Twelve Hours of Daytime Travel.

 

I was journeying on the Konkan Kanya’s day-twin, the Mandovi Express. Holidaymakers returning from ‘bhangrachey Goem’ made small talk about words not found outside the Goan lexicon, like ‘tourist-belt’, ‘the season’ and ‘take-a-pilot’, jargon that confounds both Raj-leftovers and Indlish-speakers.

          Both trains have menus for meals and freshly cooked food is available through waking hours. Over ‘bhel’, ‘methi-bhajjee’, ‘sikken-lollipop’ (batter-fried chicken-mince-ball stuck over bone), and chisanwich (cheese sandwich), I got acquainted with fellow-passengers.

          There was a woman due to deliver a baby within the fortnight, who had the topmost berth and a very concerned husband whose request to exchange it for a lowermost one got three immediate ‘yesses’. She moaned whenever the train stopped. The clackety-clack movement on the tracks seemed to soothe her discomfort. Does a baby born on a train later write ‘place of birth’ in forms as ‘train’?

          From the time we boarded, strains of melancholy ‘Robindro-shongeet’ crawled through the bogey. Music affects the mood. Glumness spread laterally and longitudinally. After four stations, one gent appealed to the owner of the mobile from which the strains came, to lower the volume. Relief was short-lived. The monotonous ‘samarth-jai-jai-samarth-jai-jai-swami-samartha-a-a’ took over before another voice requested that phone-owner-bhakt to restrict his chants to his own ears.

          The couple right next to me was an example of India Shining. He was from a small Bihari town; she from someplace near Hyderabad. Their parents had struggled through a humdrum lower-middle-class existence. The groom, knowing almost nil English, burned with ambition to make it in the land of its birth, the UK. He took a student loan after earning a professional, technical degree and slogged it out for four years abroad, repaying his dues within half the allotted time, and learning the language that would make him a world-citizen. The bride was a nurse. Unhappy with a salary disproportionate to her ability and skill, she quit the country for greener pastures and was now earning 800 times more. Like a true-blue Indian, she added, “…more respect, also.”

They wondered why they couldn’t get Goan vegetarian cuisine easily; they’d done their homework and read about ‘moonga gaathi, khatkhatey’, etc. They had travelled to various tourist destinations, spent in pounds/ riyals/ dirhams, and not felt under-valued-for-money as they’d felt in Goa. They confessed they had learned from their white-skinned hotel-room neighbours to use local buses and to share/avoid autos/ taxis. 

They were in their early twenties, humble, focused, had dreams and a chart to achieve them. They intended to extend a helping hand to their younger siblings. “And,” both said almost in chorus, “When we’ve earned enough, we want to return to India.” Impressed. My warm wishes will stay with them and their tribe, always.

The other couple near me represented India-tarnished. I learned over twelve hours that, to celebrate their honeymoon, they had poured beer over each other and another couple they’d befriended. Harmless enough, I thought. Who’m I to say whether it’s more fun than drinking it? Further learned that they had drunk it, too, instead of morning tea, before and with breakfast/ lunch. Around dinner-time they tried other kinds of ‘daroo’. The lifeguards wouldn’t let them go deep into the water, the newly-wed man grumbled. He had had several fights with the guards who’d told him he (the newly-wed, not the guard) might drown. Which would have been a good thing, said his brand-new and very vocal wife, because then he would not have been ogling at the other bride and the ‘goree’ women. All those details came out over quarrels that started from whilst we were all waiting for the train to arrive at the station till they got off. Apparently, on the night before the journey, she had discovered an sms that he’d sent the other bride and that was reason enough for her to threaten ‘divorce’ till they alighted. They were still dependent on their parents for food-clothing-shelter and their own money was used for having a good time. They had dreams and goals, too, mainly short-term, like involving cousins and friends to sort out this problem on reaching home. Everyone treated their bickering like entertainment. Only once, when the young man slapped her on her cheek did an older passenger tell him to stop and her to shut up.

A single-ticket Goan widower told me how he was coping with his unmarried children and broken tiles, loans taken for late wife’s treatment and the poor coconut crop in one breath.

Between all the above and the child who offered everyone soggy biscuits, I didn’t know when/ how the hours sped by.

I will cover, by and by in this column, past journeys across the sub-continent, over many days and sharp temperature differences, of enjoying food, music, clothes and languages across states, in days before bottled water, television and mobile phones have changed our lives drastically. And how human nature hasn’t.

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