Crossroads Galore: Part 2

What I really found missing in the last post is a character profile of the main player – that would be me – in this tale of asinine stupidity. Your’s truly, as I like to call myself affectionately at the time of debacles, thinks that he is a celebrity traveling in vintage Europe whenever he is traveling in a train in India. Cashless travel is thus a way of life to him. And this cocktail of assumptions becomes even more intoxicating on a day when he has already had quite a rollicking dose of ‘attempted-and-failed’ travel, like on the Tuesday in question. If you get the drift, when I was seeing that new train standing on the promised land of platform number 4, I was cashless. Real, hard cash I mean to denote to be bereft of, apart from the customary couple of hundred’s bills in the wallet. In a strange enthusiasm which clouds your mind when you are panicky and you happen to come across anything that will take you out of the panic state, we(me and the law student cum businessman guy, hereafter referred to as ‘Guy’) boarded the train on platform 4. Of course it helped that the train, Gondwana Express, stopped at both Bhopal and Jabalpur on its way to some obscure destination in Maharashtra, making me and the Guy real lucky people.
Once in, we sprawled on the first available, as-of-now free berths, and, ‘gizmo freaks’ that we were, logged into our laptops, visited irctc.co.in to cancel our ticket in the missed train, and get a new reservation done in the current one. Truly the ambassadors of a new, emergent, & technologically driven India, weren’t we?! Well, almost. E-tickets, unlike the normal ones collected at the ticket counters, can’t be cancelled after a train departs and they can’t be booked after chart preparation of the current train. So, after all the excitement we caused in our fellow passengers, as is caused by any ambassadors of a new, emergent & technologically driven India - identified solely by their laptop usage - we sullenly closed our machines and let out typical system-is-rotten sighs. The public gaze, earlier fixated on us filled with amazement, slowly turned into one filled with sympathy as it became apparent that we were traveling without ticket.
Now traveling without ticket, as you must be aware, isn’t the colossal sin that it used to be. An on-the-spot ticket dispatcher , not a TTE, is present on most of the long distance routes and sells you the tickets at an amount he arrives at by adding up a lot of variables which include a fine amount & the fare based on the distance desired to be traveled. That the train-commuting denizens of this penurious country, who are also its true representatives by the virtue of them being poor, would be quite laboured to pay the hefty amount, is paid scant regard to while arriving at the final figure of payment for the above mentioned transaction. Penury is of course a virtue, and you are obviously subject to state benefits if you happen to be somewhere between a pauper and a BPL(below poverty line), but ignorance and indiscretion are subject to formal state discouragement(as it should be in a society that firmly aims to tread the path of reason), this discouragement showed primarily by the swelled ticket amount. That the nation is in a state of kakistocracy since time immemorial is obviously not subject to such frivolous and opportunist line of reasoning though. Ah, how I tend to digress!
Coming back to the situation, we were then summarily introduced to the ticket dispatcher(TD), who gave us the final amount of our tickets’ cost, which neatly shot off our current cash reserves by a margin of about Rs 700. We then indulged in some frantic and actually romantic efforts to convince our man that we would pay the remaining amount after getting down at our destinations, to obviously no avail. He however pointed out to us the importance of a need of camaraderie & trust amongst fellow passengers, ending his note with a hint to borrow the money from a couple of men sitting on the yonder seat. In a space of 30 odd minutes, we were reduced from a burger-munching, cola-sipping state to beggardom. Well, beg we did, telling the men that we were merely borrowing the amount, with a promise of repayment at Beena station which boasts of an ATM on the platform itself, as informed our wise TD. Beena is the last station before the train’s arrival at Bhopal, which the train reaches at 12:00 AM in the night, with Bhopal being reached by 2:00 AM. The lenders were surprisingly generous with their money, as human compassion won over materialism in what should be a lesson in marketing for prospective borrowers. The tickets were bought, and we settled, once again, for a ‘comfortable’ journey back home.
Meanwhile, I witnessed the following conversation happening between a typically & hopelessly overweight constable(OC) of the GRP and a hapless passenger(HP).
OC: “Sat Sri Akaal Sardaarji!”
HP: “Sat Sri Akaal Saab.”
OC: ”Coming from? Going to?”
HP: ”Coming from Delhi, going to Nagpur.”
OC: “You look like a tough man. What work do you do?”
HP: “Well, I run a small machine workshop.”
OC(sitting down): “Machines! Interesting! What kind of machines Sardaarji?”
HP: “Mostly power related. Generators, inverters, etc.”
