Nasik to Aurangabad

I jumped out of the rickshaw and sprinted to platform number one. I was late for my train at 5:10 p.m. I took out my mobile from the left pocket of my denims and checked the time. It read - 5:10 p.m.

“bhaiyya, jan Shatabdi chali gayi kya?”; I asked the coolie.

“nahin nahin…abhi nahin…”

“kaun se platform par ayegi?”

“ek number pe…”

“Thank you!”

I heaved a sigh of relief and placed my bags carefully on a clean spot of the railway platform. I looked around to find the station very crowded. There was quite a lot of noise around.

I took out my train ticket from the shirt pocket and held it straight under my eyes. My eyes went to check the departure time. I was right about it. I then looked at my seat number. C 57. As I folded the ticket to replace it in my shirt pocket I suddenly recalled something. The seat allotted to me in the same train five days ago when I was coming to Nasik was exactly the same- C 57

“Strange…”; I told myself.

It went back five days to travel back from Aurangabad to Nasik. It occurred to me that I had changed my seat for a more comfortable one (read-spacious) after finding half the train vacant. I was suddenly pulled back to the present by my ringing phone. I must have spoken for about fifteen minutes when the train arrived. I hung up and got ready to board the train. I lifted both my bags one by one and hung them by their belts on my shoulder.

Once the train stopped I moved into the crowd and reached my berth soon enough. I placed one bag on the over head shelf space provided for luggage and sank in the discomfort of the seat. I had booked myself a ticket in air conditioned chair car.

The train moved in about a couple of minutes and I was traveling yet again. In the seat next to me was seated an old gentleman who looked busy doing something with the news paper. After looking harder I discovered that he was solving the English crossword. I was impressed immediately for the old man had almost finished solving the crossword with only a couple of words left. I decided to give company and stared really hard at the cross word, nearly solving it by the gaze itself.

“You want to do it?” he offered. I am sure i had made him uncomfortable.

“Yeah…” I answered and nearly snatched the news paper from his hand in excitement. It was a sort of pre-success excitement. The thought of completing the cross word which an old man was finding difficult to really got me anxious. After spending about ten minutes on the cross word and realizing that I wouldn’t even have made it this far had I worked on it afresh, I stealthily looked for some other content on the paper to read. i tried to see if the old man was looking my way by trying to almost zoom out my eye balls from their sockets around the corner of my eyes.

Thankfully a cartoon strip was right next to the crossword and I felt like it had appeared just to rescue me from experiencing a really embarrassing moment. All along, I had thought that the old man was looking at me while i tried to solve the crossword. But I realized how wrong I was when I turned to look at him, expecting to catch his condescending glance, and saw him lost in thoughts and looking the other way.

Relieved, I started solving the Su-doku on the paper. After making a thorough mess of it for half an hour I turned to look at the man once again. He pointed at something he held in his hands. He had another newspaper with Su-doku on it. But the difference between his mine was stark naked. He had solved that horribly de-motivating game completely. As if the numbers had found their place in the boxes at the neat command of his fingers.

I meekly showed him my sheet and softly said with a little shrug, “I made one mistake somewhere”; stressing really hard on the word ‘one’.

He smiled an enigmatic smile and placed his newspaper in the pocket provided at the back of the seat in front of him.

“Where are you going?”; he asked.

“Aurangaabd”; I replied.

“Do you study there?”

“No I work…with Titan Industries…currently with Tanishq”. I was flattered at the thought of looking young enough to be a student still.

However he looked a little bewildered so I spoke again realizing the reason for his quizzical look. “Tanishq…the jewellery brand!”

“Ah! Yeah yeah… so who do you sell to?”

Finding the question very strange initially I took a second longer to answer his question. “Everyone… It is for...mmm... all”; sounding a little irritated at the question

“Oh…okay…so what do you do?”

“I look after marketing and sales for Tanishq in Aurangabad and Nasik”

Smilingly he said, “that must be interesting!”

“Well it is, as a fact. It is a very dynamic business…Now, when we talk abut gold ..........blah blah blah…......blah blah....more blah.....”

I must have spoken for five minutes non-stop. After satiating the marketing man in me I looked at him with sudden silence. It seemed like everyone in the train was listening to me for there was not a sound when I stopped speaking. It felt as if the train had fallen in a vacuum .

