A journey through Real India

“I do not want anything!!!” I told my mom in an irritated tone

She was dismayed at my tone

Who wouldn’t, when her son visits her after 5 months and begins acting weird as soon as he steps into the home but what she didn’t knew were those last 30 hours I passed through which completely left me annoyed…

30 Hrs ago

I just stepped out of my campus gate searching for a shared auto in order to reach dilshad garden metro station. I just checked my tickets

MKI PBR Express Old Delhi to Rajkot Departure 13:10 Sleeper Class (S8 9 LB)

I do know that PBR stood for porbandar but I didn’t know what I stood for, I was in a hurry while booking the ticket and didn’t bother much to go into the detail of my journey. Somehow the feeling of boarding a train from ChandniChowk didn’t go too well with me. One, I have never been to this station and secondly I never heard of any other station than New Delhi or Nizamuddin in Delhi NCR.

I reached the station by 12:30 PM well in time for my train and read on the display screen that my train was 20 mins late and would be arriving on platform 12. On reaching the platform I began feeling hungry but I had a more important task to perform. I promptly purchased the book “3 Mistakes of my life” so that I could finish it in my current journey. A novel had always served me well in lonely train journeys especially if it has all the typical masala, which I always find in chetan bhagat. Somehow I have read all of Chetan Bhagat’s books during my train journeys only and I felt he should speed up his rate of writing books in order to meet my demand. While paying for the book I noticed the unmistakable golden arches

McDonalds is here right on the platform….

”Wow… Chandnichowk is not that bad” I felt.

Like any other ‘new Indian middle class’ student I placed my order, talking only in English, keeping my conversation terse with a plastic smile sustaining throughout the transaction. Somehow everything seemed perfect today, right from the shared autos or the Delhi metro or the ease of directions or reaching the railway station, everything seemed to be on track… …. all is well indeed… I thought and began enjoying my McEcono meal.

13:10 is when I stepped out of McDonalds aware that my train is 20 mins late; however to my surprise a new note kept flashing that the train is expected to arrive in 5 mins by 13:15.

I was pleasantly relieved… what better than a sumptuous meal followed by reduced waiting for a berth or bed that is arriving to yet another insomniac from IMT. A look here and there and I could already see a train pulling into platform 12, a white and blue colorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Die$%$l engine…???!!! I Thought.

How does it matter whether it is a diesel engine or electric, I consoled, and began waiting for S8. Just then somebody told that the train is coming from a place (I will not mention) but popularly tarnished in socio-political discussions…I somehow felt uncomfortable since I booked a sleeper ticket and its been a while since I boarded a sleeper class train…again I told myself that one should stop generalizing…S8 just passed me and I took a quick walk to reach it. Well the train didn’t look that great from outside with faded bhogies and bad windows but the best was still in store, as soon as I entered it, there was a horror show waiting to be unveiled…

The train, true to common beliefs, was stinking badly and the compartment was as shitty as one can get…

The entire compartment was filled with inexplicable filth, both dry & wet, was also used as a spittoon and had a layer of shells of Moomphallies/Groundnuts to walk on…so much for the filth that the janitor who entered to clean the compartment himself said “Yeh rail ka dibba hain ya kachde ka dibba” and left without cleaning it.

“I promised to come home and parents are expecting me” I told myself. I didn’t want to even think of the “R” word then

I began scouting for my seat and soon found out that the section of the compartment where my seat belonged took the cake as the crappiest part of the compartment. There was a married couple, the husband who looked very very shabby and the wife definitely not above 20 with already 2 kids who were more than 6-7 years old…Yeah they too were shabby

3 others comprised their family excluding the above mentioned who were occupying the berths and questioned my arrival into their peaceful crap…

“That seat belongs to me I said showing No-9” I told my co passengers

“Wooh babua ko baithne ke jagah dedena…agar seat aapka hain to hum hath jaayenge” is how the guy sneered and the rest of them smiled at if it were a family joke.

I sat in an area less than 2 by 2 feet not because they weren’t accommodating but I didn’t feel like occupying any more space. I began feeling very bad and started cursing myself for the reservation choice and to make things worse a Moomphally wala or a groundnet seller just arrived…

I was hoping he would go unnoticed but looks like my companions had a love for groundnuts…so much that they handpicked 7-8 packs in a span of 2-3 minutes

That’s it as if the flood was not enough, the entire family feasted on the groundnuts spitting their shells on to the floor and making weird sounds while eating. I tried suggesting them not to spit in the cabin…however they mistook my gesture and in return offered me some nuts. I denied the offer with great difficulty and acknowledged their benevolence. The laptop bag through out the journey would remain on my lap while the other bag consisting of my clothes remained on the berth...No other place was even worth putting a bag…

This family had a characteristic; Adults above 20 year old kept spitting dry or wet once every 45 secs and used the spacious compartment to pristine the remaining gaps, while the audacious kids went a step ahead by doing it at double the rate through the windows. There were times I just couldn’t take it and gave a scornful look to which only the kids responded with eyes filled with surprise and a non stop vocal-nasal coordinated spits fired with more intensity. I thought of retreating because i wasn’t able to take it anymore, but the train had already made its move and we were nearing gurgaon.

