final carriage, a first-class carriage I have intimately examined four times thus far this evening. I find the first available seat and sit down. And I wait. Time is best killed in the pursuit of eating. I eat my samosas, knowing full well I am an interloper sitting in the wrong seat, trying to use the eating of a pyramidical Indian snack as some confident cover for my crime of seat theft.
Conscience gets the better of me. I decide to move to a different seat moments before a family of three crowd around my samosa-crumbed seat and seek refuge. The train has pulled off, a detail that has passed me by. I search in vain for a seat called WL5. I settle on another seat, a seat that very roughly approximates to some of the numbers on my ticket. It isn’t seat WL5, but it is a seat 5 and it resides amongst some jolly young student types. I brush samosa crumbs from my mouth. I hold my case, my bananas and my breath. I close my eyes and hope that sleep will offer some solace and shelter from my seat-less existence.
No sooner have my eyes shut than images revisit me of the mayhem in the third-class carriage; my imagination runs riot. I dream of tooth-free, wrinkled grandmothers in skimpy cotton saris tempting me with newspaper-wrapped food, the provenance of which could not be guaranteed; their long, bony brown fingers ushering me forward, nothing but darknessbehind their cold, uncaring eyes. My sleeping mind transfixes on an insolent, big-eyed child, a girl who has, so early in her life, developed anti-Sikh tendencies, eating a rotten mango and offering me nothing but hate. And that chicken, now the size of a small man clucking straight at me, questions my very existence with every juddering movement of its overly large head. And I feel myself being inexorably pulled towards this unreserved, third-class dystopia, this free-for-all of humanity, mangoes and poultry; and there is nothing I can do to stop it happening …
I am snapped out of my stupor by one of the jolly students who gently rocks my shoulder, sparing me from the bony-fingered granny. He politely and eloquently informs me that my big fat hairy Glaswegian arse is parked on the wrong seat, a seat that does in fact belong to his friend, another jolly young student type. I am all out of ideas, so I simply submit to fate and show him my ticket. He takes one look and to him, everything became clear. WL, he told me stands for Wait Listed. Wait Listed? All I can see now in my mind’s eye is a granny chicken with big insolent eyes, eating a mango. I exclaim. Audibly. I ask him what that means, Wait Listed. He shrugs his shoulders non-commitally. I ask him if I would have to sit with the granny and the chicken and the mango girl. He looks worried. He kindly agrees to sort it out for me. He takes my ticket and digs out his mobile phone from deep within his pocket. Now, remember when I listed all that information they print on the ticket? Well, just above the space where they print your grandmother’s maiden name, the colour of your first pet and your inside leg measurement, there is an official-looking number. He texts this official-looking number to some train conductor somewhere in cyberspace. Within seconds the phone beeps back the information that Ihave seat 22 in carriage A1. A1: the very first carriage on the train. And here I am in the very last carriage. I thank him, I pick up my case, my bananas and myself and head towards the front of the train.
Now here’s a little detail you may want to carry with you if you ever find yourself at the furthest available point on a train from your designated seat. Unlike the trains in the UK, Indian train carriages are not interconnected: at least not always. (Needless to say they are interconnected on all those journeys where you find yourself in the right seat, in the right carriage, at the right time.) But as I should have remembered from my early endeavours to try and find my seat, this train is made up of three distinct sets of
Conscience gets the better of me. I decide to move to a different seat moments before a family of three crowd around my samosa-crumbed seat and seek refuge. The train has pulled off, a detail that has passed me by. I search in vain for a seat called WL5. I settle on another seat, a seat that very roughly approximates to some of the numbers on my ticket. It isn’t seat WL5, but it is a seat 5 and it resides amongst some jolly young student types. I brush samosa crumbs from my mouth. I hold my case, my bananas and my breath. I close my eyes and hope that sleep will offer some solace and shelter from my seat-less existence.
No sooner have my eyes shut than images revisit me of the mayhem in the third-class carriage; my imagination runs riot. I dream of tooth-free, wrinkled grandmothers in skimpy cotton saris tempting me with newspaper-wrapped food, the provenance of which could not be guaranteed; their long, bony brown fingers ushering me forward, nothing but darknessbehind their cold, uncaring eyes. My sleeping mind transfixes on an insolent, big-eyed child, a girl who has, so early in her life, developed anti-Sikh tendencies, eating a rotten mango and offering me nothing but hate. And that chicken, now the size of a small man clucking straight at me, questions my very existence with every juddering movement of its overly large head. And I feel myself being inexorably pulled towards this unreserved, third-class dystopia, this free-for-all of humanity, mangoes and poultry; and there is nothing I can do to stop it happening …
I am snapped out of my stupor by one of the jolly students who gently rocks my shoulder, sparing me from the bony-fingered granny. He politely and eloquently informs me that my big fat hairy Glaswegian arse is parked on the wrong seat, a seat that does in fact belong to his friend, another jolly young student type. I am all out of ideas, so I simply submit to fate and show him my ticket. He takes one look and to him, everything became clear. WL, he told me stands for Wait Listed. Wait Listed? All I can see now in my mind’s eye is a granny chicken with big insolent eyes, eating a mango. I exclaim. Audibly. I ask him what that means, Wait Listed. He shrugs his shoulders non-commitally. I ask him if I would have to sit with the granny and the chicken and the mango girl. He looks worried. He kindly agrees to sort it out for me. He takes my ticket and digs out his mobile phone from deep within his pocket. Now, remember when I listed all that information they print on the ticket? Well, just above the space where they print your grandmother’s maiden name, the colour of your first pet and your inside leg measurement, there is an official-looking number. He texts this official-looking number to some train conductor somewhere in cyberspace. Within seconds the phone beeps back the information that Ihave seat 22 in carriage A1. A1: the very first carriage on the train. And here I am in the very last carriage. I thank him, I pick up my case, my bananas and myself and head towards the front of the train.
Now here’s a little detail you may want to carry with you if you ever find yourself at the furthest available point on a train from your designated seat. Unlike the trains in the UK, Indian train carriages are not interconnected: at least not always. (Needless to say they are interconnected on all those journeys where you find yourself in the right seat, in the right carriage, at the right time.) But as I should have remembered from my early endeavours to try and find my seat, this train is made up of three distinct sets of
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