2days/3nights Stay!!!

2day/3nights stay, not in Taj or Oberoi or any deluxe hotels but in a train from Bangalore to Guwahati . Checked in with my bag and baggage at around 10:45pm on 14th Dec. to find that all my neighbors,infact almost everyone having paid the rent for the stay was Assamese. The signal goes green and the everyone after arranging their luggage and chattering with their mates gets prepared to go to their bed. Lights off and people are snoring, college students chatting but no adavantage of overhearing them. Why the hell no Non-Assamese going to Guwahati except me??

Wake up call by the chai-wallah, coffee-wallah, newspaper-wallah and you have to leave your nice, comfortable bed and freshen up yourself to start a new and exciting day ahead. Now people start getting familiar with other fellow travellers and getting excited to find someone from their own locality or college. It seemed to me that Guwahati is a very small place. You may be wondering how could I understand Assamese. I catched the english words and some words similar to Bengali in their conversation. and May be by the end of my stay, I would be able to understand Assamese too. 🙂 .Seems not very much difficult.

Now let me make you familiar with my 7 neighbours – A one-year old married couple , a boy and a girl who seemed to me as a couple initially who had just started with their professional life like me(the girl looked to be very stubborn but turned out to be a nice gal), two college guys and a mast chinki gal. They having a nice talk with each other with almost everyone discussing on the most common topics – food, traffic, IT life, hang-out places in Bangalore and taking notice of me that I was trying to make out what they were talking about. Me being too reluctant in getting into the discussion and making their tongue switch from the Assamese to Hindi/English, the married couple took the initiative to include me into the gang. Exchanged some basic information about each other – profession, college, family history, staying place and all one could talk about oneself. The couple had brought nice home food – puri and pickles. Delicious!!!!!

Spent the first day chatting with each other on all topics – from daily life issues to elections in Gujarat to disturbance in Guwahati to situation in Pakistan. The college guys having fun in between flirting with the chinki with we having fun pulling their legs. It didn’t seem as if we didn’t know each other. Sometimes they would start talking in Assamese and realizing that even I was there, they would switch to Hindi. Didn’t realize how time passed and it was time to go off to sleep. Wishing goodnight we were off to our bed with the temperature getting lower as our moving lodge was approaching north.

The morning was a foggy one with we having reached West Bengal. All of us were waiting for home made food which the couple’s relatives were planning to bring for them at Kolkatta station. So we had biryaani, pulao, puri, rasogulla, samosa in breakfast and lunch. After having a nice lunch, we made our small staying place a theater with a guys laptop playing a documentary movie “Riding Solo to the Top of the World”. It was a nice film about the solo motorcycle journey of the filmmaker to Ladakh with he himself as the cameraman. Actually the couple had plans of going on a bike trip to Arunachal Pradesh for 10 days. Feels so exciting and adventurous.

It seems as if people find their journey to be incomplete without antakshari. So finally we also planned to play but it was mostly dominated by Assamese songs. My neighbors now treated me like a foreigner. They told me about Assamese culture, food, scenery,hang out places in Guwahati. They were so happy to tell about their place to someone. They also sang some nice Bihu songs for me. I couldn’t understand the words but still I could enjoy the music and recorded some of them. It was already very late but seemed that none of us wanted to go to sleep and even the couples’ stoppage was at 4am. So we planned to play card games. I had never played card games but I learned one game(Can’t remember the name). It seemed we had become good friends – exchanged our contact numbers promising to be in contact and meet on reaching back to Bangalore. Can’t believe I was on a night-out for people who were strangers two days ago. As everyone’s stoppage came we bid goodbye. All were so much concerned for me, as I had come to Guwahati alone and also for the first time and when situation there was not good, that they even called me up the next day to confirm that I had reached safely to my destination.

It was totally a nice and a new experience for me. First time enjoyed my train journey so much. Was looking forward to have same experience like this on my return journey but all in vain. Seems some experiences occur only once. Signing off with some nice memories. Hoping to be in contact with my train friends.