Finally the TC came and I felt relieved hoping he will kick this family for occupying sleeper class on a general ticket and I very soon learnt that they all very much had their reservations done. For a moment I felt guilty…not for my travel choice but the fact that I had no right to behave this way, where I wished for people not to travel with me or they should be kicked off by the TC but just because their habits were eccentric…

When I was filled with this guilt a thunderbolt struck & kicked all my guilt out of the picture…

The family planned to have their “lunch” and somehow I must admit that it didn’t smell pleasant…

After sometime I made another awesome observation, Even a carpet like table cloth also would not be able to dry the food overflows or whatever that happened in the last 30 minutes…The berth and the compartment now had a stink that cannot be overcome even if a Public-Private Partnership initiative was launched to fight it…

There is no way one can tell an entire railway compartment to behave human like and believe in minimum living standards of hygiene and cleanliness. You would be kicked out or outlawed for portraying an alien face…

Few minutes down, the upper berth in my section was just vacated and I sprung to occupy it immediately...That is when I attained some peace and began reading “Three Mistakes of Life” in order to drown myself into something. My will to ignore the surroundings was so high that I completed the book within 5 hrs to wrongly raise my head during the deadly dinner break…holy crap…

I requested the gods for mercy and they too were busy with their dinner I guess, I began reading the better parts of the novel again for another hour. I completely forgot to eat a snack or dinner; infact I lost the sensation or the will to eat in spite of my stomach crying with hunger for the past two hours. Actually I lost the appetite…I kept browsing through the novel to keep myself busy

Finally the sleeping hours arrived and I hoped to sulk in silence but looks like I was wrong with the later part of my previous sentence. Silence was robbed from my life with the snores of the lovely family which matched the loudest of the alarms I ever heard. Luckily the kids didn’t snore else I would have considered jumping off the running train.

The dinner break of the gods was over I guess, they decided to bless me with some sleep in this hostile environment. I slept, or lost consciousness to the deadly smell, around 11 in the night when I began dreaming about those lovely hours of playing counter strike in the lab

or playing badminton

or dating nice gals

or waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

Or waaaaaaaaaah waaaaaaaah wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh sob sob sob

Waaaaaaaaaah sob sob sob

A new noise just erupted in my compartment, loud initially and matured to loud & clear within a short while. I raised my head out of scare more than inquisitiveness to check what was happening. The youngest of the spit kids wanted to have a tea in ajmer and he wasn’t allowed to get down by his unwilling mother at 3 in the night (How unfriendly). The spitkid would not be silenced unless he has a tea and the train had just left ajmer… Yeah I forgot telling you this train didn’t have a pantry car which meant he would cry till the next station arrived

I could not sleep and begged them for the first time to kindly silence the kid, but it didn’t seem to have penetrated their wail. The spitkid was too vocal for my disgust and he was promised a tea in the next station.

I immediately got down from my berth and checked for the TC. 10 mins of search did yield the TC but then I did the stupidest thing one could imagine…Instead of asking for a seat change I asked him when the next station was about to arrive as if I owed the spitkid a tea. Looks like I was suffering a nervous breakdown now…The TC, an angel sent for me, though he very much resembled the spitkid’s maternal uncle, offered me another seat in a different section of the same compartment which was some n times better. I don’t know how he read my face expression impromptu…we humans are awesome...

The berth looked better now, however the kindness quota was over; neither the cold wave nor the snore wave were ready to let me go off the hook…

I was tired & shaken both physically & emotionally. I sat on that upper berth brooding into darkness & waited for the sun to rise…I began thinking of my return journey which is a AC III tier berth, however I am scared now to travel in these trains itself…

Sometime later I heard a lot of noise in the train and learnt that ahmedabad was about to arrive, it was then at ahmedabad finally when I got down and had a coffee @ coffee day. I immediately remembered the coke which I didn’t finish the previous day at McDonalds…I began sporting a weak smile as if to preach “that is how life is at times…” to people around me.

My destination was 4 hrs away from ahmedabad and I sat awake all those four hours

I passed or killed this time by looking outside through the nearest window. The scenario was a little abnormal with thick green fields followed by dry lands followed by green fields and dry ponds. All too contrasting I felt, the green fields were too green and the dry lands resembled a drought land so it was a strange topography… I thought

Just then something happened to fade the existing contrast. The spitkids came to this place as well and as if every window had to be victimized in their ritual, they began using the same window, through which I was looking outside, to continue their mania…I immediately switched my view window and that is how those 4 hours were spent in a complete denial mode. Finally at 12:50 Rajkot arrived…

My dad who heard my story was smiling and consoling me & when I reached home it was heaven… Mom kept asking me a lot of questions to which I wasn’t answering and then she asked

“What do you want for lunch” will you say anything… to which I replied

“I do not want anything!!!” I told my mom in an irritated tone…

Epilogue

Honestly there is no moral to whatever I have written above however one thing is true…I still see a lower side in me for writing so much on hygiene and habits

But those dream jobs we think of in Unilever or ITC where we plan to hit the Rural or the Real India and sell to glory…is somewhat farfetched as a thought. If I represent one of you guys, who would love to shop in a Levis, watch a movie in the PVR and eat in the McDonalds or a Pizza hut; Trust me in those 24 hours I could not handle the real/rural india… Looks like a dialogue of “VS”...