Friday 15 September 2017

The Fine

The city; Chennai. A bus conductor is fined for not doing his duties. Now what are the duties of a bus conductor. To dispense tickets to the passengers, maybe help them sometimes, help the driver when reversing, so on and so forth. But this particular conductor did all these tasks perfectly. Then why was he fined. You won’t believe it, he was fined due to that common pest, a puny pigeon. Read on...

It so happened that a drunk got on the bus. Being a good citizen, he swayed down the aisle towards the conductor to get his ticket. The conductor, being a very compassionate person, first asked the drunkard to sit. The drunk plonked himself in a window seat, perhaps expecting himself to puke the excess alcohol, directly outside the bus. See, how concerned he was about his fellow passengers. The conductor gave him a ticket dutifully; and that’s when his troubles started. The drunkard started making cooing noises; the other passengers withdrew from him, perhaps expecting him to puke. But no, the other denizen of the world, which excels in cooing, joined him on a window grill. Yes, a pigeon made itself comfortable on a perch outside the window. For the next 20 minutes the other passengers were treated to a show of PDA between the drunkard and the bird. The drunkard used to hold a few nuggets of food in his mouth, which the pigeon picked with its beak. And so it went on for some time, when a bus ticket inspector came in for inspection of the passengers tickets. And when he saw this spectacle, he asked the drunkard for the tickets. The drunkard produced one ticket in a jiffy since he was so civic minded. But the inspector loitered in front of the drunkard, expecting him to produce a ticket for the pigeon. Yes! A ticket for the pigeon, since they also charge the animals boarding the bus. But in vain. Finally he summoned the conductor, who told him that the pigeon was taking a ride on the outside and it was not accompanying the drunkard. But observing the PDA between the bird and the birdbrain, the disbelieving inspector fined the conductor for dereliction of duty. Alas! One more human victim of that pest, called a pigeon, had fallen by the wayside.

Yatindra Tawde

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