This summer vacation, eschew that adventure trek (where, at its riskiest, your tent may let in a mosquito) for a more gruelling sport — a good old long-distance train journey. A muscle, lung power and willpower training stint which Olympic athletes can only implore Zeus to send their way.
Start with the death-defying dash to your train, which gleefully shows up at a platform which is not the one you’re waiting on (a voice straight out of Terminator 2 has been announcing this). So you clamber up an overhead steel bridge, packed with competitive hordes lugging suitcases up the wrong stairs, down and up again. The wheels of someone’s trolley get stuck in the sari of someone’s wife. At least one good fight breaks out on the stairs.
As the train rolls in, everyone sprints alongside it because, of course, you see your compartment flash right by. You now have to break into a kabaddi run. Your porter — with three cases on his head and two across his shoulders — has charged full pelt through the sea of runners, and try as you might, you and the kid you’re dangling along by one wrist, can’t catch up. You are worried someone else has paid him to steal your precious cargo of lime pickle.
You lower your head and charge like a Jallikattu bull, digging ribs, stamping toes, till you see his three-suitcased-head bobbing up front.
The long-wide-high jump follows. Murphy, who was certainly born on an Indian train, has designed this one. You reach your compartment panting, to find that the slowest person has miraculously got there first and cannot heft himself through the doorway, despite the many impatient hands which are helping negotiate his backside in. You leap over to the next door where a large suitcase has got itself wedged in diagonally. Meanwhile, the train gives a little lurch, and you spot your kid grinning and waving at you from inside. You fling your bag in a javelin throw that would win you an international gold, while making a heroic lunge at the door to cling like a slow loris to someone’s sweaty back.
A wrestling bout awaits you next. The inhabitants of your cubicle wrest each other and their bags to push as much as possible under the berth. There is one overstuffed bag which does not fit under and spends the rest of the journey stuffed in between berths with traveller’s legs cramped at bone-breaking angles to accommodate it. There is another heavy bag which needs to be pushed on to the top berth, and falls on to someone’s foot in the middle of the night. Another fight breaks out.
The deep sea dive is your last and toughest test. You inhale deeply, rush into the bathroom, hold your breath till you turn purple, and finally barge out to breathe again.
Remember, finally, that like all championship sports, this one demands stringent screening of participants. You are mercilessly grilled by your fellow travellers. They will, in the course of 36 hours, require to know whether your religious leanings, weak chin and loud snoring are inherited from your mother or father’s side.
Where Jane De Suza, the author of Happily Never After , talks about the week’s quirks, quacks and hacks.