OC: “So, they are big?”
HP(flummoxed): “Hain ji?”
OC(extending his arms): “ Big, BIG? Are they large in size?”
HP: “Yes Sir, they definitely are.”
OC: “So it implies that your workshop is also big!”(by now his arms had reached their maximum natural limit. Belly protruding, arms stretched. He was quite a sight)
HP: “Yes Sir. By God’s grace, we somehow manage.”
OC: “Yeah, God’s grace shines on a lucky few. BIG machines, BIG workshop. So obviously you must be earning BIG money as well!”
HP(shifting uncomfortably): “Well, as I said, we manage somehow.”
OC(punching HP in the arm): “C’mon Sardaarji! You can tell me! I’m not going to order a tax raid at your place”(laughed uncontrollably for 2 mins after this)
HP: “Yeah its good, if you wanted to hear that”
OC: “Now Sardaarji, being so rich, won’t you like to help a poor constable of the railway police, who is deployed 24x7 to ensure your safety?”(OC’s expression at this point of time was more pained than that of Somalian children, minus their impoverished bodies, of course)
(HP now looked like a man suddenly enlightened.)
HP: “How much Sirji?”
OC: “Arrey, I just want to have some chai-paani. 100-200, whatever you can dispense with.”
HP quietly took out a Rs 100 bill and handed it over to our enterprising cop, who merrily got up and walked off. And that, folks, is the most bizarre transaction of ‘convenience money’ that I have witnessed over the years. The Guy, simmering with all the anger that his 22 years could muster, with the anger quite conveniently coming up after the cop had left, swore a couple of choicest abuses at him. One other guy lamented the system, not too long after he had bribed the TTE to get a confirmed seat. I, meanwhile, yawned at the spectacle, and dozed off.
We arrived at Beena by midnight, i.e. at the right time. This train, as I mentioned earlier, went to both Bhopal & Jabalpur. At Beena, it divided itself into two parts, with one going to Bhopal & the other one to Jabalpur. The stoppage was supposed to be of 30 minutes. I was jerked awake by the Guy who promptly reminded me to get the borrowed money from the ATM. I, quite drowsily, ambled off the train, leaving my luggage with the Guy, in anticipation that he would wait for me, and thus quite idiotically forgot that in order to proceed for Jabalpur, he had shift to that part of the train which was supposed to go towards the same. So off I went to the ATM, off the Guy went to the other part of the train, and in the ensuing time, apparently, off went my handbag, firmly clutched in the hands of a thief. I became aware of this third movement after coming back after withdrawing the required money and paying up our benefactor.
Now, how does your average Indian reacts to crime & injustice? Iconic ones don the role of a gut wrenching, sweat dripping, muscle flexing role of a fighter. Their deeds are immortalized in cinema, like those of Shankar - played by our very own ‘Gunmaster G9’ - in Gunda( I have always believed that Gunda was based on a true story, with the depicted surrealism always getting linked somewhere with stark realism of its time). The weaklings run away, crying foul. But the average guy? Especially when the crime, theft here, has occurred on a train that is supposed to break into parts which are going elsewhere? Well, one can rake his/her mind to search for that right reaction, not me. Because, ahem, for that to happen, I have to be average. Cutting short the suspense, I, after finding my bag to be absent, imagined that it, for some godforsaken reason – security, perhaps - would have been taken by the Guy, and hence, got out of the train again to search him out in his part of the train. Forever a believer in the inner goodness of man, theft was obviously an out of question proposition to me. Well, find him I did, sans my bag of course. And by the time I reached back to my compartment, or rather the area on the platform which housed my compartment, all I found was fresh air. The train was there, chugging off into the darkness, with its tail light disappearing. The philosophizing part of the preceding post I forcefully clobbered this time.
So, effectively, there went my train number 3 for the journey.
And even that is not all folks. Due to a sheer lack of knowledge of the geography of Madhya Pradesh(this despite spending close to a quarter of a century there), I chose to hop on into the part of Gondwana Express going to Jabalpur with the now-my-great-friend Mr. Guy, in my quest to reach Bhopal, when maps, railway time-tables, and idiots-of-the-first-order(as succinctly put by Dad) know that Beena is only 2 hours of railway time away from Bhopal. This last error in judgement is however outshined by the ones preceding it, and therefore may not come across as too glaring. But the GRP cop ensured that it did; read the epilogue please.
(I reached Jabalpur at 7 in the morning. Guy’s family showed tremendous hospitality in putting up with me for 2 hours and cooking a sumptuous breakfast for me. It took a couple of trains, with a change at Itarsi, to finally reach Bhopal at 5:00 PM on Tuesday a good 46 hours after I had set out on this travesty of a journey. I now wonder how could the term ‘journey’ be ever used as a metaphor in philosophy!)

