I learned to read Mumbai through the windows of BEST buses, my face pressed against glass that had witnessed more of the city’s transformation than any guidebook could capture. Twenty years ago, fresh from a smaller town where buses ran on time and conductors knew your name, I discovered that Mumbai’s red lifelines operated on a different kind of precision, one measured not in minutes but in the rhythm of human need.AdvertisementMy first lesson came on Route A-124, traveling from Worli to Colaba on a monsoon morning. The bus pitched through waterlogged streets like a ship navigating urban seas, and I watched the conductor, a weathered man with forearms mapped in veins, collect fares while maintaining perfect balance. “Paani hai, paani hai,” he called out, warning passengers of the flooded stretch ahead. That morning, I understood that in Mumbai, the buses weren’t just transportation; they were arks carrying the city’s dreams through whatever storms the sky unleashed.The upper deck of the double-deckers became my university. During those brief years when they still ran, before traffic grew too dense and cables hung too low, I’d climb those narrow stairs and claim a window seat like a pilgrim seeking elevation. From that vantage point, the city spread below like a living map: Crawford Market’s chaos, the mill chimneys of Parel painting the sky in shades of industrial ambition, the endless sprawl of shanties and skyscrapers that somehow coexisted in the same frame.I discovered the city’s social geography through its routes. The buses to Bandra carried a different energy than those heading to Dharavi, the same red paint, the same engines, but the conversations were different, the silences held different weights. On the morning routes to Nariman Point, I’d sit beside young women in carefully pressed saris, their dreams folded neatly in purses alongside application forms. The evening buses carried exhausted clerks and ambitious office boys, their day’s victories and defeats written in the slump of their shoulders.The conductors were my first teachers in urban navigation. I watched them switch effortlessly between Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, and English, creating a polyglot poetry of destinations. “Dadar-Prabhadevi-Worli-Haji Ali” became a geographical rosary, each station a bead in the necklace of my growing understanding. They knew their regular passengers by sight and destination, holding the bus an extra moment for the sprinting office worker or saving a seat for the elderly woman who rode the same route every Thursday.AdvertisementThe computerised ticketing revolution marked another transition in my relationship with the buses. The old paper tickets, with their faded printing and perforated edges, had been tangible proof of journeys undertaken. I’d find them months later in old pockets, yellowed reminders of days when getting from here to there was still an adventure requiring faith and patience.I mourned the retirement of the last double-decker like the loss of an old friend. The single-deck buses that replaced them were practical but lacked the romantic appeal of their towering predecessors. Something indefinable had been lost, that sense of elevation, of rising above the city’s chaos to glimpse its larger patterns.Also Read | My House is a StarbucksToday, as I watch the electric buses join the fleet, I’m struck by how BEST has come full circle, back to its electric origins while addressing contemporary environmental concerns. Few remember that BEST began as the Bombay Tramway Company in 1873, later becoming the Bombay Electric Supply and Tramway Company in 1905, which introduced electric trams in 1907 before those first red buses arrived in 1926. The buses now compete with Metro lines and app-based cabs, yet something essential remains unchanged: they continue serving as the city’s great connectors.most readAfter two decades of riding these red lifelines, I’ve learned that Mumbai reveals itself slowly, one bus stop at a time. The buses taught me that in a city where everything is temporary and everyone is from somewhere else, there will always be a way to get from here to there, from what you are to what you might become.The conductors still call out destinations with musical precision. The buses still pause at stops where three generations have waited for rides to work, to dreams, to tomorrow. They remain what they’ve always been: Not just vehicles but vessels of connection, carrying Mumbai’s cargo of human stories through streets that have seen empires rise and fall.In the end, the red buses didn’t just transport me across Mumbai, they transported me into it, one journey at a time.The writer has been running a book club in Mumbai for nearly a decade