The Fountainhead in 4 days -- II

I woke to the sound of "Ey, chai - haan teen rupaya, saahab", and the inevitable haggling that followed. I got up and surveyed my companions, while pretending to search for my toothbrush. The 8-berth subdivision of my compartment in which I was situated was the one right next to the door, so there were no families. And by corollary, no girls. (You always look for families, that's where the nice-looking girls can be found, at least on this train. And the families try to cluster towards the middle, to avoid having to deal with the 2nd class citizens that generally crowd the door in a 2nd class compartment. In fact I often walked from one compartment to another, just to look at the people's faces, and....but I digress.) Some passengers had got off in the night, so a couple of berths were already empty.

The tea haggler was a loud Oriya man, slightly balding, a big "tiger" moustache and the bleary eyes of one who seeks salvation in intoxication. He wore his full-sleeved shirt tucked in, his pants held up by a thick leather belt. Between ambling to the door for a quick bidi and haggling with every beverage-vendor that came along, he would carry intimate, boisterous conversation in Oriya with his neighbors, a pair of guys clad in lungis, sleeveless under-shirts and hawai chappals (flip-flops, if you will). Then there was the white man, who was trying to keep a meaningful conversation going with his neighbor, who appeared to be a railway employee of some sort, talking about his free passes on the trains. Then there were me and Ayn Rand.

It was about 7:00 am, and we were almost out of Andhra Pradesh. The weather outside had turned cold, dreary, windy. We pulled down our shutters, got some warm chai and talked about nothing in particular. Mr.Oriya was monopolizing the group discussion, switching to heavily accented English now. I tried to stay interested for a while, but soon got back to my book. It wasn't until I was well into the second of the five-part book that the train slowed to a grinding halt. We didn't take much notice, even though this train was rather good about not having random stops in the middle of nowhere, unlike several other trains I had been on (the Tata-Alleppy being a case in point). But hey, this was the Indian Railways -- you never know when a goods train is given priority over a passenger train.

Mr.Oriya was asleep in a sitting position, snoring with his mouth open. The lungi twins had nodded off too, and the white man was probing his travel guide with a vengeance. The railway employee buried himself behind a cheap magazine. I peered out through the glass pane on my window to see that we had pulled into a small station - Khurda Road, Orissa. It looked thoroughly deserted, and the fact that it had started to rain heavily did not help. Oh, well, I thought, this is exactly why I bring books on trains. It seemed like I would have to catch a different train from Kharagpur after all. Probably won't get to Jampot before 1:00 am.

But in a couple of hours, there came the Ticket Collector, and people began crowding him. The news traveled fast: Orissa had been hit. The tracks ahead were damaged, but whether or not they could be cleared for us to go ahead, the officials did not know. They had ordered two engines to come in from a city close by to scout the tracks both sides, to determine which would be a better way to take. Till then, for all practical purposes, we were stranded.

While people sat back uneasily in the Ticket Collector's wake, it just got windier outside. The rain was seeping in through cracks in the walls, under the lining of the window panes, through the doorway. A little puddle had started collecting at the end of the compartment, that slowly trickled inwards, tasting the luggage and the passengers' shoes. And every now and then, the train would rock ominously in the wind.

There was a small wave of reassurance as the lunch guy came around. But we ate our lunches in silence, knowing that the train had only so much food aboard. I wondered about how sparingly I should use the money I had left after buying two meals and tea already. Suddenly there was a tremendous CRASH!! and Mr.Oriya leapt right off his seat with an "Uri Baba!" The other passengers had been jolted awake too, and the white man leapt to his feet. I threw my book aside and followed the others as they pulled open the door, trying not to let too much rain inside.

A giant peepal (holy fig) tree had keeled over, and had landed exactly in between two compartments, ours and the next, heavily denting the vestibule passage between the two. Its base was behind a brick wall on the other side of the platform, about 80 feet away, but now the wall had been crushed and the top of the tree, branches and all, sat on the back of the train like a gigantic hand that had emerged from the ground to hold us in place.

--- to be continued.