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The cacophony hurt her
ears as they neared the station.
“I don’t think I will
survive this!” Shruti huffed. “This is utter madness!”
“And that is precisely
why I want you to go through this,” her mother’s ever-smiling face goaded her
on.
“Dad please, try and put
some sense into her. You know better!”
The immaculately-dressed
bespectacled man smiled his enigmatic smile but deferred from saying anything.
The whistle blew
shrilly.
“I hate that noise!”
Shruti repeated and looked at her father pleadingly.
“I assure you it won’t
be tough. If you need anything, just call me. You do realize how happy your mom
would be if you do this? Please darling? As a tribute to us probably?”
She couldn’t refuse and
had to embark on her dreaded voyage. She knew her mother was incredibly excited
because that’s how she had met her father. In the train. And they had had a
love story worth telling and re-telling. To this day, her mother swore by
trains.
As the train puffed
away, she stood waving to them. They started getting tinier and tinier and
finally the fast-moving train blurred them out. Shruti moved to her seat,
hoping with fingers crossed that her journey be as uneventful and bland as
possible. When she was born, her entire family had expected her to be a bubbly
replica of her mother. However, much to their surprise, she had turned out to
be a mirror reflection of her father. She, unlike her mother, was not a glib
talker. She preferred to keep to herself, stayed away from noise and crowds and
most importantly, tried to avoid drama as much as possible. The word, drama was
anathema to her. She found her mother sweet but maddeningly theatrical. Life
was always a bed of roses for her mother. Shruti, on the other hand, was
cynical. She did not set much store by mushy-gushy ideas and believed in being
her own boss. Her father was a bridge between the two women. He had the
effervescence to survive her mother’s hyper-happy self and the sobriety to
match his daughter’s gravity.
She looked at her ticket
and saw that her seat was an upper bunk. She heaved a sigh of relief. No
pushing and getting pushed. She could retire to her sanctorum and listen to her
music in peace.
A middle-aged couple sat
side by side on the lower bunk. Relieved that no intrusive people surrounded
her, she packed herself in her bunk, pulled a sheet over herself and plugged in
her earphones. Suddenly, her eyes snapped open and she woke up to a drenched
t-shirt and an outstretched arm prodding her gently.
“Whh-at?” she blurted
out, her speech a little warbled.
“This gentleman here
wants to know your preference for dinner. Veg or nonveg? By the way, you should
not sleep with the sheet covering your head. That’s what caused your sweating.”
Shruti propped herself
up on her elbows and addressed the pantry guy directly without looking at the
man in the top berth directly opposite her.
“Nothing else, is
there?”
“We have dal, paneer,
rice, roti-“
“No thanks, leave it,”
“Okay ma’am.” He sounded
apologetic.
“You have continental,
right?” the guy in the opposite berth asked him.
“Yes, we do! Bread,
chicken-”
“Will you have that?” he
then asked Shruti.
She couldn’t help but
glance at him now. Why was he behaving as if he was in charge of her? But she
didn’t want to hurt the poor pantry guy, who was trying hard to get everything
in order.
“Yeah..well.okay,” she
consented.
Then she fell back on to
her berth and tried to sleep.
However, sleep doesn’t
come so easily the second time. So, she decided to take a walk and stretch
herself. She walked out the air conditioned compartment and stood at the heavy
train door. Some people were smoking. She stayed there a while, looking at
herself in the mirror above the washbasin. Her full face and fuller lips were
evidence that she was Reet’s daughter. However, if one heard her talk, which
she rarely did, she would be seen as Adit’s daughter. Her parents’ love story
was something of a local legend. Met in the train. Spent some chaste hours at a
hotel. Hiked to Bhatinda. Separated. Met again. In fact, she would have had a
totally different dad had her own dad not been in the same berth as her mother.
She shuddered to think who it would have been. And that is why she kind of
mistrusted love stories-the mush, the coochie-coos, the aawws, the oohs and
aahs, she mistrusted it all. The smoke clouded around her, making her cough.
“Shit…” she exclaimed.
“I know…the smoke here
and the ennui inside…” The top-bunk guy had come out with a towel. “Don’t
worry,” he continued. “It will halt at a station soon and it will be less
suffocating.” Saying so, he started washing and lathering his face vigorously.
“I don’t like to wander
about squalid stations,” she said, her vexation taking the better of her, and
went back inside. She took a seat opposite the old couple and stared out the
window, into the ascending darkness beyond. She wondered when she would reach.
Trains were just so slow.
As if on cue, it started
slowing further and came to a halt.
‘What a bother!’ Shruti
thought. People had started forming a beeline towards the gate. Vendors shouted
their regular ditties, men and women crowded, pushed and jostled, children
clamored for attention and foodstuffs; the air-conditioned compartment had
almost started resembling a Mumbai local. A couple of kids had collected near
her seat. They were looking at her phone and pointing. Shruti knew that they
were attracted to her phone cover because it had a cute key chain of a mickey
mouse attached to it.
Before she knew what was
happening, one of the kids scooped up her cell and bolted. She instantly cried
out, “hey!” and ran after them. She dashed out the door and out the train. Her
phone was almost her lifeline, especially in that cooped-up train bogey.
