Prabhakar 'Prabhu' Naidu

Prabhakar Naidu — Prabhu to the whole depot and half the city besides — grew up in a one-room municipal quarter behind the bus depot itself, the son of a depot mechanic who could set a carburettor right by ear and expected his son to develop an equally exact ear for something, though nobody in the family was certain what. Prabhu found his something at seventeen, when a family friend who conducted on Route 12 let him ride along for a week and hand out change, and by the end of that week the boy had discovered he could hold an entire moving bus's worth of strangers in some rough, cheerful order just by the force of his voice.

He joined the transport corporation formally at nineteen, was posted to three different routes in his first four years, the way new conductors always are, and was given Route 44-C in 1974 more or less by chance, when the previous conductor retired and nobody else wanted the long haul out past the industrial estate. Prabhu wanted it. Twenty-six years later he is still on it, the only conductor in the depot's living memory to have kept a single route for a working lifetime, and younger men ask to be posted under him the way apprentices once asked to sit at a master craftsman's elbow.

The nineteen-seventies and eighties on 44-C meant a wooden-slatted bus with a hand-cranked ticket rack, no fans, and a driver named Ganpat with whom Prabhu worked for eleven years without a single serious quarrel, a fact both men attribute, separately, to Prabhu's willingness to bring extra peanuts on long shifts. He married in 1979, a soft-spoken woman from his own community named Lakshmi, and they raised a son and a daughter in the same municipal quarter Prabhu grew up in, the daughter now a nurse, the son restless in a way his father finds difficult to discuss over dinner but easy enough to discuss, indirectly, at every bus stop between Kasturi Chowk and the industrial gate.

Prabhu's rules on the bus have never changed and are recited by regular passengers the way children recite a nursery rhyme: elderly persons get a seat before they ask for it, schoolbags are not to be left on empty seats, and no one, ever, under any circumstance, rides 44-C without a ticket while Prabhu is on shift, a claim that has been tested by generations of enterprising college boys and has never once succeeded.

In 1986 a woman went into labour two stops before the maternity hospital, and Prabhu, without any fuss, cleared the back three rows, instructed the driver to skip the remaining stops, and rode the last half kilometre standing at the open door blowing his whistle continuously to clear the road ahead, an act the depot still commemorates, half-jokingly, by calling that stretch of road Prabhu's Corner.

He keeps roasted peanuts in his shirt pocket on every shift, a habit that began as a way to stay awake on the dull midday run and became, over the decades, so entirely a part of him that regular passengers bring him fresh batches from their own kitchens without being asked, considering it a fair exchange for twenty-six years of punctual scolding.

At home he is, by every account including his wife's, a remarkably quiet man, given to long silences over his evening meal and short, careful sentences about anything that troubles him, a contrast the depot's younger conductors find almost impossible to square with the man who can be heard three platforms away calling out fares in a voice like a temple bell.

When his son took a loan in Prabhu's name in 2019 without quite explaining the whole of it beforehand, Prabhu said very little about the matter to anyone, including, mostly, his son, and simply worked the extra hours the depot offered until the debt was cleared nineteen months later, at which point he resumed his ordinary shift as though nothing at all had happened, and told the depot supervisor only that the accounts were now, thankfully, in order.

Passengers on 44-C today are mostly people who have never known any other conductor, and when the corporation once floated a plan to retire the old wooden-slatted buses and reroute 44-C entirely, three hundred residents signed a petition to keep the route and its conductor exactly as they were, a petition Prabhu still keeps folded in his ticket bag, not out of vanity, he says, but because a man likes to know his stop has been noted.

He will retire in four years, by his own careful count, and has already begun, in his quiet way, teaching a younger conductor named Suresh the precise order of every stop on 44-C, the precise pitch at which the whistle should be blown for a request stop against a scheduled one, and the precise weight of a coin bag that has never, in twenty-six years, come up short at the end of a shift.