BENGALURU: If you have travelled by an overnight train in one of the longer distance trains such as Bangalore – New Delhi, or longer like the ones between Kerala and the North-East states, where you are put together with strangers for a minimum of two nights, and maybe even four or five in some of the sectors plagued with interminable delays, you would have your share of stories to tell.
The stories may just be a little less colourful if you travel in the lofty, lonely cabins of the Air-conditioned First-Class coaches where there are fewer people per square meter than the crammed sleeper class berths.
Nothing matches the huddle of the unreserved coaches just around the holiday season, of course.
When thrown into a large cabin of roughly 250 square meters with 70 odd people, even when you have your reserved berths, there is so much of jostling and negotiating that goes on.
There are people who have been allotted upper berths but need lower ones given their creaky knees or other physical ailments, or kids who need the distraction of the window seat and would otherwise scream the roof down.
There are weirdos who are giving you The Look and you want to stay far away from them. There are people who have been cruelly separated by the heartless algorithms that the indifferent programmers wrote into the system, and who then have to kindly request fellow passengers, especially the ones who look more mobile and single, to move five rows down, or two cabins away.
All that is just about people, and then comes the huge task of arranging luggage of all these passengers within the little space that the coach affords.
The Indian families travelling long- distance often does not even realize that the Indian Railways ticket does have a luggage limit. I think it is about 40 kilos per ticket, but people carry way more than that, and in the long-distance trains, luggage space is a precious commodity.
There is so much of that negotiation and rearrangement that it takes a couple of hours before everyone settles down. The train might leave from Yeshwantpur and pass Chikballapur before it Settles down, but it does most of the time.
It is only the very rare circumstances where things come to a blow and the Railway Police have to be called in or the train stopped at the nearest railway station and action taken.
We are generally quite willing to do all that for a train journey, but we don’t settle into relationships that easily, and certainly not when there are so many people involved in the everyday life of the relationship.
Is it because relationships are a lot more intimate, or could it be that the difference between knowing that we have to endure the strangers for not more than 3 to 4 days that makes us more tolerant? Train journeys can be a bed of stories, but relationships are much more precious than a journey, and the adjustments and negotiations are not easily achieved.
The author is a counsellor with InnerSight.