“Hey! Red tee!” she
shouted, running after the kids who cackled merrily and scuttled joyfully. She
was afraid of scaring them off lest they should drop her phone somewhere.
“I will give you
chocolates, come back!” she shouted and ran faster. Her heel suddenly gave way
and she got thrown forward in a head-on collision with another.
“What the heck are you
doing scampering on those heels?” the top-bunk guy exclaimed, into whom she had
collided. He was nursing his leg where the heel had managed to make a dent of
some sort.
“I..I am sorry…”
“I thought you didn’t
like to venture out of your safe haven compartment?”
“Listen. I am in no mood
for banter right now. Those kids have my cellphone and if they do something to
it, I am totally lost. So, if you really are the good Samaritan you profess to
be, kindly help me.”
He stared at her for a
few moments. Then-
“I think they went that
way,” he said and started walking away from her. Two of the kids had gotten
hold of the third kid who had the phone. They were trying to pin his arms
behind his back while he kicked.
“Police here!” the
top-bunk guy said in a booming voice, flashing his credit card. And
immediately, the kids stopped fighting.
“May I know where your
parents are?” he asked in a formal tone.
None of them said a
word.
“Should I then assume
that you are all unaccompanied? Well let’s take them then,” he said to Shruti
in a mock conspiratorial manner.
“Thh…there!” all of them
started stammering and pointing in all sorts of directions.
“Hand the phone over,”
he said again and the kids promptly gave it back.
After restoring her
phone and escorting the kids back to their angry parents, the guy started to
leave.
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“Hey...listen” Shruti
said and he stopped in his tracks.
“Thanks,” she said, a
flush creeping up her face. She felt stupid now, having scolded him like that.
“You handled them smartly.”
He smiled a little.
“How long will this
train wait here? It’s really crappy,” Shruti asked.
“About half an hour. Out
of which ten minutes are over.”
“You want to catch a cup
of coffee?” she asked, trying to make up for her former rudeness.
He looked at her a
little strangely, as if not believing his ears.
“What?” she asked.
“I thought you said you
hated to get down on filthy platforms?”
“Well, once we are down,
why not make the most of it?” she said, a bit irritated now. “Do you wanna?”
“Oh gladly! But it’s on
me,” he posed a condition.
“Well, the dinner is
already on you. Let me get you a coffee at least,” Shruti said and both of them
chuckled.
“You really didn’t know
about continental food in trains?”
“Well, how am I supposed
to? It’s my first time on a darned train.”
His eyes opened wide.
“You are kidding.”
“No…it’s like I have
always travelled by air. In fact, it is on my mother’s insistence that I had to
undertake this journey. My granddad wants to see me.”
“Oh…all right! So rich
spoilt brat?”
“You are getting me
wrong. One Cappuccino please,” she said to the coffee shop owner. “What will
you take?” she asked him.
“Same as the lady,” he
said and smiled.
“It’s like I have a
certain thing against trains and train journeys. My parents met on a train
actually. And the way they got married, almost as an accident…”
Shruti found it easy to
talk to him. He was not overly curious nor apathetically uninterested. Just the
right amount of attention. As a rule, she hated narrating her parents’ love
story. But now when she told him and he listened with rapt attention, she found
the story funny, quirky and deserving of the label of a local legend.
“…and that poor man…what
was his name? I seem to forget…” she said, racking her brains to remember.
“Ansh?” he prompted her.
“Yeah! Spot-on! That
Ansh dolt got left in the end and he sort of deserved it, rejecting mom like
that-” she stopped suddenly and looked him in the eye. “I didn’t mention his
name yet. How did you know? Have you heard this story before?”
He had a mysterious
smile playing around his lips.
“I forgot to ask you
your name,” Shruti resumed, surprised at her own loquacity. “I am Shruti, by
the way.”
“Nice to meet you,
Shruti. I am Maan.”
“So, Maan, you know my
parents or something? I didn’t really expect you to make such a brilliant
guess.”
“Well I kinda know them.
Adit and Reet right?”
Shruti’s eyes grew
wider. “Well yeah…but how do you know them? I have never seen you around our
place.”
“Well in that case, you
have never seen my dad either but you do know him.”
Shruti couldn’t
understand what he was talking about.
“Ansh is my father.”
The coffee spilled out
of her mouth as she heard it. For a few minutes, none of them spoke. Shruti had
no idea what to say. Should she apologize for talking about his dad like that?
Or should she just go back to her seat, pretending this hadn’t happened?
A gong sounded.
They stood still, their
coffees turning cold. The train was starting to move. It was as if her legs had
turned to stone. Before she could say another word or have another thought,
their lips had met and sealed.
Shruti had no idea what
was going on and why she was doing this. When they broke away from each other,
the train was filing out of the platform at a breakneck pace.
“Do you know the way to
Bhatinda?” she asked Maan breathlessly.
“We will find out,” he
replied and their lips locked once more.
(Inspired by Jab We Met)
~Written as a part of the 'To Be Continued' contest on Readomania ~
