Train, Charger and My Neend...

I am quite capable of “creating adventures”…mistakes that increase the blood pressure of the individual(s) involved in the incident…but I must admit I haven’t created one like this in quite some time!

I’d gone home for a day…naturally, I didn’t carry any luggage with me…had only a small poly bag containing some snacks which my mum had prepared for me and my Sony Cybershot charger. I was as it is afraid of falling off to sleep coz then who’d wake me up!? (Those who live near my room can very well vouch for Mother Sleep’s aashirvaad on me!)…To add to it, my phone was surviving on a single picket fence indicator of the battery…there was no way in hell that phone was going to last 4 hrs!

Anyways, I reached outside my carriage, and what do I see – my seat has been allotted to someone else! And none other than a Prof. at the college! Duh! DUH!!

My seat had been shifted to the next compartment…oh what the hell! I have a confirmed seat anyways na…chalta hai, I thought…So I go there and plop myself on the seat, happy to ignore the family that was occupying the rest of the compartment…empathizing now with those who have bear the cacophony of “family masti” [:-P] – when one of the gentlemen there stands up and asks me politely, “Bhai Sahab, can you please shift to 16 no. ki berth…it’s a side lower…so that we all can stay together…”

“Okay, no problem”, was my sleepy reply. That’ll save me of some noise anyways.

“Thank you so much!”, Uncle, Aunty and a small kid in unison!...I haven’t felt so unwanted in quite some time!

So…yours truly shifts to the side lower and falls off to sleep instantaneously, only to be awakened after some 5 odd minutes by a guy who claims it is his seat! The TTE also supports him and explains that all the seats have been renumbered….so now I have to sleep on the side upper berth instead! Grrr… [This added to my tension – if I was on a lower berth, I could have seen the station name….but now??] I went up, thinking that it would be impolite to create a ruckus at this hour for getting my original berth back…

I fell asleep instantly, keeping my phone right under my ear (now you know how I sleep! ;-D). Beep, Beep, Beep! The phone goes dark after some time…I wake up to see we’ve just crossed KGP and my phone’s died! Damn!! Now what should I do? Clearly, I can’t go back to sleep now…so I just stay awake, staring at the train ceiling two feet above me with drooping eyes…

I realized it’s not working, so got down from the berth for a short walk around the carriage…came back in 5 minutes and lied down again…

Oh Shucks!!!! My bag! Uh oh! My charger!#! Somebody had stolen my bag while I was away (obviously ‘twas not the snacks, but the charger!!)…what should I do? What should I do? What could I do!? Nothing...and that’s what I did after racking my brains for some time…

I kept scolding myself for this stupidity – Shucks! I should have suspected something like this would happen…with my kind of sleeping habits, it was a miracle nobody stole me!...I should have been more careful…arre, how difficult was it to stay awake…or…did someone steal it while I taking the short walk…even then, why did I have to take the walk sans the bag!?...shit yaar…!

But I realized it wasn’t helping things…couldn’t do anything about it, right…so I was lying down…looking at people blissfully snoring away…’twas quite interesting, the various ways in which people snore… ;)

I got down again, in the foolish hope that the thief might have wanted only the food and may have thrown the charger somewhere…obviously nothing turned out of this exercise…so I got up again and was just (trying to) sitting…looking around…

I looked at the side upper berth adjacent to my berth, just to check what kind of sample was sleeping there…when I saw a white poly bag there! My Bag!! Yoo Hoo!! Wow! I noticed I had broken into a wide grin…I chuckled…Tee Hee…and I was like, what kind of an idiotic thief that was!! He must have thought that I was sound asleep and kept the bag there…must have gone to steal some more booty…

…and like a flash of lightening it struck me… each compartment has 9 berths…My seat number was 18…that’s the second compartment in the carriage…and I was in –OMG! – The first compartment!! That’s seat number 9!

Kicked myself in the mind like a zillion times…damn! Damn!! DAMN!!!...what the…how the hell…damn it! Bloody Hell! I had actually got up on the wrong seat and thought all this while what a stupid mistake I had made by carrying only a poly bag…when all this while it was lying safe and sound there with no one bothered to see it even!

I can’t tell you how relieved I was...and how stupid I felt! But as they say, all’s well that ends well…was feeling damn happy that I had got my charger back…celebrated it by sleeping soundly for the next half an hour! [:-D]