My Seat On The Bus Is Beside Hers

This essay by Santosh James Samuel won the overall prize for SJU Prize for the Personal Essay 2026. The theme this year was ‘The City, From a Bus.’ The judge, Jayapriya Vasudevan, founder of Jacaranda Literary Agency, had this to say about the winning essay:

“Santosh’s story, ‘My seat on the bus is beside hers’ uses the bus as a way to find home in the city. Shilpa is a strong character that the reader is completely drawn to. She is fearless, strong, funny and so sure of herself. Santosh writes about both cities and people with depth and charm. I also liked the easy way a language other than English is used in the story.“

She didn’t rush or waste advice on me. She understood. She filled my silent glum with her non-stop chatter. Her white-noise tales were boxy, built like those old white and blue BMTC buses that struggled to cut a corner. The words would come in a squeezed ramble, dense enough to clog the road, frustrate traffic. One day when I was stuck constipated on the toilet, from the adjoining kitchen she told me the story of how she came to Bangalore. From Tiruvannamalai, Mathalangulam she said, rolling the name like a nursery baby, each syllable softened with mixed affection…”Ma-tha-la-ngulam”. She needed to enunciate because I couldn’t pronounce such words. She spoke of the hill with mixed feelings; some days as if even the hill itself had rocked her gently to sleep and other days in less pleasant terms. She had grown up in the shadow of Arunachala, the sacred red hill whose top glowed like burning coal at dusk. Her days of hiding and holding back, of smearing herself in a skin that wasn’t hers. The few photographs she had showed me were of a scrawny teenage boy against the cracked Boogeen’ (her term for blue-green) plaster wall of her home. It was essentially a single room with a kitchen and another attached room that functioned as a bedroom only during the night and everything in-between during the day. A patchwork of red oxide, emulsion paint and cement propped up by Ilaiyaraaja tunes that filled the cracks. But the hill, holy as it was, began to feel oppressive. Ash everywhere, the smell of Vibuthi was always about her, I could still smell it as she combed my hair with her fingers year later.

“It was like the mountain sat breathing on my neck, unmoving with expectations, static like a log of dog shit nobody bothered to scoop up”, she said.

“A lack of imagination rots the soul; it was not easy recognising a way out” she pushed as I looked defiantly out her window.

I just know, how much harder it must have been for her. I could sense she was bullied at school, probably for being scrawny. As the oldest child, a son, she had no time to consider her body and urges. She worked with her father in construction work, most of her teen years. With regard to her transition, she says she just remembers one week she could no longer be a boy. She just was Shilpa after that week. She was not embarrassed. She slowly introduced her new self to her family and friends. Her mother was supportive, her dad was rather aloof.

“Pretty progressive for the time, they didn’t worry much, but my future was anything but worry”.

By 18, she wanted more. Her family was aware she wanted to leave but didn’t have real reason to hold her back. Shilpakka was earning money for the house by interning at a local darzi shop. Sometime in 2005, shortly after the horrible tsunami that devastated the Tamil coast, she found just cause to leave home. All she left with was a big ‘manja pai’ stuffed with two of her mother’s sarees, food for the travel, and ten thousand rupees – all of her savings. She boarded the night bus to Bangalore. That bus ride was her first taste of freedom, or at least, first taste of air that wasn’t familiar. She said she remembered watching the city lights flicker into view near Majestic, blinking like promises. The air smelled of “diesel, wet cement, and half-cooked chicken”. That first day, she didn’t know anyone in Bangalore only the name “Shivajinagar” passed down by another trans-sister who said, “Go there, you’ll find work and people from everywhere”. She, however felt like a child lost at a mela, stayed that whole day with her bum parked in the bus station. With nowhere to go but with everywhere possible. Few months passed. In the hotness of the summer after she got her ‘operation’, she took multiple bus and auto rides to nowhere in particular. She says did it for the rush of air that soothed her inflamed mound. She was a woman. She was a woman in the city. Her regular circuitous trips familiarised her with the city. Whether she found the city first or the city found her? It’s the age old egg-chicken tossup.

