Kaptaan Saheb’s bus arrives at Kuteena

When Capt Jivan Lal returned to his village in Rajasthan in the early 1970s after completing a short tenure in the Army as an Emergency Commissioned officer, he was dismayed at having to travel the last leg of the journey using the same ‘vehicle’ as when he had left to join the Army — a camel. ‘Poori duniya aagey badh gayi pan Kuteena ut ka ut saiy’ (the whole world has progressed but Kuteena has remained as it is), he said ruefully, noticing that the adjoining villages of the new state of Haryana had progressed fast, but Kuteena, the last village of Rajasthan on this side, was in a time warp. The realisation fired up the young retiree to do something to improve the state of affairs in his native place.

He was the first Army officer from the village, so a stream of visitors came to greet him. Among them were the sarpanch and other leaders to whom the Captain expressed his willingness to devote his time to village uplift.

But the wily and well-entrenched caste-based leaders were loath to let him disturb the existing power structure of the village. So, they distanced themselves from him. They had, however, underestimated the young man’s resolve. When he saw that no one was taking him seriously, he announced his arrival with a bang. ‘I will start a bus service in Kuteena!’ he declared.

The leaders scoffed at the audacious avowal because they knew he had no money. But the common folks greeted it with excitement. A glib tongue even remarked that if the bus service was launched and things moved in the right direction, the village could even overtake, ahem, Delhi in a few years.

Well, the Captain proved to be a man of his word. He managed to buy a condemned Army truck in an auction and on its chassis got a bus body mounted.

And, one day, the brightly shining bus arrived at the village square, signalling the arrival of the backwater village itself. The bus, known as Kaptaan Saheb’s bus, made two daily trips to the nearby town of Rewari. It took two hours to travel 25 km, owing to dozens of stops en route, but what did it matter as long as the bus was available from the village itself!

The bus ran for nearly two years, and throughout that period, its arrival and departure were the main events in an otherwise staid daily routine of the village.

Alas, the bus ran into trouble, perhaps because private buses were not issued permits then. The penalties kept mounting till the authorities impounded the bus. For all his enterprise, the poor Captain had no money to pay the several thousand rupees of accumulated fine. He gave up on his maiden venture. Last heard, the bus lay rotting in the compound of a police station.

The village finally got a bus service a decade later. But the old-timers still recall Kaptaan Saheb’s bus as a fond memory.