My friends cannot fathom my love of overnight train journeys.
“What, spend eight hours in a tiny space, staring at a bunch of people, when you can take a two-hour flight?” they exclaim.
What they don’t understand is that the railways are an excellent place to indulge in the national sport of all introverts - people-watching and judging.
Strange things happen within the close confines of the Second/Third Class compartment. Gentleman who board as strangers, part as business partners. Families bond over children, politics and the heat. Everyone shares the food. Young and single people are fussed over. Of course, there are zombies that disappear into the blackholes of their phones or laptops, but these are few and far between. Boredom, a lack of Wi-Fi and privacy compel a large majority of passengers to engage in the now-forgotten art - of making small talk.
It is like watching an unscripted reality show.
I was traveling to Delhi from Ahmedabad on my favorite Rajdhani Express (all hail Rajdhani, the queen of trains). My compartment was full of young people, who seemed, like all young people, to be in their own worlds. A loud, boisterous Punjabi gentleman was transacting business loudly on his phone; a young woman was whispering quietly into her phone; and a young man was doing the same. I was reading my kindle, looking up to watch the people around me from time to time.
A middle-aged lady sat to my right, seemingly alone. I had felt her piercing gaze, lingering over me for quite some time. She seemed to want someone to talk to. I looked around, and no one seemed to notice Aunty. I sighed and shut my Kindle. I would have to take one for the team.
“Where are you from, aunty?” I asked. Within minutes, Aunty had told me her life’s story — how her family came to shift to Ahmedabad and how she had a group of 10 friends (10! I thought about my non-existent social circle and sighed) who went on daily walks together.
“Your uncle, by the grace of God, lives on Satellite Road". I considered this information for a moment. Did I have an unknown uncle? My family tree, scattered across two countries, was complicated. Could this be a fortuitous reunion with a distant relative?
Then it struck me that she was using a conversational tactic to weave the listener into her narrative. Aunty was a genius.
A few minutes—or was it hours?—later, Aunty had gotten everything off her chest. She said she was going to visit a lady in the next compartment. “She is unwell and suffering,” Aunty said, managing to look both sad and gleeful at the same time.
I sat back, relieved at having performed my kind deed for the week.
Suddenly, my compartment came alive. The boisterous Punjabi gentleman had apparently stopped transacting his business over the phone and had been following our conversation intently. “Aunty ke chakkar mei shaheed ho gayi bechari” (The poor girl sacrificed herself for Aunty). I smiled.
And that was all it took. The young woman, who had been glued to her phone, set it aside and started talking. She said she was going to marry a Gujarati guy and had come to Ahmedabad to meet her in-laws. She complained about the lack of decent food in Ahmedabad, and we all heartily agreed. The young man shared sweets he had brought from Ahmedabad. The Punjabi gentleman talked about his business, and I found out he worked not far from where I lived.
Things were going really well, when aunty returned, with a gleam in her eye. She eased herself into our conversation easily.
“The lady in the other compartment is not doing so well," she said, shaking her head sadly. “Her husband has cancer, you see, and she herself is undergoing an operation herself. It is so sad,” she said.
There is a natural insincerity when young people try to sympathize with the troubles of the elderly and the ill. We don’t understand what it’s like to be in that position, and we’d rather not know.
As aunty prepared to launch herself into a more detailed account of the exact impact of those operations on her friends’ organs, the rest of us sat in resigned and a horrified silence. Running was not an option. We were too polite to change the topic of conversation.
The Punjabi gentleman was having none of it.
“It is sad, aunty, but what is written is written, what can one do about it,” he said, invoking the ineffability1 of God’s plan. If it was written, there was no question of fairness/unfairness. And with that irrefutable logic, aunty was silenced. We all breathed a sigh of relief.
As a social impact professional, I’ve traveled to almost 7 states in the country. Sometimes, the places I’ve traveled to were so remote that I got used to becoming an object of intense curiosity. I was once traveling from Gunupur to Badambadi, in the Rayagada district of Odisha. The station reminded me of the scene from Spirited Away—small, cozy, and it looked like it was in someone’s backyard.
The train was empty, and I seemed to be the only passenger alighting from that station. The TC (Ticket Collector) looked at my ticket and my Gujarat driving license, and his eyebrows shot to his forehead.
