Three Tiers of a Journey

by Renuka Radhakrishnan

In the confines of an AC coach, the narrator struggles to reconcile herself to sharing a few hours of her life with people who check none of the boxes in the list in her head that lays out what a well-ordered existence looks like. Renuka describes the journey. 

When they boarded the train at Aluva, they brought a great deal of noise with them. Not to mention a hundred and one pieces of baggage, which were lined up along the passage of the AC coach, all the way from my side window seat to the glass door and beyond. Noise and excess baggage. Two things that featured on my “least favourite” list. Besides, the suitcases and bags stacked near the toilet doors effectively cut off access to them. ‘What if I have to pee?’ I thought peevishly.  ‘Do they expect me to hold it in, till all those wretched pieces of baggage find their way to more acceptable nooks and crannies of the AC 3-tier coach?’

There were three men and three women. And from the way they interacted with each other, it was pretty obvious that they were three couples. One of the women held a baby in her arms.

Much of the conversation focused on what was to be done with different pieces of baggage.

‘That red suitcase is Leena’s. It can be stacked on the upper berth along with the bags.’

‘Please don’t stack the large blue bag on the upper berth. It’s got some things I need for the baby on the journey.’

And so on, it went. Back and forth, forth and back, as bags and boxes were hoisted, heaved, squeezed, rolled, even turned over, to make them fit into spaces doled out rather stingily by the Indian Railways. The baby, held rather precariously, it seemed to me, simply slept through it all. Clearly, she had decided she was too young to be caught up in the mess created by the older folks around her.

Irinjalakkuda passed in a blur, as the train rattled on, snootily indifferent to the people who stood around listlessly on the platform. Inside, more suitcases and bags disappeared from the floor. By the time the train crossed Chalakkudy, they had all found suitable corners for the journey. The passageway to the toilets had been cleared. My peevishness subsided, but the aftertaste lingered on my skin.

The menfolk in the group began to take their positions on the seats beside their spouses. The bespectacled, somewhat bemused-looking gentleman, who answered to the name Benji, slid into the seat beside the woman with the baby in her arms, and gave the sleeping baby a once-over. Having reassured himself that the baby the woman held was indeed the right one, he turned to the business of ascertaining whether his wife needed anything. Parenthood seemed a fairly novel experience for the couple and Benji was obviously committed to holding up his end of the parenting rope as efficiently as possible.

The second couple too arranged themselves around Benji’s wife, and seemed ready to chip in with their services, should the mother and baby need anything.

The third couple seemed to have a lot more difficulty in settling down. Now that I had a slightly better sense of the different members of the group, I realized that much of the noise generated by the group was contributed by the third couple. To be fair to the wife, who later told me her name was Elizabeth, Peter, the husband, was the culprit-in-chief. He seemed incapable of keeping his voice and his limb movements within the bounds prescribed by the rules of civility. As soon as he plonked himself on the seat, he began to swing his legs back and forth. Sure enough, he soon rammed a leg into one end of a largish suitcase that jutted out from beneath the berth and gave a yelp of pain. Once the murmurs following this minor accident subsided, he proceeded to peel off his shoes and socks.

I stiffened. The odour of worn socks probably topped the list of things I disliked intensely. And in the shut-in AC coach, the odour simply stretched its limbs, and settled all around our noses, with no signs of dissipating in a hurry. I almost held my nose, but then remembered I was too polite to make my distaste that obvious.   

On the opposite seat, Benji and his wife exchanged knowing glances. The woman from Couple 2 could hardly hold back her titters.

‘Peter, throw those socks out,’ Elizabeth said, looking stricken.

‘But these are perfectly good socks,’ Peter said, rather loudly.

Whereupon, Elizabeth leaned forward and began whispering earnestly into his ears.

After some lengthy whispering by Elizabeth, Peter declared that he was going to have a bath. He fished out a white cotton towel, a soap box, and a shaving kit from an air bag, and strode resolutely towards the washrooms. (How anyone can hope to come out clean after having a bath in one of these train washrooms, beats me.) Elizabeth followed him, but came back soon, with a relieved look on her face. Perhaps she had convinced him to get rid of the offensive socks.

With Peter away, Elizabeth seemed to relax somewhat. She asked me if she could share my side seat for a while and enquired where I was going. I told her I was going to Thalassery but refrained from giving any more details. In my world, we didn’t share personal information readily with strangers.  

For a moment, she looked envious. ‘You’re lucky. You’ll be home by five. We have to go all the way to Kasargod, and then undertake a six-hour bus-ride to reach our house. It’ll be at least two in the night before we get home.’

‘Are you on your way back from a trip, or something?’ I asked.

‘We’ve travelled all the way from Italy, where most of us work.’

I was intrigued. Elizabeth went on to reveal that she and Leena (the wife from Couple 2) worked as nurses in remote towns in Italy. Benji’s wife was lucky. She worked for a hospital in Rome, where her husband worked too.

‘But then, Annie has been there for four years,’ Elizabeth said, wistfully. Apparently, it took time to work your way towards Rome. And to get your husband into the country. And to get him a job in a hospital close to where you worked. Annie had managed all these feats. Leena, who was Annie’s cousin, had so far managed to get her husband into the country on a temporary visa.

Elizabeth was a little behind the others. ‘It’s been only a year since I went there. It’ll take me some more time to be able to get Peter into the country.’

For the next two minutes, she looked out the window of the moving train, in silence, a faraway look in her eyes. Then, she turned to me and said, ‘The problem is, Peter doesn’t want to come. He’s happy with his lumber business in our little village. Even his parents want him to move to Italy. But I’m not sure he’ll ever get around to it. He’s not the type who is comfortable taking up a nursing job.’

Having said it, Elizabeth herself looked a little surprised at what she had just said. And confused. She looked away.

‘Have you picked up any Italian yet?’ I asked, partly to steer the conversation away from Peter’s obduracy, but also because I was intrigued by the thought of this village girl negotiating her way through an alien land, an alien tongue, an alien cuisine.

Elizabeth grinned sheepishly. ‘I can only speak a few words. But picking up the language is just a matter of time. It’s the food that kills me. Sometimes the longing for kappa and meen curry almost makes me physically sick.’ I thought of the exorbitant amounts we forked out whenever we dined at Italiana and felt strangely defensive.

As she finished her sentence, Peter strode back into the compartment. He had jettisoned his trousers, and now sported a white mundu. Elizabeth seemed to run out of things to say to me. An awkward silence followed, which was broken when Peter’s phone jangled loudly.

‘Haalllo,’ he shouted into the contraption. ‘Yes, I’m on my way back da. Tell John and Ravi to come around tomorrow evening. A session at Tony’s is long overdue.’

The conversation then meandered into local gossip. Peter’s face came alive as he caught up with all that had happened in their far-flung village during the two days he had spent travelling to Aluva to pick up his wife from the Nedumbassery International Airport. Benji and his wife smirked in a restrained manner. Leena and her husband smirked more openly. For Peter, though, the rest of us in the compartment may as well have been non-existent. His voice dipped and rose as he drew out every single detail of all that had happened back home during his absence.

‘I hope Elizabeth manages to bundle this man away to distant Italy and turn him into a version of Benji or the husband from Couple 2. Redemption in Rome. Yes, that’s exactly what Peter needs,’ I decided, before going back to Alexander Portnoy’s sordid world.

She made her living from journalism, publishing and eLearning. Then one day, Renuka Radhakrishnan decided she had enough dope on life to shape bits of it into works of fiction. Her first novel, A Marriageable Age, chronicles a Malayalee mother’s frenzy, as she struggles to find a suitable groom for her daughter.