From my vantage on her lap I could see the little life she had built, a mosaic of her persistence. I wanted some of that endurance for myself too. I was desperately clutching for some sense of self. I studied what made Shilpakka. Crumbling photos of 2000’s Tamil actresses clipped from old Kumudam magazines dotted her almirah. A shaving mirror pockmarked with used sticker pottu-s sat atop the mini whirlpool fridge. The fridge only had prep ingredients for her food truck, nothing more. The hall floor was that iconic 90’s speckled terrazzo tiles. A small calendar with Murugan on a peacock hung beside a cut out of disco Shanthi. A Kannada newspaper poster advertising second-hand scooters. Her bed was neatly folded on the floor, next to a trunk bursting with sarees bright neon synthetics, chiffons, silks. On a shelf near the pooja arrai sat her trophies – a chipped cup from a local dance competition, a laminated photo from Pride, a plastic Ganesha with a plant in it, and a bottle of cheap gulab attar among a blur of other stuff she neatly hoarded. Her bathroom has pink plastic bucket-mug, a lime-scaled radioactive green floor. And an Indian toilet with a broken geyser tap that would drip on your head while you squatted to shit. This space was hers. Every bit and piece that held her as she carried on through the city.

When I quit medical college in the second year, I broke. My bus didn’t stop, it veered off into a void of not knowing where, what how, who. Fuck. This was further complicated by a series of depressing fuckboys. I spent many hours tucked away at her place to avoid the bitter murk at home. I turned non-verbal, spent weeks sobbing and sleeping for hours. I kept asking, looking for my space? What did I have to contribute? I felt like cargo being dragged against my will. She’d begin another drone of her tales in the city.

Her first stop in Bangalore all those years ago was to first locate a one-room rental, through some contacts she found a Muslim lady that had a darzi shop near Mary Basilica, with a bachelor room right behind it. Shilpa finally only wore sarees and salwars, her hair growing longer as roots she put down in city grew firmer. “I stitched school uniforms, cushion covers and ‘jaali’ blouses for rich madams from Richmond Town. Shivaji in the mid ’00, that place was a whole new world, far from her home in Thiruvanamalai – a bazaar where every turn changed language and smell. From Morning azaan from the mosque braided with church bells from St. Mary’s, roosters crowing behind tin sheds, cap sellers shouting over the clatter of pushcarts. Mutton stalls with flies circling over shiny chaakus, advocates hunched over clattering typewriters, young boys hawking bootleg CDs and fake “walkmans”. The air was thick with meat smoke, incense, and ambition”.

Surviving for many moons on a diet of tea-bun, samosa and roadside anna-sambar. She hated the new routine. After a few years, she drifted to KR Puram, sharing a flat and kakkoos with four other transwomen – one from Dharmapuri, one from Hosur, two from Andhra. Every evening, the room filled with the smells of potato fry, gossip, and hair oil. “We fought like cocks, but cried like sisters”. This was where she learned the secret of surviving Bangalore – part Urdu, part Kannada, part English and part pure invention. She learned to curse in three languages, bargain like a market aunty, and smirk like someone who’s seen it all.

Shilpakka’s words always had a fun rhythm – part Tamil village drawl, part Bangalore street slang, full of those memorable neologisms that sounded like they were born mid-sentence. She’d call the police ‘khaki goiya’, with an eye-roll that could rival the blinkers of an Activa. For mean aunties who haggled over ₹10 she’d mutter ‘Saani pongal’, always steaming.” And men who stared too long? : “thenga-maaratadila-paira-naayi” she’d snort. Literally, “Dogs peeing under coconut trees,” – I never quite figured out what it meant, but it fit – absurd, territorial, and shameless. She had a phrase for everything. Her speech was percussion. You could almost dance to the rhythm, the rhythm of Bengaluru slang. Her slang stitched together a whole neighbourhood of Tamil aunties, Kannada uncles, Telugu delivery boys, Urdu mechanics – all found home in her phrases. Sometimes, she’d drop a proverb so twisted it became poetry. When I asked her why she never lost her temper, she said “If you throw stone at every barking dog, you’ll reach nowhere before midnight.” That was her genius – she made language perform. Words didn’t just describe her world, they made it. A steady diet of her language began to infuse some courage to this shy twink.

