Trapped ... a 12 hour train journey

Yesterday night (27th March, 2005), when i arrived at beloved Thrissur Railway station, I was full of hope (the quintessential ...)
Hope that a dusty berth would be confirmed for me. But nope!
Latest Status: Waiting List 9.

zzzzkkkkk

Images of horrendous General Compartment Journey flashed upon my inward eye!
The only thing i could do at the moment was sip a cup of tea and wait till the train came , so that i could beg, borrow , steal a berth from the TTE .Things took a wrong turn, when i was at the wrong end and met the TTE for the AC Coach...

I had to be squeezed inside the general compartment and was finally landed in..
There was just enough space for everyone to stand. The Tamil family made a cradle out of a cloth , hung it on the two luggage carriers and placed the baby in it.
The young engineers to Salem, started talking about Unit tests and other stuff.
Two middle aged people were talking something very seriously about trains and particularly the Palakkad station.I didnot dare to keep my bag on the already overflowing luggage carrier, because it contained two of my most prized
possesions, viz a viz my passport (paid almost 8000 bucks - tell ya later!) for this one , and my degree certificate (waited almost 2 years for this one).

So i stood their amidst my country men, and really wished the Swades background music started playing ..yeaaaaheaaa yeahea yeaaaaheaaahein ... heaaaheaahein ...
Usually , my legs would have worn out in 15 minutes flat , considering the fact that my body was pampered with 23 deg centrigrade cool room temperature for the past 2 years, and that the only excercise i did was kick starting my bike ..
Dont know why, maybe because of the good afternoon nap i had, i felt really energized to stand..The trick was to stand as much as possible.. As a good 5 years train travelling had tought me , when i stand, i want to sit, when i sit, i want to lie down, when i lie down, i want to stretch and turn around, so the request for comfort keeps growing.

a 6 hour journey can be spaced as 2 hours of standing , 3 hours of sitting and 1 hour of lying down if possible ..but for 12 hour journey , i have to stand atleast for 5 hours, and then fight for a place to sit .... otherwise my body would
give in too soon and the end result would be sheer frustration.

so , the baby was sleeping the cradle, sparks were dancing under the train when it braked , once in a while , some one squeezed thru the entire crowd to the toilet or to wash his hands ..only one toilet was available because some drunkard had locked himself in the other one ever since mavelikkara (4 hours and counting).. though, he was drunk, he was diligent enough to choose the toilet with Europen closet ... ha ha ... SNORE .......

ok cut back to reality , up there goes gravity ..
Train stops at Palakkad, the two people who were discussing about all the trains in South india jump out .a whole crowd of my countrymen rush inside ... i see it .. .i see it now ..there is a sack lying in the area between the toilets , it stinks .. but hell what , i want to sit! its just over an hour and i have already developed a cramp i think... i leaped like a zebra.... sat on the sack .. woaaa! the smell was disgusting , but hell yeah, i wanted to sit..2 minutes later , an very very old man steps out of the bathroom and says "bluhughuh akkada gukkada bluhhuhuhu "
it was ancient dialect which sounded something like telugu mixed with hebrew!
near the sack was yet another college student sleeping like a baby ...
very soon, everyone was looking at me as if had commited murder, i stood up and gave him the sack seat...by this time the rest of the compartment was brimming with people and the only place left was the place i was standing right now
amidst the toilets ....

the nauseating smell of the old mans head which was now directly under my nose ....
the frequent buggers who came to urinate ..sweat ... no air circulation .. and cramped leg ...yet, i felt that i was the luckiest person on earth ....
After a while, the old man took out an ancient beedi (should be atleast 200 years old!) and lit it ...aaah! the aroma was intoxicating ..... for the first time in my life, i thanked a smoker ...because it saved me from everything other disgusting smell in my present universe.....

The sleeping boy opened his eyes and asked me if i wanted to sit.. "nope..."
he stood up and started a coversation right away ...he was an engineering student at some college at Erode and told me everything about it .....he said that it was run by a group of goondas and students were literally man-handled by the staff! They were also forced to pay small amounts of money every now and then ..and cheated on the University to keep the affiliation intact ! He had a million questions for me ... how much do you earn ? how much do you spend ? .. what is work like ? will an electrical engineer be ok with software ? ..how is chennai and so on ..One more hour passes by ..........

The rest of the journey was more or less eventless .. i stood for a total of 5 and half hours ... then sqeezed as the 7th person on the bench ... half butt the baby in the cradle peed on me and on the guy sleeping on the floor ...military guys .. hit everyone around with their metal trunks and god knows what iron packages .... bastards .. they woke up everyone every 10 minutes .. they were moving the luggages all the time ... at 6 in the morning , everyone was awake , everyone was looking at each other .. everyone was trying to recollect the journey ... the baby was still snoring ... there was a new bunch of students on the luggage .. talking out loud about their syllabus ...and i was feeling like the protagonist in "Once Again" .. "am i alive ? am i awake ? " ...