Sally Rooney 1 It was four in the morning in Chennai when our bus driver fell asleep and drove us into a wall.
No one was badly injured, and we could all get out of the bus okay. We found ourselves next to a themed restaurant with a plaster statue of King Kong outside. I knew most of the other passengers, and we chatted together in English while we waited for the police, laughing in the slightly hysterical way that follows frightening events.
The accident was an unexpected interruption of this schedule. I was familiar with how unlike ordinary travel it felt. A tight, transparent seal separated the competition from its setting: as long as you were in a place only in order to debate there, you could expect to encounter only the same privileged, English-speaking university students you had seen on the previous trip. You could also expect immaculate accommodation and relatively fast Wi-Fi. In Manila, two years before, a police escort had chaperoned our air-conditioned buses past roadside dwellings made partly of cardboard advertisements.
No one failed to notice this fact, but what was there to say about it? The bus driver in India was either unable to speak English or understandably reluctant to do so. Chennai is not a wealthy city, and he was not driving a bus full of gum-chewing college students to a luxury hotel at four in the morning for the good for his health.
The passengers, a few of whom were American law students, complained freely despite his inattention. The legal responsibilities of the competition organizers were discussed. Formal avenues of redress were mentioned. We all felt overwrought, not because the accident itself was so bad, but because something we had taken for stable was now not stable; the little seal of protection had ruptured.
