That Local

It was June of 2006. The Ship Designing training at Vasco just got over and I was on my way to Mumbai to meet a friend before bidding farewell to western India. The Night Bus from Panjim hit Mumbai at Dawn. The first sight of Mumbai reminded me of the first chapter of ‘Great Expectations’ where Charles Dickens described the graveyard with tombstones peeping out above the mist in the marsh…. So was Mumbai…marshy mist with skyscrapers peeping out of it. The Dawn was calm, so calm that I hardly recalled that there’s a phrase called ‘calm before the storm’.

I alighted at Dadar, for the mission ‘To catch The Local to Andheri’.
A 15 min walk with two huge travel bags; which contained my survival kit and the goodies that I collected during the 45 days holiday-cum-training in Goa; I reached the Dadar Station.
Straight I went to the ticket counter and got ‘The Ticket’ to Andheri! Hurray! Half the task done.
Then I dragged myself off with my survival kits to the Platform number ‘3’ and waited for ‘The Local’.
And there ‘The Local’ came!

One, Two, Three…. Four thud! The 5th guy coming out of the bogie (I guess it’s originated from word ‘bogey’) pushed the 4th who landed face-down on the platform!
I got goose bumps , this gonna be thrilling, I gonna see a big fight in Mumbai style, that I saw only in movies! Come on 4th guy, show the 5th what you got!
Alas! The 4th got up and went straight without even glancing the 5th.
Only loser in the whole crowd was me, who missed ‘The Local’ expecting the drama which never unfolded. Time to wait for the next one…err…next train not drama.

In 5 mins the next one hit platform ‘3’ and I bravely jumped in with the two huge survival kits. Ah, what a relief!
‘The Local’ moved on, its rhythm was somniferous and slowly I was lost in the fantasies of Goa.
But soon the anxiety of the small frog out in the sea startled me out of my memorabilia.
I asked one of my co…. shall I call ‘co-passenger’? Will that term not be demeaning the stature of the local-train commuter?
Lemme take the pleasure to use the term ‘co-local-train-space-filler’…. So I asked one of my co-local-train-space-filler, how long will it take to reach Andheri?
And pat came the reply “This Train Doesn’t go Andheri”.
I gaped at him for some moment and before that moment turned into infinity, I had got infinite instructions by my co-local-train-space-fillers that could be collaged as “101 Effective, Quick and Easy ways to reach Andheri”.
The only thing I concluded was that I gotta get down the next time the Bogey stops; my ‘The Local’ had suddenly become ‘That Local’
And so I did, and rushed back into ‘Yet Another That Local’ which took me to Dadar….some things wrong with this name…. does it rhythm with ‘dread’….even if it doesn’t, it makes me feel dreadful.

Getting down at Dreader I referred back to “101 Effective, Quick and Easy ways to reach Andheri” and that guided me to another platform ‘3’… not the one I was standing on.
I dialed up Murphy’s cell and he confirmed that his law “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong” was specially designed for this day. Glad that atleast some guy cared so much about me that he made a law, I moved on to ‘The platform 3’; there was some mention of Central, Western, Eastern and Northern type of platforms but I refrained from taking out my compass because of the incongruity about it among the co-authors of “101 Effective, Quick and Easy ways to reach Andheri”; and finally I got into ‘The Right Local’ at ‘The Right Platform’ with ‘The Right Ticket’ and went to ‘The Right Destination’ taking ‘The Right Pledge’ “Never Again!”.