Epilogue
"Sirji, tell me seriously. You seriously want to file this FIR, or shall I give you the number of a very good psychiatrist? I think your son needs counseling.”

Crossroads Galore - Part 1

Analyze this. Yours truly, while aiming to travel from Delhi to Bhopal, missed 3 trains in 28 hours; took 44 hours to complete a journey that should ideally have taken 10; survived on a couple of sandwiches, equal number of cold drinks & an amazingly inedible Railways 'thaali', coupled with a Good-Samaritan sponsored utthapam during the ordeal; had zero cash for about 11 hours in which he resorted to begging to uplift his economic status; lost(or rather gifted, as suggested by a sarcastic cop of the GRP) luggage that included ‘sheerly worthless’(suggested again by the same cop) items like branded shirts, trousers, joggers and- hold your breath femme fatales(though I wish you actually did)- about 50 photographs of yours truly.

Zoom back to a chilly Monday night on the roads of Delhi. I, with my unparalleled wisdom, thought that 2 hours is enough time to reach Hazrat Nizamuddin station from Noida via Green Park. Now, any Delhite wouldn’t find anything particularly wrong with this assumption, unless he/she knows that this 2 hour window lay in the infamous rush hours of Delhi traffic. Add to this the fact that I had already missed a flight in Delhi owing to the same traffic an year before during the same rush hours, and so, ideally, I should have been wiser, which, as it turned out, is something that should be a life time goal for me. But nevertheless, the journey began smoothly enough with the rickshaw driver crooning classic Kishore Kumar numbers, laced with sudden genitalia describing outbursts at erratic drivers, with the blaring speakers of the vehicle complimenting his, ahem, unique voice, while I enjoyed the night view of Delhi, peeping out of the rickshaw like Tarzan visiting a city for the first time. When the lights whiz by, you don’t exactly get to know the speed, and to make it worse, it was me. Rest is legendary stuff as, after hitting Green Park at 8:40 PM, we(the rickshaw driver & me) still tried to make a dash for H. Nizamuddin, in a bid to outshine Schumi or, lately, Rossi. Which we obviously could not, though it was heartening to note that we were only 10 minutes late, a delay about which I boasted almost pompously about in a later encounter with Dad, about which I would talk, quite naturally, later.
“What touches me most about missing flights and trains is the philosophical angle to it. The disappearing lights of the locomotive signify the adage – “so near, yet so far”, they give you a reality check as to how your cherished goals leave your side even as you watch them go, they also signify the lullaby of life and the ultimate truth that you leave everything behind…….” –
(the intention now is to create a loud, jarring moment here which denotes that my phone rang, but it was on vibrate mode, and the ‘jarring moment’ is thus better understood than expressed, so…anyways, lets just leave this crap)
“Hello?”
“Boarded?”
“No Dad, actually I missed….”
“(pause)…Quite so expected when you are concerned!”
“Ya, I mean I just missed by 10 mins. Remember, you too missed it once?”
“Yes I did. So?”
“So nothing…I’ll just call up when I manage a contingency boarding”
“No boy, I’ll list out to you the earliest options which you have….blah blah”
“Fine Dad, I’ll see what can be done and call you back.”

Can/could notwithstanding, what was wanted to be done was to find a comfortable reservation for the next morning, and sleep off the ensuing time, given the mental fatigue that is common if you spend a full day at work doing, well, nothing. So I did the same, and logged off comfortably from the current ‘adventurous’ day, after getting the reservation done for a train due to depart at 2:17 PM from Delhi to Bhopal(New Delhi – Jabalpur Superfast) the next day, oblivious of what lay ahead.

Next day, I strolled into the Hazrat Nizammuddin station again, almost whistling Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be wild’ – ‘almost’ because I have always believed that it would be quite bizarre to do so actually, movies notwithstanding - taking an intelligent margin of 17 minutes. Not one of those who get all worked up and act silly after a minor mistake, I introduced a sexy swagger with a cocked-sideways-gaze while walking up to the ‘Enquiry Window’ and enquired about the platform at which the specific train was supposed to come. “4” came the reply from the utterly bored human sitting across the window. Hence I marched to the platform number 4, found a train with the words ‘New Delhi – Jabalpur’ & ‘Superfast’ written on it, confirmed the train with a fellow passenger and perched myself on the allotted coach and seat number. All seemed perfect. The luggage was tucked in. The fellow passenger was a law student cum business man – an interesting case for fruitful conversation, given the fact that I had rapturously laughed at a lot of lawyer & businessmen jokes recently. The weather too was perfect and I looked forward to reaching Bhopal by 12 AM in the night.

Only, the train just didn’t start.

Not at 2:17 PM, not at 2:30 PM, not at 3:00 PM.
While we shifted nervously on our arse a couple of times while looking at our watch during our very engaging conversation- which covered almost everything from Laptop power issues to the Chennai lawyers going berserk over their ‘brethren’ in Sri Lanka- we didn’t exactly panic until a family came in and started settling themselves in the adjoining seats, casually mentioning that they came a tad too early before departure. By that time, during our conversation, we had scoffed at a couple of bachelors sitting around, asking whether they had reservations or were just freelancing on railways and had smirked at their miserable existences when they had sought to confirm the train name, which was, incidentally, different from what we were assuming it to be. The family angle brought a lot of credibility to the now grounding theory of ‘wrong-train’. We rushed out to check the train name and lo behold, this was actually a certain Mahakaushal Express, which indeed goes from New Delhi to Jabalpur, at a super fast pace, but does NOT stop at Bhopal in between.

And it was standing on platform number 5.

Yes, yours truly mistook platform 5 for 4, & thus got into the wrong train which was incidentally going towards Jabalpur, and watched the right train leave the platform over the edges of a lively but ultimately futile conversation.
So effectively, train number 2 missed.
Now, my eyes drifted to the original Promised land – platform 4. There was another train standing there as I watched, now with a strange & sudden fear of trains on the ascendancy.
(to be continued)