Mumbai Guhwahati Express S7 31 - All Alone

I had the opportunity of travelling alone from Mumbai to almost Guwahati, baby sitting a seat, protecting it from 500 others who would kill to sit were I sat. I was amidst strangers who did not seem to like the fact that I wanted to sit with a little space around me. So, there I was baby-sitting my luggage like mother sheep guarding her lambs from the very bad wolf.

I spent a good half of the first day cribbing to myself through clenched teeth about the lousy situation and why I couldn’t be part of a group that would crack up at my wisecracks and not so wise cracks and play OHNO with me. Why did I have to be stuck up with a bunch of losers so bored that all of them watched goggle-eyed as another guy stood up on his seat and placed three very interesting guavas into his bag on the upper berth in slow motion – one by one? Each movement of the man was like breaking news. “Dekhiye kis tarah ek aadmi NE apne seat par chadhkar ek nahi, do nahi, balki teen amrood apne bag ke andar ghusaaye…”

The TTC, I bet, feels more important than Pratibha Patil feels inside the Rastrapati Bhavan. This lanky guy wearing black clothes is suddenly God for my fellow travelers. They want their tickets confirmed and give him looks that range from pious-innocent to smug-bribey.

And thus, interesting traits of people around me began to ooze out, which is when I decided to stop cribbing and make the most of the situation. Who knows, one of these could be characters in my first film.

A couple sat to my left. The man spoke a mix of what seemed to be a mix of Bengali, Hindi and Awadhi. His female partner looked obviously Nepali and even spoke like Bollywood’s caricatures of Gorkha watchmen. Though not too much into PDA, I was of the opinion that they were all set to star in the next controversial mobile clip that people around the world would download for $ 50. What the woman had to tell the man had to be very important stuff because she yelled every word of it. I wonder why the guy wanted to know about how the woman had hit another woman (who was washing utensils) for staring at her. The man kept chewing sachet after sachet of Kolhapuri gutkha and the woman kept pulling at his hair for this habit. Wonder if the man was putting up with all this because he thought she would make up for all of this later? (Wink wink).

Their eating habits psyched me out. The food from the railway pantry car is akin to the food Raveena Tandon feeds her pets. Ya, so there are a couple of things in the dal that you cannot really eat like long pieces of fried chilly, pieces of the foil etc. so the couple took out all of this and placed them on the seat while they devoured their food with all possible limbs. Post lunch the woman raked off the residue from the seat with those very hands, leaving dal tracks all over the seat. Aur phir Bhagwan Ramchandra ne us nanhi gilahri ko apne haathon mein uthaayi… aur apni ungliyon se uske peeth par teen reshayen banayi… The guy then wiped the wet dal with a gammchha (towel) and proceeded to sit on it.

Remnants of the dal could still be seen on the woman’s saree a day after that particular lunch session. The man switched from Kolhapuri to another locally available gutkha brand. He also developed a rare mental condition where he would get down and run to the water faucet with at every possible railway station.
On my right sat a bouncer in a dark blue Sando vest. He could give Yoko Zuna a few tips on muscle toning. Besides entertaining the broom that grew out of his armpits, his occupation throughout the day was to rile salesman, interrogating them with pointed questions about the price, quality and quality of their wares. He even volunteered to sit on a plastic torch after its salesman claimed that it was unbreakable. When he wasn’t playing CID with them, he would squeeze out his mobile phone out of his tight pants and make calls to people inquiring about the number of sacks of cement they used to build their new house and the shampoo they put on their head.

A whiny kid sat in front with his mom who looked so much like Shashikala that I almost asked her for an autograph. The 8-year old whined for everything from his toothpaste to his right to sit at the window. The whining was beginning to get to my nerves and I would’ve stuck my only black pen into the imp’s ear if it wasn’t for redemption that came in the form of Anish who asked me to join the rest of the gang in a compartment across seven seas.

Not that the rest of the journey was uneventful…but all of that is another story.