The question itself was a rather simple one. Although I had already been walking for quite some time, I was thinking about the very question of whether to walk or not to walk. If I pursued the first option, it would take around an hour to get home. And if the second one, depending on when and where I caught the bus, the ride itself would last around fifteen minutes or so. People mistake walking as a hobby of mine. And while it is true that I do walk a lot, I am not particularly fond of walking. To be fair, I don’t dislike it either. It just happens to be the default option that I find agreeable.

Once I am in motion, I prefer to continue if I get where I intend to go. That includes a detour to the bus stop or waiting until the Pathao rider calls me just to verify if I am on location. I often don’t even set off with a destination on my evening stroll sessions. I keep walking, with either instinct or inertia, deciding my turns. Even when I head back home, it happens randomly, neither guided by time nor urgency. If someone noticed me suddenly turning around, as I often do midway before reaching the end of the sidewalk, they'd probably assume I forgot something. But who has the time to notice? To most people, I'm just another face in the crowd, someone they recognise only as a stranger—someone they don't need to forget because they never remember.

I played futsal in the morning and felt a bit fatigued. Yet when I set off from my friend’s place some twenty minutes earlier, I had no qualms about walking home.

Convictions tend to be frail like that, especially with a mind over which one doesn’t have a proper reign. I felt I had made a confident decision at the time, but it only took me ten minutes to reconsider. What was the point of walking when I could also get a ride? And I knew at that very instance that my idiosyncrasy was destined to be defeated upon being dragged into the realm of rationality. I who nurtured and protected it in its spontaneous form, the only place where idiosyncrasies can survive, let it be subject to the relentless incursions of the mind. I crossed the road and took a left towards the bus stop. I guess it had been decided, ironically by instinct and almost as a reaction to rejection.

The bus stop was less than a hundred meters away, and upon reaching it, I was glad to find that there were not many people waiting. I tend to think of myself as a well-intentioned individual. However, I sometimes get my character tested at a bus stop, and my feral nature tries to come out of me. Once I'd been waiting for about five minutes and the bus still hadn’t arrived, I started getting frustrated with everyone who joined me in waiting. To be fair to me, or maybe it’s just a lame attempt to justify, I feel this type of subtle rage tends to have plenty of historical precedents that should make my reaction somewhat warranted. I grew up in a boarding school where one had to line up for virtually every activity, and cutting the line, although observed marginally, was a very frowned upon exercise. Imagine waiting behind thirty people, and some bloke comes in and gets the malpau and banana tiffin before you.

It's the same kind of frustration as when a bus arrives, and I’m standing by the door waiting for passengers to exit, only to have a guy push me aside as he, along with the crowd behind him, force their way in despite the disapproval of the bus conductor. Once, I even had a woman elbow me while I was getting inside. And the funny thing was that the bus didn’t even end up being packed. I guess people just do it by instinct, especially at peak hours. There’s no seat without struggle.

When the bus finally arrived, and the doors opened, a teenage guy who had stopped after me and stood behind me while I was waiting for the passengers to alight reached past my face to grab the handle and forced his way in. For a moment, I thought about calling it quits—cause he happened to find the only vacant seat available and reverting to the original plan, but I felt I had already invested a lot of time. As such, I succumbed to the sunk cost fallacy. Later, when the bus was in motion, I clenched my teeth and stood beside the rude guy scrolling his X feed.

He stopped scrolling when he got to the news about the Prime Minister doing some routine media stuff and proceeded to write a comment without bothering to open the link. I cannot write it down verbatim because of the PG13 nature of his mistyped expressions, but the gist was that the politicians were ruining society. Word.

Our driver was a young gentleman full of vigour, and he channelled the only way he could by pressing on the accelerator pad. Now, I don’t happen to be among those who get easily scared by a speeding vehicle on account that I’ve been in quite a few of them, but the problem was that the bumps and brakes along the road were throwing me off balance much to the dismay of the young kid whose leg I happened to step on. He was wearing sandals, too. I said sorry, but he gave me a cold shrug. It all comes down to how far one intends to go down the causal chain. He saw me as the person who had stepped on him, so he blamed me entirely. I saw myself as the person thrown off balance by the driver abruptly pulling the brakes, so I blamed the driver. And maybe the driver blamed the guy on the motorcycle. I was starting to get sweaty, and because I could not stand upright in a Hiace without bending my neck, I was in quite some discomfort, too.

Thankfully, Lagankhel arrived shortly after, and about four or five people got off, finally allowing me to grab a seat. It just happened to be the one across from the guy who was still busy scrolling and typing away. Because Lagankhel tends to be the last stop in which they can expect commuters before the trip ends, we waited there for some time. After a few murmurs of discontent, the driver reluctantly but slowly got us moving, only for the conductor, leaning on the door handle, to bang the handle once and bring it to a halt again. “Hurry up,” he said out loud, and when the person finally entered, I saw that it was an old woman. I won’t lie, I was disappointed. I had just found a seat, and my conscience wasn’t letting me sit there. I looked around. The guy on X was busy changing society. I took a deep sigh and got up. I swear, I could see the kid I stepped on smile.

Pandey is a graduate of Macquarie University, Australia.