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After scanning the entire compartment in hope to get at least a square inch of place to seat I went on to stand in the aisle next to my luggage with a hopeless sigh. I stood at the same place for almost six hours switching between the awkward postures and creating space for passengers running to relieve their unbearable pressure. A loud and disturbing noise of people engaged in animated discussions was continuously bombarding my eardrums. All I can hear was the dialogue mixture of two languages, an unknown Tamil with strange words and known English with strange accent forming an equally strange dialect meant to deliver only at high pitch. With no other better options available to pass that tiresomely long time I started to decode the sentences giving unwelcome visit to my ears. After sometime I found myself consumed in a thought transference process enabling me to read & interpret the thoughts churning in the brain and the expressions overplaying on the faces of my fellow passengers.
A Tamil group consisting of 7 people; two senior citizens, one man and a lady in their late thirties, two adolescent girls and one little boy reading some kind of tale book was present in the compartment along with their massive luggage extended to the every nook and corner of the space below lower berths. In India you can easily establish the relations that people from a group shares with almost full certainty on the basis of their behavioral pattern; their demeanor, pitch of voice of individual, age group, etc… etc. Thus it took not more than a minute for me to perfectly guess that a family of three generations was travelling to Delhi; A Husband-Wife with their parents/in-laws, two daughters and a son.
One thing has drawn my attention when that little boy threw the book he was reading on side table. It was a Comic based on fables from Panchatantra, A legendary collection of short stories composed by Vishnu Sarma to implant moral values into the three dull and ignorant sons of the king. Cover page full with pictures of animals and other characters from different stories was beautifully designed & calligraphed.
A monkey with his long tail trapped into the rift of a log as he tugged off the fixed wedge out of curiosity............ The lion looking into the deep well and mistaking his own reflection in the water for the big lion........... The hunter following the flight of the doves trapped into the net......... A Brahmin carrying a lamb on his shoulders and being duped by three Thugs ......... A monkey riding on the back of crocodile in a lake unaware of the crooked plan of latter to cleave off his heart for his wife.......
A single look at these pictures took me back to my school days. I could see myself seating in the Vth standard class room and our teacher narrating these same stories with moral at the end of each story…. (To be continued)
