Shatabadi Express

SHATABADI- CHENNAI
My day began when I remembered that I lost my sleep, a little too early with my cell screaming for help for direction, only to realize that it was the cab driver who lost his way to my home.

@ 4.00am Saar!! Yelide nim mane? (Sir, where is your house?) it resonated and I almost jumped off my bed and stooped from the balcony making dumb hand signals, talking to him, as though he could see the directions I gave, to take the rights and the lefts and ignore the lanes and jump the by-lanes to reach my home.

It was just 4.30am, sharks! I had to leave by five*@#*there I go doing the fast-forward, the first things the last and the last things, ophs! I did.

@ 5.00am the cell goes screaming again!!

Cab driver: Saar!!
Me: yen aithu? (What happened?)
Cab driver: Saar!! Innu kaithaidini (Sir, I am still waiting)
Me: howdah yenu? (Is that so?)

Finding my mocking ignorance, the cab driver would have wished to rinse me up like a cloth and use it to clean the dirtiest part of his car. As I got into the cab I sheepishly grinned at him and said a timid sorry hoping that he drives me safely to the railway station in the wee hours of the day.

On the way I were to pick SU’ (my friend and colleague) from an isolated Bus Stand near Isolation Hospital on old madras road and when he saw me, he was struck in disbelief to find me once on time.

@5:50 we were at the railway station and in no time we were on our push back seats; for a moment I thought that this was the journey I day-dreamed for quite some time, not for the destination but for the journey in SHATABADI.

I heard from my friends “the WOW “of travelling in this train and I experienced for once the way railways treated us, so privileged and so much so we were waked for biscuits with coffee and then the breakfast, uppit (Indian concrete) vada (Indian doughnuts) bread butter and jam and finally fruit juice.
Amidst the tranquility of comfort, I saw a man diagonally opposite to me gobbling something that appeared like chappati (Indian Bread), as I took a closer look I realized he was having an omelet and the hilarious part was he having it with fruit jam.

SU and me were never fortunate to find good travel companions when we travelled, a guy beside me from HP was rattling on his laptop and was making frantic calls for being denied of a cab to pick him up from Chennai railway station.

By 11.30 we reached Chennai, it was sultry. We soon found a government fixed rate auto and had to travel another 20 more kilometers to the hotel where we had the software demo.

Our demo from 12 lasted for a while and we hopped into a Madurai anjappar restaurant had an elaborate meal; soon we were ready to leave Chennai by 3.30 lalbagh express.

The Train was in time and was similar AC chair car but was not as good as our onward journey. As always we never got lucky. In fact a young lady wanted to occupy her seat which was beside SU, This time SU was very stern he didn’t want her to sit beside him, so we requested her to go and sit with another guy.

After a while we found her celebrating food starting with parupu vada (an indianite pulse patty) following a bread omelet and her trip went on, while the guy beside her suffered the most, we found him almost sunk into his chair and it appeared he was snorkeling to breath in intervals until we reached Bangalore.

Well all said and done the onward journey through Shatabadi was truly a memorable one.