Essequibo busman Kass, who drove one of the big buses on the Essequibo route when I was going to school in Georgetown, was fond of playing a game with passengers who would disembark after a trip and come around to the front of the bus to pay Kass their fare and get any change owing.
The game was for him to return the change to the passenger, minus a few dollars, and to put the bus in gear and move off very slowly, causing the passenger to trot beside the vehicle to collect his change. It was usually an entertaining episode for the other passengers, many of whom would be amused by the game the bus driver was playing. He was very adept at speeding up the vehicle as the passenger trotting outside was just about take the change from his hand, resulting in the passenger having to continue trotting to retrieve it. Apart from the passengers enjoying the game, there were would often be several with him pleading to end the tease and give the man his money, and in the process, particularly in the dry season, the guy on the road was also often having to deal with clouds of roadway red dust as he trotted along eventually collecting his change due.
In my memory, the driver often played this little game only with male passengers, but I had a different view only as an adult. In fact I was one of those who would be exhorting Kass to hand over the money and get back to driving, and I sometimes wonder if drivers today are playing that same little game with their passengers, though I suspect it has long been abandoned and rightfully so.
It’s interesting to note as we deal with human behaviour how things change over time, leaving us to wonder about the whole process and the why of this and that action that affects us. Kass, I know, saw the whole exercise as a brief moment of fun, though I’m quite sure the trotting passenger would have had a different view. In these modern times, a bus driver, whether in Essequibo or elsewhere, would not dream of such an exercise with a passenger after a trip being treated that way and it is interesting to note that, in this era, no bus driver would dream of deals with a paying passenger in that manner, and In that long ago period, when perhaps we were a less aggressive people, it was not a practice repeated by other bus drivers. Not to say, it didn’t happen but Kass was the only driver I saw, on any bus with that practice.
Perhaps it says more about the generally genial kind of man he was, that he could do it and it would be accepted as just some harmless fun and nothing more. Kass was really a special person, in a variety of ways, and I feel safe in saying that other drivers did not play any such game with the persons they were transporting daily in those long gone Essequibo days; if they did, it would have stirred a more aggressive reaction than Kass provided.