Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Late Hai To Safe Hai

"Seedhe twenty feet paani ke ander"...The words reached my ears as I lazily turned to look down from the upper berth of my coupe. I turned, but did not look down as I was reluctant to open my eyes. I had already slept for 21 hours since I boarded the Falaknuma Superfast Express, to Secunderabad, from Kharagpur. Did not want to break the momentum. "3 more hours and I will be able to boast of sleeping for 24 hours at a stretch.

I dismissed the comment as the banter of the whining stout girl (well her stoutness and the whining voice are the only two things I remember about her) and did not bother to look down. Her boy friend retorted "shubh shubh bolo...hameshaa galat sochti ho". I thought, " how can you think of spending your life with a stout, whiny girl, who always "thinks wrong"....sorry, thats the direct translation from Hindi...". Another passenger, now he was a sweet one, an IIT Kharagpur aluminus (married ofcourse...all sweet men are married!), said "Don't worry, they are working on it. It will be ok in a few hours".

Hold on...what will be ok? What's wrong? Now curiosity had taken over my laziness. So I slowly opened my eyes...all this while, I had not even realised that the train was not moving...so much so for being absent minded. As I looked down, I got the shock of my life when I saw that there were about 30 people sitting in our coupe (which is made for eight, including the side berths), and as my eyes drifted to the windows, I saw that there was flowing water on both sides, and we were on a small bridge.

On enquiry, I came to know that the train had derailed, of course I got this information after getting dirty looks from many passengers who were obviously envious and disgusted by the fact that someone can sleep in the middle of so much of chaos. While I was contemplating descending from my cosy seat, a few policemen entered the coupe and coach and asked everyone to evacuate it and go to either the one before it or after it.

Now its often said that in a grocery store, the queue you stand in moves slower. True of the trains too. The coach I moved to was stalled for five hours in that deserted place, while the other part of the train left for Secunderabad. Our part of the train went all the way back to Vishakhapanam, got a new engine, a new route and reached its destination, Secunderabad, around 11 hours late.

Now you can ask me, "But you haven't described anything about the derailment and the details related to it". Well, the true answer is, I don't know. And I don't care. When the derailment happened, I was sleeping. And after I got up, I was more interested in finishing the James Patterson's book that I was reading and was glad that I was getting the time to finish reading the book before hitting the regular schedule of going to the office and eating and sleeping....and then again going to the office and eating and sleeping and then again....

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