As Good as A Kiss: A Train Journey

 10 PM:

Now, we were two on my seat. Me and a twenty-eight year old girl who has a stupid brother. 

We started on very nicely and for the next few hours, we were just talking. Her struggles of life to essence of a job to my hair-fall to the nuances of our love life to our respective family members to the incompetency of Nitish Kumar as CM of Bihar. Everything. We talked about everything, even the way I approach a girl and why I should stop that ASAP. I remember the passage of time when we were talking about our definition of love as a non-toxic human beings, we both could see the enigmatic tortoise moon through our closed window. Straight out of a frame from some Basu Chatterjee movie.

7 PM ONWARDS:

It's seven in the night and I have managed to board into a train which will lead me to the most polluted city of India. As of now, I'm standing near my berth and there are six people already. As an obvious passenger, I look back at my ticket in the phone to reconfirm my seat number. For the next thirty seconds, everyone of them pretends as if he/she has got the ticket and I'm the one who hasn't. As of now, I am assured that they are sitting on my seat so I have no option left but to take the charge and I interrogate them one by one. Two of them turn out to be local commuters and soon they find out that I am THE MAN. They now give me a kind of respect as if I was the one who had invented railways.  

Few more minutes have passed and I've finally managed to sit in an " one man on the tip while other on the back of the seat" sitting pattern. Train has started and new visuals can be found. Other than us, the train is now full of the students. It’s pretty evident that they are returning after appearing for some government exam. Now to avoid possible conversations with the fellow travellers, I take out a half-read novel from my bag and start reading. I force my mind into the book but the gimmick doesn’t work and I fail badly. My mind forces my eyes to keep on glancing at those students. I really can't stop myself.

They all look tired and none of them is found to be cracking jokes. I feel so bad for them that in this evolving world, they are preparing for an avoidable lifestyle and I feel even worse for them to get judged by a loser like me. But this is who I am. I have also been judged by them- the society. BTW, Fuck Society!

Now I lose all of my attention from the texts and what I do now is I talk to the fellow travellers and in between that conversation, they request me to exchange one of their seats which is at some distance in the same coach. I agree to that. I have to. I give them my seat and now I feel like Akshay Kumar from the movie “Oh My God.” Tere Nishaan plays in the background. I'm kidding. I feel like an actual God from the holy books who accepts every request from any stupid~obsessive devotee.

The next station has come and all the students board off. Each seat holder takes a deep breath and I am now moving to my new seat where I already see a girl sitting there. I find out that she couldn't book the ticket but her stupid brother had made her believe that It won't be a problem to travel without a seat on a train which runs in the night. Cool!

11:30 PM: BACK TO THE MOONLIGHT

We became so comfortable with our insecurities and secrets that even the silences and the pauses felt less awkward. Everything was appearing soothing to my mind. We kept our heads against the window and let the outer landscape run over our surrendered pauses. It was a movie. The pauses would vanish like a sleep for an insomniac and suddenly one of us would restart the conversation with another “ Pata hai….? ” and the fluidity of conversation would lead us to a never visited RUMI-ANTIC place where A NIGHT IN LENASIA plays in a loop and I love it. She doesn't mind as well. Those few hours felt like recalling the most beautiful dream I ever saw.

You might know this that the beauty of life increases exponentially in no time and the reason is not only the dreams but the ability to recall back those dreams. All those moments in this journey were culmination of all those dreams as well as those well crafted meetings we read in the slow paced movies.

2 AM:

Moments passed and I noticed her yawning. To maintain the continuity of everything going right, It was better for us to stop talking. I told her to go back to sleep and she did. The moon took another few hours to go out of my eyesight and sadly the darkness went away to another continent. 

DOES THE TIME MATTER HERE?:

Few hours later It was bright again and the train was about to reach the destination I wanted to avoid. All of us had woken up and were adjusting our luggage. I went to wash my face and came back looking as dull as the John Abraham from a-not-so-famous face-wash ad. My sleep was incomplete. And for others, waking up in the train means almost a new life to them. I don't know why passengers in the train start talking as if they are solving third world problem or what. Discussions about politics....scandals... And it happens only when the train is about to reach the destination, that too in the morning.

THE TIME:

Back to the girl. The dream girl! While greeting her in the morning, I thought I shouldn’t finish this journey with a closed ending so I tingled her with the topic of poetry and literature. I told her that I have kept some of my poetry hidden and asked her if she would like to go through my ‘ Monalisas.’ She couldn’t say no on my face so she asked me to show few of those. Instead of showing the poems to her, I recited few of those with my same when I was writing. She was all gone in those poems and the world had stopped and it felt…….. No, I am kidding. It doesn’t work like this. These things occurs only in the night. The sunlight doesn’t give the scope for this. The nights are the dreams while the days are the reality checks. We can’t talk Rumi and shit in the day. It is awful. The darkness is poetic only in the night. People should thank God for the sunset as it clearly works like a seamless bridge where people get to choose which side they actually belong to. The nights or the days? The mood-swings or the happiness? The moon or the family?  

LIFE:    

Half an hour later, the poems and the journey had finally ended to a moment which gave me a heightened sense of being alive. No, I am kidding. I am dead since the time I woke up with a fact that I have decimated the thin line of sunset much before I had stopped believing in concept of God. The fact is: Until seven, the time I boarded into the train, It was all La La Land in a bad way and then God decided to write - It's seven in the night and I've managed to.........FUCK!!!