Train to Madras
Before all this corona and lockdowns, I used to go to Thrissur about once a month during the weekends. I prefer the Alapuzha express whose departure and arrival follows the circadian rhythm of human beings unlike some other trains which seem to share a lineage with the Vampires, dropping us at 2 or 3 in the morning. I would spend the weekend at Thrissur and come back to Madras on the same train.
I am used to waking up at 7 in the morning with no alarms. It’s the circadian rhythm you might assume. But my body probably trying to rebel with nature, chose it’s Modus Operandi to be the bowel movement cycle. Is it better than an actual alarm, I can’t say. But it’s certainly stricter with no “snooze” option available.
One weekend, the Alapuzha express reached Chennai at 6 in the morning and the cleaner woke me up when all the passengers had left. I remember reading something in ‘Thinking fast and slow’ where the author mentions that smiling is a causal effect of being happy. But you can trick your brain into being happy by just smiling. My bowels got tricked when I woke up at 6 too. “Living on the edge” is how I would describe my state of being at that moment.
I went to the toilet in the compartment. These were the days when most trains weren’t yet fitted with a bio toilet. I had a strong moral code to not do it on a standing train, added to that I also didn’t want some stranger in the platform to know that I had Biriyani for lunch the previous day.
I dropped my luggage in the waiting area and ran to the public toilet in the station. I thought I was the only one suffering from this issue, but it seemed to be a national issue. There were some 14 members standing in the queue already. I lost all hope. Any other queue, you could have asked the person in the front to show some sympathy because you had some urgent business. But everyone in this queue were already attending to their urgent business. I called upon all the gods to give me strength, for this was a battle akin to 300 Spartans trying to hold off a million Persians.
I noticed something special in the public toilet in the central station, there were two toilets and about 8 bathrooms. I want to know who is this OCD fellow who takes bath in a railway station. Or is it for people who soiled themselves due to the lack of availability of a toilet, only the station master can tell.
Probably due to some past lives’ karma points, I held the fort till my turn arrived. I was also silently praying for an Indian style toilet over a western one. As soon as I entered the toilet, whatever was trying to push its way out went right back in. I had wished for an Indian style toilet because the toilet seats are usually not so hygienic in a public place, but what I didn’t expect was the authorities removing the toilet seat altogether. I looked around, there was no place to hang my clothes either. I did what any resourceful person would do, I held the clothes in my underarm and put myself in a semi seated position trying to distance myself as much as I can from the commode. Thanks to my paying attention to the physics class in school, I was solving the equation for projectile motion standing in that semi seated position.
After the successful accomplishment of the task, I came out of the toilet and bid the other members of the queue a big goodbye, for we had been waiting there for so long that we had become thick friends.
If you read till here, you can also checkout this video