THE TRIP

Ch 3- Reach.

I strongly believe that we six hulligans were the noisiest in the bus. We kept on playing a lot of time killing girly games. We kept on creating a lot of racket in the bus while the others tried to manage and cooperate with our unruly behavior. And, last but not the least, we kept on clicking a whole lot of pictures to store them as our forever memories.
The tiresome bus journey was about 7 hours long and we would have reached our destination by noon. We had been served with a pack of snacks and a pack of juice a few hours prior to that. Having done with our snacks deliciously, the others had the pressing urge to take rest as all of them, except me, had gone through incomplete sleep the last night. While Vas and Mani plugged in their respective earphones and shut their eyelids, Ashme and Mayu got busy in topicless chatters and Angy retreated to read her novel she had brought along with her.
I took up my phone and dialed my dad's number to give him the updates. Describing every bit of our enjoyment in detail to my mom and some important informations to my dad I kept the phone down. I looked around to see almost the whole bus drowned into deep sleep. Clicking a few pictures of the roadside while we crossed it, I felt a tinge of sleep crawling up through my eyelids forcing them to shut.
Switching of my phone I closed my eyes and slowly drifted off to deep sleep, as I knew, tough hours were to follow after we reached our destination. I knew that we were going to have a full time enjoyment in the trip. So 'Rest' would be a word out of our dictionary. The bus suddenly came to a jerk and then to an abrupt halt, so badly, that it made me open my eyes in mid sleep and asked haphazardly being confused,"What happened? Who died?"
Pause. Nobody gave a damn to answer me. "Where are we?" I asked everyone "We are on the Baleswar National Highway" one of the kinder folks helped me with the reply. A lot of commotion was going on in the former part of the bus.
Excusing myself from the others, I went to the conductor uncle. I saw Ma'am Frost and the uncle arguing with an elderly lady who was standing infront of the bus door. Peering into the commotion they were going through, I understood that this lady had asked for a lift in this highway and because this was a school bus, it was impossible to give her the lift according to the norms of the bus agency. Thus, a lot of chaos followed by. Some of the girls of the bus managed to make her understand the obligations of the bus agency and cool down the situation. But she was very angry with the bus conductor, at least that's what she seemed to be like. We calmed the heated atmosphere of the bus and went back to our seats.
Our bus had started off. I always have the bad habit of popping my head out of the window in a moving vehicle and looking back at the scenery which we had already left behind. Out of this very habit, when I popped out my head to get some fresh air and to look behind, I just felt that the old lady just vanished into thin here.
Just a minute ago, when we had passed her, she was standing there giving us death stare and a minute after, she just disappeared! I felt a little jittery about it, but chose not to give this occurrence a think, 'Maybe she had walked away somewhere' I had given myself logic. I got inside and went to sleep again.
After a couple of hours, I was woken up by a tickle in my ear. Opening my eyes I found Vas grinning like an idiot."Good morning" Vas chirped "afternoon!" I breathed. I untangled my open hair with my hands and rubbed my face vigorously to remove the last reminants of sleep from my eyes and got ready to get down while the bus was gearing up to stop in the bus stand.
We six got down one by one.
We were handed over our respective suitcases and were headed to a open space for lunch. After helping ourselves with the juicy chicken leg pieces and the yellow tinted rice we got ourselves get some pictures clicked, some single ones and some selfies and groupies. We were divided into groups and guided by our teacher in charge to our respective hotels.
Mrs Frost handed us our hotel names and room numbers. We six and 56 others were aloted 'Hotel Laura' where as our other classmates were divided into 'Hotel Lancy' and 'Hotel Jack' respectively. We were told to take rest and get ourselves comfortable in our respective rooms and later in the evening we would go to take a stroll down the beach to get fresh air.
We six were aloted room number 14. After getting our suitcases and the keys for the locks all the 56 aloted for Hotel Laura headed for their respective rooms. There was a lot of huff-puff in searching the room numbers we were alloted.
Only we six didn't face much difficulties in finding room 14 because it was in the ground floor. After a lot of wild suggestions, I was given the duty by Mayu to open the lock of our allotted room. The others got busy cracking jokes while I opened the locked door of room number 14.