THE TICKET
There is a train for every ten minutes along the Beach-Tambaram route, Electric train. Being an electrical engineer, I know nothing about an electric
train ,but that is not the subject of this story.
A friend of mine, a very clever chap, used to recite all the fifteen stations in the route, as if it were a nursery rhyme. For a once in a blue moon commuter, it’s a tough ask to recite all the fifteen look-alike stations.
In the late evenings, when people working in the polluted part (they call it heart) of the city travel back to their spacious homes in the suburbs, the windows would be closed, not by shutters but by men and women sticking to the walls of the train.
It is exactly at this time Mrs. Susheela Raman fights her way back to her house at Nungambakkam and sometimes to her mother’s house at Mamabalam.(One would definitely feel bored with the same opponent everyday, it’s human nature to seek new challenges now and then. Once in a while Mrs.Susheela prefers her sister-in-law to her mother-in- law)
She’s a poor observer and a competent fighter. It’s unnecessary to describe her, step into the next train, you are bound to find a lady of such disposition with an ease of lifting a feather dumb-bell.
Every time she buys a ticket at the counter, her ticket would be up to the last station, Tambaram. (Don’t ask me why she did not take a pass! How can I carry on a story if you ask such troubling questions?, May be she liked the guy at the ticket counter.)
Depending upon her frame of mind, she would decide on her adversary; her mother-in-law or sister-in-law. I’m not going into their fights for glory; any soap on any channel can fulfill such a wish, keep some dry towel ready…
On a gloomy day, a respectable young man sat beside her, and the next day too. He was curious to know about her ticket, “If it’s five rupees a day, then twenty five rupees a week, a hundred rupees per month and twelve hundred a year.” he reflected. “She’s wasting quite a lot of money”, he told himself.
Everyday he would sit beside her, looking for a chance to ask his doubt in a courteous way. She would never look up, not that she was very tall or headstrong. Nobody knew the reason.That is how some people are. They wouldn’t learn unless they bump into a peaceful wall and grow a lump on their forehead,like the hump of a camel. That would occasionally remind them to look up.
Finally the young man gathered enough courage and asked her,
“Why do you reserve the ticket up to the last station? I’ve never seen you at
Tambaram!”
She smiled at him; she didn’t have to look up to the sky, for the young man wasn’t taller than her,and said:
“You know, I’ve very poor memory.”
“What does poor memory got with spending a hundred rupees every month?” he thought to himself and shook his head.
She continued “I’m very careful these days, these stations look so similar that I often forget to get down at where I‘d actually to. The other day a ticket collector charged me a hundred for getting down at Mambalam.”
“Why?” he uttered unconsciously.
“I’d my ticket only up to Nungabakkam, It’s a just a distance of five kilometers distance to Mambalam.”
“Do you mean a fine?” he asked with a feeling of why did I ever meet this creature.
“Exactly!” she said cheerfully.
She walked down the corridor of the train, perhaps to get down at the station. It was a crowded day, as it has always been, and he stood on his toes to verify the station. She’d already crossed Mambalam and this was Guindy.