“Gujarat se? Yaha kya kar raha hai?” he asked, incredulous. (What are you doing here from Gujarat?)
The day got got cooler after that. The burning heat of the day subsided, dark clouds gathered in the sky. It began to smell of rain.
As the only passenger on the Gunupur Express, I put on loud music (nothing like Pasoori playing on an empty train) and imagined myself running up and down the corridors of the train.
The first passenger to alight in my compartment was an old, sweet lady who sat just across from me and stared at me curiously.
She attempted to converse with me in what I recognized as Telugu. I shook my head to indicate I didn't understand. She smiled. She raised a hand and extended a finger. Once more, I shook my head, no. This time, she raised all five fingers, then just one. She was probably asking if I was alone. I was touched by her concern and the effort she took to communicate it.
I nodded yes, happily. We might as well have been from different planets. Different socio-economic backgrounds, languages and age, yet this tiny spark of connection and understanding, had set us off both grinning like school-children.
What a moment of cross-cultural understanding can feel like, beautifully captured in this 2016 ad for the Aman ki Asha Project, by Times of India and Jang Group. Video credit
“Aap Kaha se Hai?” (Where are you from?)
This inevitable conversation starter always throws up my stateless unbringing, which never ceases to amaze people.2 I once got up at Pune Duronto, one of my favorite trains (on-time, overnight, and clean). I had barely settled into my berth (side lower) when a young lady approached me with a request. She wanted to know if I would swap seats with her mother, who had recently undergone knee surgery. Pausing briefly to hear my answer (umm, sure), she proceeded to launch into her family’s history. Within minutes, I knew where they’d been on holiday (Srinagar), the landslide that had stranded them for 3 hours, and the status of her mother’s knee surgery.
For me, this was the verbal equivalent of getting hit by a fast truck.
I had to admire this girl’s confidence. If it were me, I would think a thousand times before offloading personal information at a stranger, and I would give up at the slightest sign of disinterest.
This wasn’t just a one-way exchange of information, however. The family was curious about me; within minutes, they’d figured out my whole background—the places I’d lived and my current job. “Aapne toh poora India ghoom liya,” the girl’s dad remarked. (You have traveled the entire country.)
Another young woman and a student were in the same compartment. The woman opened up about what she loved about Pune (the greenery, its proximity to the hills, and the chilled vibes). She spoke about her brother studying at IIT Kharagpur, feeling homesick, and dealing with the lack of vegetarian options in the state.
I reflected on my own experience of staying away from home during college - I’d relished the freedom but at the same time, faced crushing loneliness and a lingering sense of being an outsider, that has never really left.
“When I was studying in Trichy, language and food were a huge problem for me and all the other students who came from North India. But in my opinion, when living in a different state, we must learn to adjust. Only by accepting and appreciating these differences was I able to make some of the best friendships of my life, and I also learned a lot from an entirely different culture,” I said.
The conversation moved along, but the dad looked to be in serious thought.
“That is a very important thing that you said - that somewhere, someone has to adjust,” he told me. I felt like a sage imparting timeless wisdom.
The feeling turned to horror when, after dinner, the family took out large tiffins of khakras and theplas and started snacking and talking (snacking at 11!). Worse, they continued questioning me!
At which point I decided to take the time-honored route of yawning loudly, and proceeding to draw the blanket over my head.
Spreading inter-cultural tolerance is alright, but sleep is even better.
What have been some of your funny/exasperating experiences traveling on the Indian Railways? Comment below with your most memorable train travel moments—the unexpected friendships, unique characters, or just those moments that made you question your travel choices!
Ineffable : beyond description (and/or logic, according to me), too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words
I picked up this word from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens which describes God’s ineffable plan as :-
“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
Wonderful vignette, Tania. I love my long train journeys, and have travelled quite a bit between Delhi and Bangalore recently. One truly disconcerting image from the journeys though is waking up in the middle of the night and seeing everyone on their berths lying motionless and shrouded in white, like a bogey carrying corpses. Gives me the creeps. I like everything else though, and a lower side-berth makes it all the sweeter (miss the little desk on the other side, however). Like you, I've also been blessed by mostly kind strangers who overstep their boundaries all the time haha, but I love listening to stories so it works great for me. I agree, trains are a wonderful place to observe the human condition.
There seems to be no proper reply to a conversation colliding at “what’s written is written”
Just nods