MISSION IMPOSSIBLE ON RAILS

Humour in Uniform

The travel tales of Phulana Singh, our genial senior officer who always found pretty females for company whenever he travelled, often made popular topic for parody among us young-officer lot of the Regiment. Nevertheless, guffawed at and forgotten though, those tales did wet our romantic appetite and secretly everyone aspired to live one of his juicy exploits. I was exceptionally unlucky on this score, mostly having some fellow fauji-s or weary old couples for company. And I travelled a lot too, from Kerala to Kashmir and Punjab to Northeast, but never the speck of a female, except once of course, when I had not just one, three of them crowding my compartment of four.

And all of them were young and pretty as well, officers of the Military Nursing Service. They were happy chatting amongst themselves, except for the pleasantries exchanged with me at the beginning of the journey, leaving me to sulk at one corner over my bad luck. A tongue-tied character I was though in feminine company, I might have stood at least minimal chance to break ice, if it was only one, three was overwhelming women-power. Little did I know however, that I was headed for a near disaster with the trio.

Unlike now, when train travelers remain cooped up within their AC coaches, glued to their mobiles for hours on end, even during long halts, those days people used to step out almost at every halt, to have a cha or a samosa or whatever the platform vendors offered. So it was that, mighty bored with my lonely saga in the company of the three incessantly chatting females, I stepped off the train around ten in the night or so at a station that I rightly don’t recollect which it was now, might have been Poona or Kalyan or so that fell on a route I frequented. It was mid-winter and a cha was welcome any time. I guess I had overestimated the duration of the halt and noticed the train moving off a tad late. Fortunately, my coach was not far and sprinting up to it and grabbing the door handles, I leapt over to the footboard. The door was closed, so, holding on to the door handle with one hand, I turned the lever of the door lock with the other to open the door. The lever moved but the door did not open to my push.; it was bolted from inside!

I banged on the door a couple of times, which didn’t help. Then it struck me that my compartment was right adjacent to the door. So, I stretched out and banged on the downed, metallic shutter of the closest window. After a couple of bangs, one of my co-passengers rolled up the shutter and peered into the night. I could see her profile, but she couldn’t see me. “Open the door” I shouted, but my voice was drowned in a ruckus her companions were raising to close the shutter. I could make out titbits of their frantic talk, panicking that I was a robber or a maniac. The train was picking up speed and I was precariously perched on the footboard, my hands already freezing with the cold wind. It was an electrified stretch of the rail and it became scarier as concrete posts supporting the powerlines above, loomed out of the dark, one after the other, forcing me to hug the door and hold on for my dear life. It was curtains for me if one of the posts hit me. Young and fairly tough though, I was no superman to do a Tom-Cruise-stunt to extricate myself from the predicament. All I could do was to keep banging the window desperately and beg the three panicked women inside to open the door.

I had overheard them chatting in Malayalam, which was my mother tongue too and had even momentarily contemplated at that time on using it as a ploy to connect, before discarding the idea as too mundane. Now, in my despair, I shouted to them in that language to open up. Either they didn’t hear me because of the howling wind, or they thought it a ploy; there was no response. By now, I was really scared. What a way to die, I despaired. And despair made me angry. Furiously knocking at the window, I gave a delirious shout almost in a drill-square pitch. “I am going to fall off the train and die, and all three of you are going to be bloody well court-martialed for murdering an officer!” That did the trick. They opened the door in a jiffy and I was in. There were profuse apologies and I gruffly responded “It’s not funny!”

The whole episode had actually lasted less than five minutes, but to me it had felt a nightmare far longer. As we all regained the composure and the embarrassment faded, we got talking. It turned out that they were saturated with tales of dacoity on the trains and in the panic of the moment, had not even noticed my absence in the compartment, let alone imagine it was me who was knocking on the window. The sound of ‘court-martial’ probably jolted them to their sense to recognize who I was. It was one hell of a way to break ice; not that the conversation lasted any longer either. It was time to hit the bed and only the goodnights remained. It must have been an overnight journey or either myself or my three companions disembarked early morning, because I do not recollect any sequel to the episode next day. All the same, I too had a travel tale now, even if it didn’t border any romance as Phulana Singhji’s colourful ones did.