Lalbagh Express

Hello everyone! Here I am again; back after another long break. I want to take this opportunity to enlighten you all with how enjoyable a boring train journey in the sweltering heat of the afternoon sun could get. Yup, you read it right. The things I mentioned here are actually the contents of a perfect recipe for ultimate boredom. Now let me tell you about the scenario in detail. It was a hot summer afternoon; my mother and I were to catch a train to return to Bangalore. After we got onto the train and got settled into our seats, I started to chat with my mom. Nothing special, just some small talk to pass the time. But after sometime, it was starting to get boring. So both of us realized it and stopped. My mom went to sleep in the sitting posture itself.

I wouldn’t blame her. We had had two very tiresome days prior to our journey. This was the time I really started to regret not buying a book at the small book stall in the railway station. Then I started thinking. The seat to my right was a window seat. But it was empty for the time being. Apparently he had booked for the ticket from some small town on the way where the train made a brief stop. I sat in that seat and started looking out the window. Now me being the day-dreamer I am, started to watch the cloud formations. And believe me when I say it; one of the patterns looked exactly like a mermaid. You know, like the cartoon The Little Mermaid in which they show you some sexy mermaids. I sometimes wished that they had a lower body that was human(you can keep guessing why ). But that was when I was interested more in cartoons and the female anatomy than the creativity part.

Courtesy: Flickr.com

So there I was, dreaming away and imagining myself some pretty good fantasies(now I won’t say what kind. ) when this guy whose seat I was sitting in walked in on my wonderfully landscaped dream. I cursed him under my breath and moved over to my seat. My mom had woken up by now and was reading a Tamil book. A pity I don’t know how to read Tamil fluently, otherwise I could have borrowed the book. But I had far bigger things in store for me. I couldn’t let a simple thing like boredom get the better of me. So I turned to my left to see a lady in her late 20’s sitting with her 4 or so year old daughter next to me. The kid was actually throwing a tantrum that she wanted to sit with her father. The father actually looked so tired that I thought he would drop down unconscious if he didn’t get some sleep.

Now the mom understood this and tried her best to keep her daughter with herself. I actually pitied the woman, because the kid was actually pulling her mom’s hair with quite a good amount of force. That was when I realized that the lady could use a hand. I tried to distract the girl by smiling at her. She quieted down all of a sudden. I bet she thought I was some pedophile Whatever it was, the kid at least let go of her mom’s hair and mellowed down.

This was when I started looking at all my fellow-travelers . There were all kinds of people. The I am ok with anything kind of people (me and my mom), the family to which the lady and the girl belonged to, the show-offs/wannabe’s who think the world is too shoddy for them; and then there were the middle-aged couple who were trying to make small talk with their fellow-travelers. I spent the rest of the time talking with them and the lady. I was also occasionally trying my best to annoy the wannabe sitting next to me by talking so loudly that he could hear me over the loud music playing on his headphones. The rest of the journey went by pretty much the same way.

And that was when I got the idea that I should write a post about that journey. And so, here I am narrating to you in the best possible way I could; the journey from Chennai to Bangalore in Lalbagh Express. I want to make a note here. I got the initiative to turn a most boring thing like a train journey into totally exciting adventure by thinking of Dinesh’s blog. I learned that lesson and wish that other people who read this article learn it too. Saying that, I promise you that I will be writing new posts without giving too much of an interval between them. Signing off, Pavan a.k.a AnniYan.

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