Spicy Tales of My Life

The idea of traveling always creates an enthusiasm in me especially when it is long and when done by train. If you are a lazy south Indian, you rarely get a chance to travel by rail routes. You need to book at least a month in advance to get a confirmed ticket and you generally don’t tend to be so over enthusiastic to reserve a train ticket when you have all the major cities well connected by roads and quality state/private transport system.

The idea of a long train journey is never a deterrent for me as it is the case with many other people, except for one irritating factor i.e. the cleanliness or rather clean less ness of bogie toilets due to the poor maintenance of Indian railways. But still, one of the ways by which I attain peace of mind is by sitting near the window of a train, sipping hot tasteless tea, gorging my mouth with the cheap samosas, resonating my body to the rhythmical beats of the tracks made against the wheels of the bogie and savoring my eyes with the picturesque landscape of Indian country side.

In spite of my love for train travel I never got a chance to do it in last two years. My eager wait ended last week when I had to travel back and forth to Hyderabad from Kolkata for some personal work. I could have chosen to travel by air, but giving myself the excuse of saving the extra buck I chose to book the train in advance for one way trip to reach Hyderabad and then decided to come back by air.

The train from Kolkata to Hyderabad starts in the morning and will reach hyderbad in the morning of the next day. On the day of journey, I got up early, shaved to look particularly good for any pretty gals that might sit in my bogie and reached the station, an hour early, just to catch a glimpse of the Howrah Bridge and incredible cacophony at Howrah station. I was not disappointed as the Howrah bridge stood as majestic as it always stood on the banks of the Hoogly river and the crowd was just as noisy as I expected with many pretty faces dispersed among it.

I tried to enter into the iconic Victorian structure called Howrah station and saw huge crowds coming out of it. With some difficulty I pushed through the crowd to make way into the station. A pungent smell of mustard oil hit my nose indicating a lot of biharis coming out. A train from bihar must have just reached the Howrah station. Just as I reached my platform I saw a dark, short man, very enthusiastic, selling idlis. By his atypical white lungi and a horizontal mark on his forehead. I knew it was a tamialian. Not him but his tasty looking idlis drew me to him. Three months in kolkata, and not once did I eat a tasty idly. This was my chance to wallow the taste of some real South Indian idlis. I devoured half a dozen idlis in spite of not being hungry. Thought about paying the man a tip but people on platforms are not accustomed to it so just payed happily whatever amount he asked for.

Train came soon and the first thing that I did was to check the reservation chart. Not check the confirmation of my seat number but to check the seat numbers of all the gals seated around me. There was one padma mukherjee right next to me. I happily entered into the compartment and eagerly waited for a beutiful mukherjee to arrive, thinking of ways to provoke a conversation with her before the other male counter parts sitting around me. Soon all the seats surrounding me started filling up with guys but with nothing that can be called a Padma Mukherjee. After some impatient waiting I came out to check the chart again. I saw this

Padma Mukherjee Male 24 years.

What a sham? I felt like cursing the naming sense of Bengalis but realized fault is mine in getting over enthusiastic. I still had 24 hours of the enjoyable train journey left. I came back and stuck to my window seat. Within a few minutes I started sweating like a pig thanks to the incredible summer season of Kolkata. After almost wetting my Tshirt the train started. Then came along the track, the slums of Kolkata. As the train drove past the dingy shanties I made a point to observe as many as I can to get an insight into lives of people living in there. I saw emaciated kids running along the tracks and waving their hands so very happily. I felt a little lucky that my life is better provided with than theirs but soon realized that the happiness and the carefree ness with which they are living theirs is not something I have experienced in my life in a long time. I wanted to wave my hand to those kids but got scared of embarrassing myself among the fellow passengers.

Strange it is but what was I really scared of? The strangers, whose opinions are in no manner going to affect my life? I should have waved my hand because the happiness that am I going to give to the kids, if they see me, is  incomparable to the embarrassment that I am going to create, if any, to my fellow passengers. I swore that next time I am not going to do the same.

As the train crossed the slums and streets, the city slowly faded away into lush green paddy fields of the country side.

(To be continued..)