Chennai Chronicles

An unbearable stench fills my nostrils even as I enter the platform, understandably excited about the impending journey. It's been a good year and half since my tryst with the Indian Railways and I was looking forward to it. The train has always been an interesting experience, planned and orchestrated to the minutest detail or genuinely and honestly random, unexpected, spur of the moment sojourns across the length and breadth of the country. A platform for strangers to meet, a bogie of love and hope, a path(a track)to a new beginning.

Of all the times I have travelled in a train, and I have travelled a lot, this is only the second time I am going AC. I have travelled in a sleeper coach with a bunch of African nationals, sharing my reserved seat with them, packed to whole 10(more if you count their mammoth sizes) in a coupe that was designed to accommodate only 6, eating their smelly canned fish, chatting them up, smelling their African sweat and leaking my own(Well, sweat of course). I have travelled from Hyderabad to Bangalore, ticketless, was caught while admiring my brand new whisky flask, charged for drinking onboard a train and shoed from this end to that, from one corner to another till there was nowhere else to go.

I have gone from Hyderabad to Goa, from Hyderabad to Ooty, relinquishing my reserved berth for a seat by the door experiencing those things that only a train journey can provide; Massive waterfalls and little rapids, high mountains and low hills, vast planes and little dark tunnels, the wind in my hair and the scenery in my eyes. And here I am once again, walking down that familiar platform, sitting in that familiar bogie, chukk chukking away to Chennai, not for a trip, not for an adventure(well it may turn out to be one), but to witness two of my best buds lock horns(for the lack of a better expression) in holy matrimony.

Tamils cannot stop chattering, Goltis cannot get off the phone, Gujju's can't stop eating, Madu's bicker all night long. Kids won't stop wailing, husbands teach their wives life's goings on, wives play ignorant even as they play along. The smells of foods and flavors, from biryani to Battura or Sarson ka Saag, tingle your olfactory senses as the chuk chuk bandi chugs along. And in all this chaos and confusion, in this commotion, a lone boy is sitting, book in hand, window for a companion, listening and not just hearing, seeing and not just looking and experiencing and not just feeling the enigma that is the Indian Railways.

And wasn't it just moments ago when the unbearable stench of urine and goop launched an assault on my senses? Wasn't it just moments ago when I saw my train slowly but steadily rolling down the rails along the platform? Wasn't it just moments ago when its arrival had a caused a pandemonium of sorts - the aspiring and the hopeful running to fulfill their aspirations and dreams, the homesick and the desolate running to their loved ones for security and strength, coolies with baggage and people who were baggage each racing towards their destination only remotely understanding why.

Wonder what this trip has in store for me.