Better late than never
Iknew my mumbling and muttering was not going to make the bus go any faster, but I could not help it. I had a Math test in the first period, and if I were late for that, I would be in big trouble. I had a feeling that Mdm Yap did not like me much to begin with since I have never handed in any of her homework. She would never give me a second chance to take the test if I missed it. It looked like all the studying I had done the night before was about to go to waste. I would not have bothered studying if I had known I was going to oversleep and miss my usual bus.
The bus lurched to a stop and all the passengers jerked with it. Sitting upstairs, I looked out the window at the passengers below, alighting and boarding the bus, willing them to move faster. They seemed to be crawling along at a snail’s pace. Once all the passengers had boarded the bus, I waited in anticipation for the doors to close and the bus to move on. The doors closed, but the bus did not move an inch. I wiped the spot where my breath had fogged the glass and tried to look as far out the window as I could. The sun had not risen fully yet, and the heavy rain was blocking most of my view, but eventually I saw the doors of the bus open again, and passengers from the lower level started pouring out of the bus to the bus stop.
“What’s going on?” I wondered. The people sitting upstairs seemed to have no clue as to what was going on below them. Many of them were softly snoring, and others were too busy connecting with the Internet to bother paying attention to what was going on in real life. It was not until the wait got too long that people looked up and started to wonder why the bus was not moving. I was trapped in my seat by the person sitting next to me who had her head lolling on my shoulder. I gave her a hard nudge and heard her head snap up with a nasty crack. I quickly pushed my way past her, accidentally smacking her with my schoolbag in my haste, and scrambled down the stairs.
The sight that greeted me when I went down was so alarming that I forgot all about being late for school. The bus driver was sprawled motionless, face down, in the centre aisle of the bus. I looked around for help, but no one was around! All the adult passengers were waiting at the bus stop, trying to hail taxis, or catch whichever bus would take them closest to where they needed to go.
As I stepped gingerly over the bus driver, two school boys came back onto the bus to kneel beside his prone body. “We went to ask someone at the bus stop to call an ambulance,” they explained. They looked scared and were at a complete loss of what to do. I was worried too, and I thought that an adult should be doing something. But here we were, three frightened school children who were going to be late for school, kneeling on the floor of the bus, while the adults noted the date, time, and license plate number of the bus so they could use the information to buy 4D later.
Why, why, why, why, why, does the bus driver have to drive so slowly, today of all days!
adults are not very com passionate . they look out for themselves and their own interests , and do not bother themselves with small things.
The bus driver’s left hand twitched, and a rattling sound caught my attention. The boy closest to the driver’s hand seemed to realise that the driver had something clutched tightly in his fist. He pried it out slowly to reveal a set of dog tags. Upon closer inspection, we realised that the dog tags had words printed on them. Reading the tags, we were shocked to discover that the bus driver was epileptic. He had apparently just suffered an epileptic seizure and collapsed.
We were at a loss. The note on the dog tags said that there was nothing we could do, but to wait for him to wake up. However, we could not leave the driver lying on the ground could we? Just as we were debating what we could do to help the driver, the ambulance pulled up behind the bus.
The paramedics loaded the bus driver into the ambulance and took him to Tan Tock Seng Hospital. By this time, the bus stop had cleared, and I took this as my cue to get to school. It was 8 a.m. Mdm Yap was going to kill me, and the Discipline Mistress too. Who was going to believe my story that the bus driver suffered an epileptic seizure and collapsed?
I missed my test that day, and I was right about nobody believing my story. I ended up spending the afternoon in detention. It was not until the whole episode appeared in The Straits Times the next day that my teachers believed me. I was finally allowed to take my Math test, and my friends regarded me as some kind of a hero.
I learned something the day that I decided to try and help the bus driver: adults are not very compassionate. They look out for themselves and their own interests, and do not bother themselves with small things like a collapsed person on the ground. Instead, they use others’ plight for their own gain and would literally walk over their fellow man if it served their purpose. I vowed that day not ever to become a selfish, jaded adult.