A girl’s dad.
" Let's make the train reservations the seats are filling soon ", I said to my friend Khwaab. “After 2 days we’ll be getting our week long holiday”, I added with a tone of urgency when she didn’t reply. “But sleeper seats are expensive. Aren't there any general seats left”, she asked. Ugh why is she such a miser I wondered. Khwaab told me to wait while she enquires about the tickets from her mama who works somewhere associated with the railways. I didn't want to wait "patiently" while the remaining seats also got filled.
Instead I consulted another friend, Nazira, whose brother seemed to know about this as he had booked our tickets under similar circumstances before. Her brother asked us to wait till the general seats get available before the chart preparation.
But her brother’s claim to wait till 9pm was wrong as the chart got prepared by 7pm the next day. I was very furious because we could’ve had booked sleeper tickets if it wasn’t for the miser Khwaab. The sleeper tickets were just 40-50Rs more than the general ones!
I suggested her about the early morning train we could’ve taken the day on the first day of our holidays. But she was hell bent on us going home before the holidays begin. She has this weird obsession. She would call it a bad omen if she is unable to reach home after attending classes, a night before the holidays begin.
So she wanted to go by the late evening train. I tried to make her understand that it wasn’t safe to travel by that but to no avail.
So, because of her, we ended up booking “waiting sleeper tickets” (as they were the only affordable ones available) for a late evening train.
Ohhhhh!!!!! The cherry on the cake is that we had to board the train from Usalapur station and not our regular Bilaspur station. I had never been to the former before and that just made me even more annoyed.
Next day our tickets got confirmed when the chart was prepared around noon. Me, Khwaab and Nazira started packing our bags after our college got over and headed out of the hostel an hour before the train’s scheduled departure so that we could get an auto and reach the Usalapur station on time.
Getting an auto that charges reasonable fare is always difficult. After bargaining our way into an auto we finally made it to the station and our assigned platform on time.
We were waiting for the train, trying to guess the location of our train carriage. We asked a nearby standing man but he wasn’t aware of it.
As soon as the train arrived and we started shuffling around with our bags towards our carriage, it started pouring down heavily. That just dampened my mood even further than it already was.
Somehow the 3 of us managed to get to our assigned seats and got busy in ourselves, listening to songs, watching a series, reading a book etc.
An hour and a half later Nazira got down at Raipur waving us goodbye. I and Khwaab had another hour as we got down at the Durg station.
We started talking to each other on random topics when suddenly a mad man or so he appeared to be, came and sat on the other side of our area. We didn’t bother to look at him and continued with our conversation trying to ignore his creepy stare.
After a few minutes we heard him blabbering something but continued to ignore him and got busy in our own conversation and started talking a bit loudly to drown out his voice when suddenly he got aggressive with his blabbering and started shouting at us while pointing his hand at us.
That’s when I noticed Khwaab getting scared and she went silent. I, on the hand, even though a bit intimidated by him, knew that we are 2 against just 1 mad man. If he were to try something stupid, he never stood a chance against us. But Khwaab on the other hand seemed frozen.
So, it’s just 1 against 1 I suppose, I thought bitterly and clutched hard at my steel water bottle which I would’ve used to give a hard blow to his head as I saw him almost standing.
“Aye, Move somewhere else”, a middle aged man from the adjoining seating area bellowed out at the mad man.
The mad man, I and Khwaab, we all were startled. The mad man kept on looking at the middle aged man motionless. The man got up from his seat walked up to our area and again repeated a bit more loudly, that he had asked him to move away somewhere else.
The mad man got up and left. Leaving me still adrenaline charged. I felt Khwaab breath a sigh of relief and we both thanked the man to which he just politely smiled and went back to his seat.
I and Khwaab again started our conversation till our station was about to arrive. We got up, took hold of our bags and when I heard Khwaab whispering to me, “which way should we go? That mad man could be anywhere!” I assured her that it’s alright, he won’t bother us anymore when I saw the middle aged man walking behind us with his bags. He made sure the mad man wasn’t anywhere near us, helped us down with our bags and everything when the station came and even wished us a safe journey home from there. We were just thanking him profusely at the station for his kindness when he replied, “No problem kids. I have a daughter your age. I understand.”
And with that we parted our ways.
