Indian Nocturne by Antonio Tabucchi Read Free Book Online

through the hills with hairpin bends that the driver had tackled with a
nonchalance I felt was excessive, we were now speeding along enormously long straight quiet roads through the silence of the Indian night. I had the impression that we were going through a
landscape of palm groves and paddy fields, but the darkness was too deep to be certain and the light of the headlamps only swept quickly across the landscape when the road made a bend or two.
According to my calculations we ought to be quite close to Mangalore, if the bus was keeping to the schedule set out in the timetable. In Mangalore I had two alternatives: I could either wait seven
hours for the bus to Goa, or stay for a day in a hotel and take the bus the following day.
    It was difficult to decide. During the journey I had slept little and badly, and I felt quite tired; but a whole day in Mangalore was not a particularly attractive proposition. Of Mangalore my
guidebook said: ‘Situated on the Arabian Sea, the city preserves practically nothing of its past. It is a modern industrial city, laid out on a straightforward urban grid and with an
anonymous look about it. One of the few cities in India where there really is nothing to see.’
    I was still weighing up the pros and cons when the bus stopped. It couldn’t be Mangalore; we were in open country. The driver turned off the engine and a few passengers got out. At first I
thought it was a brief stop to give the travellers a chance to relieve themselves, but after about a quarter of an hour I felt that the stop was unusually protracted. What’s more, the driver
had calmly sunk down against the back of his seat and looked as if he had gone to sleep. I waited another quarter of an hour. The passengers who had stayed on board were sleeping quietly. In front
of me an old man with a turban had taken a long strip of material from a basket and was rolling it up with patience, carefully smoothing out the folds at every turn of the cloth. I whispered a
question in his ear, but he turned round and looked at me with an empty smile to show he hadn’t understood. I looked out of the window and saw that near the edge of the road, in a large sandy
clearing, was a sort of dimly lit warehouse. It looked like a garage made of boards. There was a woman at the door. I saw someone go in.
    I decided to ask the driver what was going on. I didn’t want to wake him, he’d been driving for a long time, but perhaps it was as well to find out. He was a fat man, sleeping with
his mouth open; I touched his shoulder and he looked at me confused.
    ‘Why have we stopped?’ I asked. ‘This isn’t Mangalore.’
    He pulled himself up and smoothed his hair. ‘No, sir, it isn’t.’
    ‘So why have we stopped?’
    ‘This is a bus-stop,’ he said, ‘we’re waiting for a connection.’
    The stop wasn’t indicated on the timetable on my ticket, but by now I had got used to this kind of Indian surprise. So I asked him about it without any show of being taken aback, out of
pure curiosity. It was the bus for Mudabiri and Karkala, I discovered. I made a suggestion that seemed logical to me. ‘And can’t the passengers going to Mudabiri and Karkala wait on
their own, without us waiting with them?’
    ‘There are people on that bus who will get on our bus to go to Mangalore,’ the driver replied calmly. ‘That’s why we’re waiting.’
    He stretched out on the seat again to let me know that he would like to go back to sleep. I spoke to him again in the tone of one who is resigned: ‘How long will we be here?’
    ‘Eighty-five minutes,’ he replied, with an exactness that I didn’t know whether to interpret as British politeness or a form of refined irony. And then he said: ‘Anyway,
if you’re tired of waiting in the bus, you can get out. There’s a waiting room at the side here.’
    I decided it might be wise to stretch my legs a little to make the time pass faster. The night was soft and damp with a strong scent