Although the most cherished day of the week for most people, Sunday never managed to cheer Omi up. The prospect of returning to work the following day seemed to drain the enthusiasm out of him. It was tough to blame him. A gut-wrenchingly monotonous drone, it was, his routine on weekdays. Being in a rut was not Omi’s concern, though. He was not one who craved for adventure or excitement, nay, not even a bit.
It was on one such Sunday afternoon that Omi received a call from his old-time friend Kabir. After mustering the energy to extricate the phone from a pile of clothes, Omi channeled the rest in sounding sociable enough.
“Hello!”, he shouted.
“Boys! Guess what, I am getting married.”, Kabir animatedly spelled out in one single breath.
Considering the innumerable wedding invites- some earnest, some not so much- that he had received of late, and the never ending stream of gawd-we’re-so-happy honeymoon pictures on his Facebook, this should not have come as a shock to Omi. Yet another friend taking the bait, right? This, however, seemed different. Omi knew Kabir from school, and when one doesn’t meet their school friends too often after their paths diverge, the image of the school bag carrying, puberty stricken teenager is hard to shake off.
After a few incomprehensible mutterings which might have loosely translated to ‘Wow!’ in some east African dialect, Omi let out a joyous “Congrats!”. He was, really was, delighted for his friend, especially as Kabir’s excitement was almost abrasively palpable even with the hundreds of kilometres separating them.
Kabir had left a lucrative job and stationed himself in a small village close to his native place where he co-managed an NGO which was trying to promote education for the girl-child. His co-manager, it turned out, was the one he was entering into companionship with. And with the cause-driven couple, Omi was not entirely surprised when Kabir announced that the wedding would be held in the same village as per his to-be’s wishes; “brimming with tradition”, as Kabir had put it.
“Aha! Destination wedding.”, Omi jibed, eliciting a flurry of expletives from the other end.
“How do I reach there?”, Omi followed it up with another question.
“Ok! So the roads are rather intractable. There is only one train from Delhi…”, Kabir paused, “… which passes by the village station. It slows down a trifle, so you can jump off and that’s that.”. Kabir had to wait longer than usual for a reply.
“You’ve got to be kidding me”, was all Omi could manage.
At this juncture, it is only meet that we get to know a bit more about Omi, and why this rather doable action plan seemed so preposterous to him. Omi was not immensely athletic. Well, perhaps, that is putting it too mildly. His always-ready-to-fall glasses, well-rounded paunch and uncannily slow reflexes made sure he excused himself from any activity that required more physical rigour than one’s morning chores.
“Well, you’ve got to move your vegetable self for this!”, the other end of the line shot back. Meanwhile, Omi was busy trying to think of alternatives - pulling the chain seemed to be one.
“Don’t even think about pulling the chain.”, Kabir continued, almost mysteriously reading Omi’s mind. “It is a small station but, for some reason, has a lot of police. They will harass you no end with questions and are even more suspicious of city lads like you. It’s no big deal. Get off as soon as the platform starts. As mentioned it is a short strip, and has a bridge adjoining so there is no getting off after the train crosses the station, where it picks up speed quickly too.”
“Oh well! Exactly what I wanted to hear.”, Omi shot back. Then he realized it was better not to spoil the moment any further, and with a dangerously sharp twist in tone, said, “I will manage.”. Kabir let out a few exultations of joy and hung up, crazily blabbering about the zillion calls he still had to make with little time at hand.
Soon after, Omi immersed himself in booking a ticket on the train Kabir had mentioned. A part of him was excited, for the wedding of course, and he could not help but feel a tad thrilled about his impending adventure. Yes, one must reiterate that his routine had turned extremely dull.
He spent the next few days finishing off work at office, getting his own clothes and a suitable gift for the couple to-be. And before long, the day of the journey had arrived.
The train was supposed to cross village Dhawarval at 3 pm, which just gave him less than two hours to get dressed and make himself available for the ceremony. The journey was rather uneventful during the initial part. However, Mr. Murphy seemed to have woken up from his slumber and stirred into action during the second half.
