It's always the food that gets to you first. Not the
constant shaking or the crazy passengers or the faintly persistent smell of
disinfectant mixed with urine he smelled for every journey in the past 15 years. Which was an ironic combination of things, he
mused to himself. Like earmuffs and heavy metal, or Arnab Goswami and
“moderator”. These weren’t stellar examples of ironic combinations of course,
but you couldn’t expect creative spontaneity from a ticket conductor on the
Indian railways.
Ravi Singh Buti, or as his friends called him, Ravi Singh
Buti, was just another jaded employee of the government of India. It seemed
like he had slept all through his life. As a student, he remembered being woken
up to laughter in the class many times, as teachers kept asking the people next
to him to “shake that Buti”. He was always the butt of all jokes. I’ve run out
of ass jokes to crack. Ok NOW I’ve run out of puns, so let’s get on with the
story.
Ravi was going on a
harmless, and by now quite a routine, trip. The train was going from Karnataka
to Jammu and Kashmir. More specifically, from Bangalore to Srinagar. From the
city with lots of bars, to one where there were lots behind bars. It would take almost two days to make the
journey, and Ravi wanted to catch up on his reading. He was at that point
devotedly reading a self-help book by Dale Carnegie titled “How to not let
self-help books rule your life”.
What Ravi didn’t know was the fact that he was dangerously
close to going completely insane. Anything at that point could have triggered
off a chain reaction which would cause him to be crazier than a tipsy Sonia
Gandhi on ladies night. The last time that happened the country was given Rahul
Gandhi. In this version of events, that chain reaction started much later,
after a series of events much more important to the narrative.
It was that time in the journey when he was supposed to go
check the tickets of the passengers on the train. This was probably the most
active part of the job, the part he found both tiring and tedious. He had
probably met all kinds of people over the years. Young, old, angry, calm and
constipated or a combination of those, among others. He found that he always
had a choice to make regarding how he dealt with people. Either with patience
and calm or with irritability and anger, a decision made mostly based on his
mood. After getting about halfway through his compartment, he found he had a rather
strange decision to make, for he could not decide how to approach the next
passenger. More specifically, he could not choose a head among the two to talk
to. He never had seen a person with two heads before and that’s when his day
started getting really strange.
