“A journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step” - Chinese proverb

Our journey started with one person missing the train!

Maya, Susa and I were going to catch the Udayan Express to Mumbai at 8:10 on the 17th.  Despite being warned to leave home by 6:45, I was finally out at 7:10. I caught a public bus, thinking it doesn’t really matter what mode of transport you use in Bangalore anymore. I got off at Majestic at 7:45, and  had to cross the road to reach the railway station. The subway was closed so I thought I’d find a gap in the fence and cross over. After a bit of increasingly frantic walking , I found that for two hundred metres on either side there was a  double fence topped with barbed wire!

By now it was 7:55. I had absolutely no intention of flying to Mumbai the next day.

I managed to find an auto driver who took me right round to the opposite side. Bangalore must be the only city in the world where it costs twenty bucks to cross the road!

Our train was on platform one, and our bogie near the entrance. It’s eight and the first thing Maya says, “I thought you two weren’t coming. Maybe this whole thing was a scam.”

Ahem.

Susa still hadn’t reached. He was stuck in the traffic, and what was more important, he was the  one with the tickets. At eight ten the train started chugging out of the station, and Susa happened to be at the gate. “Catch an auto and rush to the  Cantonment station”, we tell him. We didn’t think  he’d  make it.

We were right. And we had no tickets.

In case you’re wondering, we didn’t yell at  Susa. I guess there was no point!

Maya told me we’d probably have to pay the price of the ticket as well as a five hundred rupee fine. That would be around eight hundred bucks!

Fortunately we only had to pay fifty rupees each after showing the TT our ID cards.

Our journey to Mumbai was uneventful, because we were both fast asleep for most of the trip.  Rashmi joined us at Poona, and promptly fell asleep too. In between my long dozes, I managed to finish Adam’s Navel – by Michael Sims, a book on the cultural and evolutionary history of different parts of the body. Yup, even those parts.

We reached Bombay about an hour late. The city is alive! Rashmi and I got off at Dadar to go to Mumbai Central and Maya headed off to her hostel from where she’d meet us at the station. Susa had flown down and was waiting for us at the Mumbai Central station.

We caught a cab and got chatting with the driver. A*** K**** (Rashmi thinks we should have taken his permission before quoting him. I wonder if his parents might be following our road trip?) from Kanpur. He’d come to Mumbai five years previously and was working in a garage. He was as old as us, and wasn’t married. There was a girl back home he wanted to marry but his parents were looking for someone else. Same story everywhere.

Rashmi and I picked him up and went to my Aunts place nearby. It was at least 8 years since I’d last come to this part of Bombay, and everything looked different. We had a quick shower and my uncle and aunt fed us up to our throats.

We met Maya at the Mumbai Central station. The ladies rushed off for a quick shopping trip and then we boarded our next train, the Rajdhani to Delhi.