3 Hours To Mumbai

I’ve just completed 22hours of the 25 hour journey by train, in a hot, stuffy and overcrowded sleeper class bogey.

So yeah, besides the fact that I’ve sweat out just about every single drop of fluid from my body and the fact that I can’t feel certain parts of my body, it’s been a pretty interesting journey.

I managed to milk one complete movie out of my backup laptop which is probably older than I am, stood by the compartment door ‘to feel the wind’ with headphones in my ears like in the bollywood movies, did the whole social thing with others in the train, pissed myself off by (trying to)playing flappy bird and passed out.

And yet I find, there are three more godforsaken hours left.

Good part? I’m going home, to Mumbai, albeit for all the wrong reasons and not exactly in the best state of mind, but I’m going home.

Also, besides slight irritation and sheer boredom, I’m also insanely hungry, owing to the fact that I haven’t eaten solid food barring a packet of biscuits in the last 20hours.

Why? Because anything that goes in, has to come out yeah?

And taking a dump while travelling across the country in an Indian train is like playing Russian roulette with your butt.

You may either survive the ordeal and have a nice rhythmic dump in sync with the trains wobble, or you may contract a serious infection which’ll probably cause your hooha to wither away like the leaves of a tree in autumn, or both.

But again, for people outside India reading this, it’s an interesting journey, if you have time, and strong immunity, I suggest doing the whole ‘travelling with the locals in a crowded train’ thing Atleast once in a lifetime.

It gives you time to think, about things you’ve been avoiding, or running away from.

Because even as it quietly rumbles down the green countryside, beside endless fields, above the largest and holiest of rivers, up and down giant mountains with ease and down lanes narrow enough to jam a bloated buffalo, you can’t help but be retrospective, even for the shortest while.

And no, it doesn’t make you realise all that’s messed up in your life or things you don’t have or the mistakes you’ve made.

It does the exact opposite.

As you sit, looking around aimlessly or making conversation with fellow travellers or listening to their stories or just noticing the people around you as you listen to your ipod, the little sensory organ in your head which by then would be pretty hopped up on the lack of fluids, food and the sheer toxic stench from the toilets, makes you do two things –

– Makes you realise all that you have, and you took for granted. From family, to your pet, to your friends to money.

– Revisit certain events, that may be somehow linked to the current setting that may have ended badly, and makes you see it in this whole other way, from which you either come out seeming like you learnt a life lesson or realising that you are/were a knob-end, or both.

It’s fascinating really.

And in many ways we need it, the whole ‘alone time’ deal, ‘cuz believe me, it’s only when you’re completely and truly jobless and you’ve exhausted every other means of entertaining yourself, you realise the sheer magnitude of shit your brain backs-up and keeps on its backburners for later review.

And it only starts throwing them up only when it’s cornered, and better you than someone else.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, by habit I tend to notice people around me a lot, the subtlest  of mannerisms, and the way it all, well, fits.

The way two different incidents/actions by different people in the same frame of view seem to nullify each other. Chaos theory.

Having said that, it’s a funky experience when your head, on running out of test subjects, starts applying the same on your own life.

All I can say is, you’ve got to try it out.

Cheers.