“What is your USP?” he asked. breaking the silence. I quietly lauded his brave attempt for giving me another chance to open my gob. Self-infliction seemed like his sport for the moment and I didn't mind being his guest. So i began...

“Purity.”

Again there was that vacuum like silence. I realized at that very moment that I had set pretty high standards for myself in the past. So my current poverty struck performance had rendered quite a surprise at my audience. The spell of surprise was dispelled in a few seconds when the old man spoke.

“24 Karat?”

“No…we make jewelery in 22kt. Jewelery cannot be made in 24 karat. The reason being that………….blah blah blah”; I went on another word trip.

Once I decided to take a quick break from the rapid fire, I found that the old man had adapted himself well to the situation already as he immediately jumped at the opportunity of stopping me from - Act 2 Round 2 .

“I am an engineer by profession. I passed out of IIT, Madras about forty years ago. I didn’t do an MBA even though I had call from IIM Calcutta. I found it real fake”; he said smilingly.
“I don’t mean to offend you. I just thought I wouldn’t do justice to my engineering if I ended up selling tooth paste and shaving cream”; he concluded.

“He he … I agree. Not many think like that now days.”

I immediately thought of how much easier it would have been to crack that dashed CAT examination if all engineers thought like him. At least there wouldn’t have been the peer pressure of performing well in the quantitative section.

We continued talking for a while and I realized that I had taught the old man something. He was now talking as much I did when we started conversing. the preamble was irritatingly long and the real stuff was yet to arrive. I smiled at my success and appearing to be attentive I drifted to thoughts about this and that whle the old man continued to binge on alphabets.

“What do you think?”; he spoke and looked straight at me.

Those words hit me like a bullet and his stare was like the blazing sun in my eyes. My heart curled like the touch-me-not plant as I stood at the verge of a terribly embarrassing moment. I gave a guilty smile to him as I tried the impossible task of fetching his words from my sub-conscious mind. i couldn't break the sticky glut it had formed in mind .

Fortunately my rescue team arrived again and this time in the form of a pantry man, sugar, coffee powder and milk. I really needed this army to pull me out of the trench and the timing couldn’t have been better. Another rescue comrade appeared from the mouth of the old man as he spoke- “you care for some coffee?”

How I wished to tell him that the only thing I cared for at that moment, from the cockles of my heart, was coffee.

“Sure! Do cup please” ; I said to the pantry man with as calm a voice as I could possibly keep.

“Ek strong”; the old man demanded.

“Let me pay”; I said after we had received our respective cups of coffee.

I handed over the money and gave him a huge smile with BIG thank yous written all over my face. I think he got the point because he gave me back a very strange look, the one you wear when you try very hard to understand what the other person is trying to say but just can't. He nodded his head, gave me half a stifled smile and hurried away.

Soon after we finished our coffee we got talking again, the old man and me.

“You must do what you really feel like. We Indians are never taught to be adventurous and creative by our parents. But we must follow our passion.” He had said this in a jiffy and I felt like he was reading my mind. Just before he had spoken I was thinking about my guitar which I dearly miss and his words came like my own. It was spooky and it was now my turn to be surprised. I turned to my right to look at him and found him staring at me. I held his stare for a couple of seconds and looked away with a jerk.

Silence fell upon us and I fell into a deep thought about this and that.

The air was suddenly full of noises of feet scraping the floor and bodies shifting into a different arrangement. I looked out of the window and saw some street lights. I could also map indicators of capitalism and I realized that a station was approaching. Or should I say, we were approaching a station!

I rose to my feet too and so did the old man next to me. He asked me to pull out his bag from the over head shelf and I did so. I enqued myself in the aisle and moved to pull out my bags from the over head shelf of the front seat, where i had placed them. The train stopped and I almost simultaneously pulled out my bags.

I turned to find the old man already gone. Initially I thought my eyes were duping me but soon I realized they were not. The old man was just not there while everyone else was still in the que and moving. Few people, who were sitting in the adjacent column of seats beside me, were staring at me as they walked out of the compartment. I walked out feeling cold. Once on the platform I looked for the old man everywhere but there was no sign of him.

I just ambled to the exit and took a rickshaw home.