The Last Bus to Murree

Eleven passengers boarded the midnight bus from Faizabad to Murree. Kamal counted them himself, because the conductor was asleep before the bus had even left the depot, his cap pulled down over his face and his ticket machine clutched to his chest like a baby.

There was the honeymoon couple in the front seats, sharing a single shawl and a single packet of salted peanuts. There was the grandmother with a cage of two very angry hens. There were three university students singing old Noor Jehan songs, badly, and a soldier in uniform who stared out of the window at nothing, and a man in a grey suit with a briefcase he did not let go of once.

Kamal was the eleventh. He had a seat at the back and a thermos of chai and the unshakeable conviction that nothing interesting ever happened on the last bus to Murree.

The road climbed into the hills. The lights of Islamabad fell away behind them, and the pines closed in on either side, black and endless. Fog came down around the bend at Chattar and the driver slowed to a crawl, leaning forward over the wheel as though he could push his way through it by will alone.

Somewhere past Tret, the bus stopped. Nobody got on. Nobody had pressed the bell. The doors opened onto nothing but fog and the smell of wet pine, stayed open for a long moment, and then hissed shut again.

“Driver sahib?” one of the students called. “Who was that for?”

The driver did not answer. He put the bus back into gear, and they went on climbing into the dark.

At Murree, under the single yellow lamp at the stand on Jinnah Road, Kamal stood by the door and counted the passengers off, out of habit. The couple. The grandmother and her hens. The singing students. The soldier. The man in the grey suit, still holding the briefcase.

Eleven. Then a twelfth: a girl in a white school uniform, her plait tied with a red ribbon, who stepped down past him into the fog without a word and was gone before he could see her face.

Kamal sat down very slowly on the steps of the bus. Beside him the conductor woke, yawned, looked at his ticket machine and frowned. “Strange,” he said. “Twelve tickets. I only remember selling eleven.”