Backtracking

So I took a train. Not the first time of course but took one alone after forever.

Overnight train journeys have this thing about them that warp you in a completely new zone altogether. You have faces you are forced too see no matter how they look, you have people’s voices to hear no matter how incomprehensible and of course, the loud tear banks– kids.

Anywho, with 24 hours to kill and a 600 kilometers to cover, I was off to Mangalore wto satisfy my own whims and fancies. I normally love train journeys, mostly because I get to judge people & admire, all along the way, from the window, the beauty that cities lack but three things that made this journey worse:

·      

   I was sleep deprived. I hadn’t slept the entire night before.

·         My iPod battery was low and I had forgotten to charge it.

·         I got the upper berth.

I shrugged and dragged my suitcase in with me to serve my sentence anyway knowing it would end soon. I rolled the suitcase in and neatly reverse parked it under the seat before me. Tossed my backpack onto my berth, patiently but not so intently awaiting my co-passengers. 

I noticed a happy bunch of Gujarati people, probably representing half of Vile Parle, a family of 7 take an entire compartment hostage. It didn’t take them very long to relieve all their airbags, fit the stereotype travelling gujju family and make the compartment look like this in a matter of minutes:

Believe me, 24 hours was more than sufficient for them to run out of stock too. 

Enter co-passengers: A keralite couple who occupied the side upper and lower berths and a weird Telugu dude who was obviously travelling RAC because you could see his pupils go all heart shaped when he noticed the berth was still empty.

Before he could even buy her dinner and before the berth could even give him its consent, he gagged it and…

The Keralite couple were tolerable. Mostly because they kept to themselves and bitched about everyone in the train. The man tried to be as protective as he could about his wife but alas, his gadget got the better off him and his priorities shifted to “not – giving – f**k”.

I scurried up to my berth and lost myself in a series of the Tudors episodes, trying to kill as many minutes as possible before hitting my hometown. Headphones locked on my face, I tried to block all the “eh chaaya chaaya chaaya” (whoever she is) and the “kuffeee kuffee kuffee…. bishleri waatar bishleri waatar…. breakfasht breakfasht” etc. Phonetics ki satyanash bhenchod.

It is interesting to watch all these people but the fascination runs dry soon once you’ve been in there for too long.

A couple of hours down after catching 30 winks post a good Tudors session, I decided to get off my perch and go down (tee hee ‘go down’) to my seat. The Telugu berth abductor – wow that sounds SO wrong, has now been replaced by the most awkward looking Tamil family ever. The dad and the children all seemed to look EXACTLY the same. These folks were heading to Kalyan (no surprise there) and as usual, I alphabetically placed them in the library of stereotypes in my mind.

Here’s what the family looked like to me:

OK, probably that was pushing it but you know what I mean. The dude married and procreated himself.

When I stepped off my berth and took a seat before them, the father, who didn’t seem to know Hindi, uttered just one word – ‘neend’, with a horrendous grin that could shake the very virginity out of you forcefully.

I shimmied a little behind, further away from the edge of my seat, trying to reassure myself that I wouldn’t be subjected to activities that would make me wake up to look like him somehow the next morning.

But the dude turned out to be nice. He didn’t realize I was a tamilian too & understood every word he said and I decided to keep that facade throughout. It helps to know what the other person speaks about you in their own language and what pleasure they get of the same.

Apparently, while talking to his kids, he pictured me as some boy who must have moved from Mumbai to Chennai and probably now works for some large IT firm, wondering where his college life suddenly took off. We’re all stereotypes at the end of the day.

The chai waalas took more rounds than the train security did and made sure that your journey wasn’t complete without downing at least 3 of those mismeasured cups before you see the break of day. I sipped my tea and looked out the window to admire the day’s performer, Mother Nature

The point is, the pointless endeavour of watching reruns of the same trees and fields go past for hours together never seemed to be a waste. Each passing tree would make me eagerly wait for the next one

Each field did alike. Each electricity tower, united with the others through their cables that they held on together with seeded way too many deep thoughts that my mind could nurture.

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Come nightfall, (LOL always wanted to use those words together), everyone begins to unwrap their prized dinner. The ones that their wives/mothers packed for them with the sheer thought that train food was only good for dogs. 

The worst part of travelling in any enclosed air conditioned space from Tamil Nadu is that there’ll always be at least one family carrying Thaiir Saadham and Oorga (Curd Rice and Pickle), which was made the previous day or early that morning. The smell of this duet will circulate through the air conditioning, throughout the compartment before comfortably taking a seat inside your nose for the rest of eternity.

Train journeys will always give you something to write about. They’re inspirations that you can sit inside and journey with. The next time you manage to win the war against IRCTC and earn yourself a ticket, make sure you look at the intricacies within the journey and you will find something worth remembering.

Remember folks:

·         Judge harshly (haha nothingserious just for fun)

·         Make friends with Gujarati Sneks waala families.

·         Put on your scariest and most disgruntled uncle/aunty face to make sure kids don’t venture into your territory.

Here’s wishing happy journey for all your future train rides and all the very best dealing with the curd rice.