Her breakthough, her TEDed moment, if-I-can-do-it-what’s-stopping-you-gandu moment was starting a food truck. It was a Maroon ’95 series Maruti Suzuki Omni van that she and her sisters Reshmakka and Kavi had converted into a mobile kitchen. Parked religiously on the same street near the Lake side Kensington road, I was there with them every other evening from six till ten. Friday nights were the best. By around 7 PM, Halasuru Lake shimmered with streetlight and the air filled with the smell of frying curry leaves and exhaust fumes from the last of the frustrated commuters making their way home. The maroon van sat parked just beyond the old GK Vale photo studio, the dickey door and side doors wide open like a stage curtain, for the LPG stove and serving table. Shilpakka stood at the counter, pallu tucked in, bangles clinking as she mixed a fresh batch of raita. “Enna, office boy? Today salary day or what? Taking only two plates?” she teased a techie who had just arrived, still wearing his ID card and half crumpled shirt. He grinned, and nodded.

Behind Shilpakka, Reshmakka was bent over the biryani vessel, stirring. Steam rose in clouds, basmati rice, browned onions, soft mutton falling off the bone. Kavi was leaning on the van’s door, applying lip gloss between taking orders and looking at Grindr.A group of college students on scooters pulled up, laughing too loudly. One of them tried to pay with UPI before even ordering. Shilpakka said, hands on hips, mock stern. “You think this is Swiggy? Cash only da. Every now and again, a warm breeze from the lake carried the faint scent of algae bloom, mixing strangely with the biryani aroma. A whisper of nice coffee also travelled across the road to join the mix. It was from Shanthi Sagar. The sight of the signage prompted a chai-sutta break.Around 9 PM, the rush peaked. It’s around this time you’d see young families come out for dinner. It was also when everything would be a hot blur of assembling orders. And I was just watching, imagine these three women! Shilpakka charged tech bros a clean 150 rupees but would wave off a hungry boy from the labour adda with a “Baa maga, adjust madkond bisi bisi tindko.” She swore that food tasted better when at least one plate a night was given free. It was in just quietly being a part of her hustle I found something. In watching the rush of the city around me I sought ‘my seat on the bus.

Life began to feel a little less oppressive. I filled in my application for bachelors in English and psychology at SJCC and restarted my new life. Few days after I began college, she dragged me to Third wave on Church Street, where cappuccinos came with foam art. She saw some reel she said. She asked for a flower design but they didn’t have the barista who did that. Finally she settled on a simple heart shape. After a few minutes the cup came to our table. She squinted at the heart floating in her cup, and then announced: “Yenna man, this looks like a gorilla bum. I paid 300 rupees for a coffee kundi.” I laughed so hard.

In a city like Bengaluru, where it’s so easy to disappear into traffic and statistics, Shilpakka was impossible to miss. The clamour of her bangles, rows of necklace, swishing kodai jumikkis and golusu announced her like a maharani. “Idhu allam covering da, but confidence-u is full asli,” she’d laugh, punctuating the punchline with her trademarked bum shake. Her little ayoo appadi yellam illa la amounting to bits of modesty eluded the image. I eyed her walk like she owned Halasuru. Shilpakka.She showed me in her own way that all it took was just showing up. Shilpakka, even in her synthetic ‘Fanta’ colour saree that shimmered just a shade too odd under the new Ulsoor L.E.D streetlights carried herself like she was dipped in real gold. She walked with a laidback swish that made her nose pin slice light like the local bhai kadai mutton chaaku. Her untimely cackles and witticisms ‘cut noses’ also like that mutton chaaku. This was true today and the very first time we interacted. This was what she has taught me – all the survival tips she yearned somebody would have taught her. I can see that life is not meant to be survived quietly, it’s meant to be loud and shameless. The city did not slow down for either of us. We just learnt to hold on and finagle a seat. That mad woman showed me how to find life and my seat on the bus.