Kunum

Kunum
Kunum (Khasi for brother-in-law) is the conductor of the Mawlang – Mawjatap bus. We never got to know what his real name is, everyone calls him Kunum. He ties a gamcha or a muffler on his head all the time, knotted in a style distinctly his own.

The bus conductor, generally referred to as the manager, is responsible for collecting fare from the passengers – not only those sitting inside the bus but even from those on top. Kunum goes in and out of the bus comfortably even when it is moving- through the door, through the window, up the iron ladder at the back of the bus to the roof. As the bus enters the city limits of Shillong, all the passengers sitting on the roof of the bus are herded down by him. The bus could be penalized for this.

Once the bus parks itself at the bus stand opposite Anjali cinema in Shillong, Kunum has a lot of work to do. People from villages along the route, especially from villages where the bus starts from, give him money and a list of things to buy from the market in Shillong. He keeps a note of the things he has to buy on the currency notes that people give him, each bundle of notes kept separately. His work load increases if there are orders from the village dorbar (the unit of local governance at the village level) to collect rice or other such goods for the entire village.

We asked Kunum if he could take photographs of his bus, the journey and villages that lie along the Mawlang route over two or three days. Unlike what we were expecting, he only took a few photographs of Mawlang, the point of origin of his bus. The bulk of the photographs were of two girls, in different clothes each time, framed against trees, fields and the horizon. One could tell that he knew them well – they seem to have enjoyed being photographed. Maybe they were from his village. Except for a couple of photographs of the village landscape and the bus, we decided not to use these photographs of the two girls. These photographs seemed extremely personal and intimate and we did not think that these images ought to be exhibited.

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