A Bus Ride from Hell

What can be more horrific than being broke when you have to go to your workplace to pick up your salary?
A bus ride on a hot summer day:
I don't know what is wrong with the bus owner society but it seems they have vowed never to make one decent bus for Farmgate. With a charitable 10 taka note from my cat's college fund, I set out on my journey and got into a bus with the name “Time Control” (translated). That's where the Doctor Who reference and the cool part ends. The bus was horrible, it smelled of onions, sweat and diapers; which isn't a surprise considering it had a man with a sack of onions, a woman with three infants and office commuters.
With no seats left, I stood waiting at the back and that's when this dude, who was four times the size a dude should be, got into the bus. I am guessing the conductor didn't have the heart to refuse him a place. The guy squeezed in between the seats and stood right in front of me. This was like staring into the universe itself, you don't make fun of the universe; you glorify it. You just stare at it and contemplate its gigantic size thinking about the massive opportunities that would open up to me if only I broke the BMI scale.
Soon enough, I heard voices to my right where two guys were having a fight about Shahbag. It was between a guy who I presumed was going to his office wearing a pink shirt and fitted trousers with patent leather shoes and the man who had a sack of onions and was wearing what we call a “sendo-genji and lungi” combo with plastic sandals. At one point the office commuter went, “what do you know about politics? You just sit under your oil lamp and count onions with your (something I cannot repeat in front of kids)”, and then the onion man aptly replied, “I can at least read the papers and hear people, you sit in the darkness during load-shedding waiting for the TV to feed you crap”. This was one of those moments where you go “ho ho ho, burn” but instead of me doing it, the fat man did it and just as he was going on his merry repetition of “ho ho ho”, the bus hit the brakes at a high speed near Kawran Bazaar. I quite literally flew into the fat man's rear and most probably my head was lost somewhere inside his back.
Imagine sweating, shedding blood and putting what you had for lunch the past three weeks inside a plastic bag. Then putting that plastic bag over your head for a suicidal scientific purpose. That is exactly how I felt. With that burst of my olfactory nerves, I was listening to a thick baritone voice saying “ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, bhai”. Once the bus righted itself and the obese man pushed me back into my face, I realised one thing -- from now on, I will let my hair out and sit on the seats reserved for women.