Rocking in the Free World

My much deserved state of somnolence was rudely disturbed by the screaming and shouting of one of the fourteen people in the compartment. I thought someone had fallen off, and I woke up with a start, only to notice that this was how they woke each other up.

I wish to dear God that I had a shotgun that time. I’d have done a Kurt Cobain on myself.

I figured that I’d wait it out until they were done waking each other up so that noise levels would reduce, and I could go back to sleep, but they spoke so loudly that, were they in Necropolis, it would cease to remain so, with the dead waking up thanks to their irritatingly loud decibel levels.

I was, obviously thinking of savouring this experience so I could blog about it later, but I was soon getting to be at my wit’s end.

The train was late, and these fat ovesttuffed ladies and their uncontrollable children and teenagers were wreaking havoc, and even the loudest music on my ipod couldn’t drown them out.

There was no way I could go back to sleep even if I were injected with morphine, and so I stepped down from my lofty berth.

The side-upper berth was allocated to me since I was a waitlisted traveller, and those are the crappiest berths available on trains. They are so claustrophobic that they’d make the individual capsule in Japanese hotels look like rooms in the Leela Palace Hotel.

However, once I stepped down to sit at one of those window seats that I was rightfully supposed to sit at, five of those kids came and sat there, a couple of them barely old enough to read trying to flip through my book and being playful when I wasn’t in the best of moods.

A couple of those kids who were in their early teens were so fat that I thought twice before giving them dirty looks, lest they decided to punch me, in which case I’d have had a broken jaw in the very least.

I finally sought refuge at the doorway, where I could stand and view the ever changing landscape as the wind blew into my already unkempt hair, with music playing in my ears, and I was at peace temporarily.

Further attempts to go back up and sleep on the berth were futile, and I think that we need to torture prisoners using the sleep deprivation technique by putting them up with huge Marwadi families travelling on trains.

It was now that the train stopped at Guntakal, and I was still sleepless and getting more irritable by the minute, which was when I was inspired to come up with the title for this series of posts.

As the family finished breakfast and settled down, I thought it was over and I could read / sleep / sit silently and contemplate the passing scenery in peace while listening to music, but alas, my reverie was disturbed by the loud noises of eunuchs clapping.

As soon as they saw me, they knew instinctively that I was an easy target, and they hounded me for money. I was glad to partake with small change, but as the three of them present chose to gang up on me, I had no option but to shout and make a run for it in the compartment, shouting out loudly that I was a student and that I *actually* had no monies.

But eunuchs with crazy eyes who want money from ipod toting, shorts wearing, decent looking gentlemen would hardly care, and I think I escaped a near death traumatic experience thanks to my wailing like a banshee to get away from them. Such joy.

It was two hours past the time of arrival when the train arrived finally in Mysore, and I was thankful to have gotten back to where I once belonged.

I wish this had a more melodramatic ending, but life isn’t always a chick-flick, you see.