With a hundred kilometres left, the train halted abruptly. Looking out of the windows, there seemed to be no station in sight. The murmur within the passengers paused with the appearance of the ticket teller. “There is a small group of farmers protesting on the tracks. So, we are in for a slight delay”. A collective sigh of dismay shot through the compartment as the teller hurried away before further questions were doled out to him.
Omi instinctively began his tete-a-tete with the almighty beseeching him to keep the delay to the minimum. To his own surprise, he gathered himself rather quickly, and thought it might be a good idea to talk to a few of his co-passengers, hoping some of them might be regulars and may be able to comfort him about his plan of action. Thinking so, he cleared his throat, perhaps a bit too loudly.
As he already had the attention of the travellers in his vicinity, he passed a sheepish smile and introduced himself. He received a few nods in return but little response otherwise. He continued anyway and talked about how he was supposed to get off at the village station, and was not entirely looking forward to the same. Here, almost as if on cue, a young portly man with an amusingly wavy moustache jumped into the conversation.
“Oh! That is no big deal, sir. The village folk do this all the time. Caution is always recommended, for a first timer, surely. I will help you, if you so wish.”, he spoke without pause, the excitement in his voice almost making him sound delirious. Somehow, the offer of help from a self-proclaimed veteran seemed to comfort Omi who replied he would be happy to have help. The feeling of comfort suddenly spread itself across the compartment as the train began to chug, and within a few seconds, they were rattling along to their destination again.
With the renewed chatter, it was not too long before they entered a vast tract of arid land which lay right before the Dhawarval platform. Omi’s new found well-wisher indicated that he should ready his belongings and position himself at the door. “Timing is key, my friend”, he quipped and laughed raucously as he saw Omi’s face tense up. Now, both of them moved to the nearest door. It was a curious sight - vast expanse of land with no habitation whatsoever, trees few and far in between, and the abrupt appearance of a stray animal from time to time. Looking out made Omi feel dizzy though, so he turned back and exchanged smiles with his stranger-turned-saviour.
Seeing Omi’s anxiety, a few more passengers had joined in to pep him up. The platform was now in sight and the train had slowed down considerably as Omi readied himself like a man on the battlefront. His fellow lay a comforting hand on his shoulder, and when the time approached, blurted, “Now!”. Omi lurched forward without much delay as the on-lookers beholded the sight with bated breath.
“Keep running and sustain the momentum or you will fall”, he remembered from his textbooks in school. They also advised against jumping off moving vehicles, but that ship had sailed already. Admirably, Omi landed with precision and maintained his running step with amazing dexterity. His co-passenger broke into a brief applause which Omi gratefully acknowledged by waving and letting out little shouts. The train was steadily gathering speed now. Omi, out of sheer excitement, was still running, with a trolley bag in tow and one hand in the air, partly waving and partly celebrating the success of his endeavour. A few hours from now he will be all dressed up and dancing at Kabir’s wedding.
Wait, who was this grabbing his shoulder? He looked up in alarm and saw two men leaning out of the hastily speeding train. They had steady hands, and he was now stuttering along, his resistance to their pull paling every second. The men had innocent smiles and one of them kept shouting, “Don’t worry, sir. You city folk, I tell you. We do this all the time. Take a big stride forward and jump in”. Omi’s bewilderment had turned him into a brick. His momentum and the men’s gigantic grip was now pulling him aboard the train.
“Careful, you will get caught in the gap.”, one of them shrieked. Omi woke up from his daze to move his feet off the gap, and, with little choice, onto the train’s risen pedestal. With one last pull, the group of men got him onboard. A cackle ran through the group, with innocuous jibes about how the city’s comforts makes pansies out of men.
Omi stood staring at them blankly. As the train hurried onto a bridge overlooking an aberration of a rivulet in the midst of the parched land, irony seemed to be pervading across the elements.
