Micro versus Tempo: Part I

“What? Lalitpur bandha? I do not know about this one.”

It is usually the college students; fed up with the monotone of college workload, who get the first news of any kind of bandhas in Nepal. I, for one, having already gone through that phase few years ago, have been in oblivion for a few days. Yes, I am on a holiday!!! Still in Kathmandu; but on a holiday. This also means that there is quite a bit of cut backs on traveling. It is usually on holidays that I find some time to clean up my place, get some good amount of rest and guard the home while my parents and cousins find their way back into the chaos of Kathmandu life.

So when I got an opportunity to go out, to my dismay, I find that it is a bandha. I hope you do not mind if I digress slightly but I have to blurt it out: what is the use of Lalitpur bandha when the people who live in Lalitpur still have to walk to their offices in Kathmandu, still might have emergency cases and have to rush to the hospital or the students who have already left for their morning classes have to walk back home in the afternoon! I understand that perhaps the cause of the bandha was a protest against injustice, murder, impunity and the likes. However, all this said and done, I also realize that discussions on bandha are going to lead me nowhere in this particular post.

My point here is, I could not find one micro that would take me to Ratnapark. Imagine my disappointment! After a week-long separation from the rides in micros, I was prepared to jump into one and allow it to take me to destinations known and unknown. I looked around the empty road and saw that except for the Lagankhel - Kumaripati route, the vehicles in the other routes were running smoothly but not a micro in sight. I halfheartedly called for a tempo to stop, and slouched into the uncomfortable bench-like seat with cracks in the middle. I made sure my mobile phone was not in a vibration mode because the temp is in one.

A woman in light brown and greenish kurta was handling the steering wheel, while trying to avoid the pits on the road. I looked at her for a while, not long enough to make her uncomfortable but long enough to allow me to contemplate. Suddenly, I realized I have never encountered a woman driver in a micro! I tried to scramble through my memories; desperately trying to defend micros: I wanted there to be some, at least one woman micro driver. After half an hour or so, the tempo neared Baneshowr and I had to find a bus to get to Ratnapark. All the while, I was unable to find any memory of a woman micro driver.

For all the gloating about micros and the glory of traveling, I found this particular tempo ride the most beautiful one.  

Microphile loves to travel however, since her fantasies of travels into the Egyptian pyramids and Saharian deserts are, well, mere fantasies; she makes do with the hazardous amount of traveling she has to do in micro-buses, aka, micros. She loves to read while traveling in micros. All that traveling has most probably caused some spinal/brain injuries that she is unaware of; while she continues to travel by micros every morning; observing the mundane and writing about them in this blog.

http://www.parakhi.com/blogs/2011/12/07/micro-versus-tempo-part-i