What do you call a person, whom you have seen only once in your life, who talked to you continuously for 3 hours and rescued you from the boredom of a train journey? Well that is what Ajay is to me :)
We met at a railway station. That railway station, as per my friends’ description, is owned by my father, so that his only daughter can come home safely from college. The platform was so small that it could accommodate a max of 3 or 4 bogies. Two tickets for Thiruvananthapuram express were reserved for this station. Since these tickets were the quota of the station and not available online, it was always easy for me to get a ticket. I was the first point of contact for most of my batch mates when an urgent need for ticket to capital city arises.
Usually the other ticket holder will be a govt official travelling to capital city for some official errands. There is a crucial shortage for young and charming guys in our village. So I never kept great expectations about my fellow traveler. That day when I saw Ajay (I dint know his name then) at the station I was a bit surprised. He was standing behind his father, a tall lean guy. He was the type who didn’t care much about his dressing. My father started “panchayath” with his father, and I continued watching him (of course not directly). From his shyness I concluded that he must be a first year. I had heard his father announcing earlier that he is into Barton Hill Engg College.
Finally train came and we started our journey. We found our places, kept the baggage and sat down. The moment he opened his mouth to ask my name, I knew that he had left his shyness along with his father, in the station. As usual with my prejudices, most of my prejudices about him were wrong. He was a second year like me and he was much more talkative than I thought. He told me about his project. Being the tech savvy I am, technical stuff flew above my head. But the clarity and precision in his voice told me that he is a brainy.
He was a simple guy.
"I miss my childhood friends. After I joined B tech it has been difficult to keep contact with them. It's not that we don't meet, but somehow now they are treating me in a different way. For them engineering is a big deal and I don't know how to make them comfortable"
It was nice listening to him. He was not a good orator. But the honesty in his voice was pleasant. Then he started his Picnic story
"Last year we went to Coorg from college. It would have been a wonderful trip if two people didn’t die."
"Two people died?" Disbelief was evident in my voice.
"It was our yearly tour. Actually as a class it was our first trip together. We were about 40 people. Everything was heavenly until we reached the water falls. It dint look much flooded or dangerous. So we were not much bothered. One girl in her over enthusiasm slipped and fell down. A guy caught hold of her and pulled her up. But in the process he lost balance, and fell. He tried to catch hold of one more person and they both fell to the depths of water. We couldn’t do anything other than watching them sinking into the deep water. All girls started crying hysterically. People came from near by houses. They alerted police. Some special squad came and took out the bodies."
I felt sick. "Horrible…"
But his voice was calm. There was no other emotion in his words other than the amusement of telling an interesting story.
"Didn't you feel sad?" I asked slowly
"Why should I feel sad? They were not close friends of mine. It was slightly frightening when we had to carry the dead bodies in our bus itself till town. There were no other vehicles available. You don't feel so good while travelling with two corpses. But yes, the girls were unbearably emotional. Especially the one who was helped out of water. She became hysteric and made a scene. Don't know why girls act so much. They were alright and back to normal with in a week. But we couldn't forget it for a long time"
The feminist in me kept quiet. But it was a horrible story, told in a very clumsy way. A chill crept through my spine when I tried to imagine two dead bodies along with a picnic party. He was happy that his story produced such an effect in me. We talked about other things as well – he about his college, his friends, me about mine. Other passengers were bored with our continuous chatter. They needed some sleep. So we decided it was time to put a full stop to our conversation. He climbed to his upper berth and started having dinner.
We reached Trivandrum around 5 am. We took the same bus. Before getting down near his house, he asked for my contact number. Instead of giving him my hostel number (those days mobiles were rare and I didn't have one) I took his house number (they were four or five boys staying in a house) with a promise that I will surely call him. I scribbled the number in my memory, remembered it for around four months and then it got washed away along with semester exam “mug up and forget” routine. After that I have never seen him. I have never tried to find him in orkut or facebook. But never forgot him as well :D
