Night-out

First Sunday of the year, I was standing amongst hundreds of people waiting for a chance grab a seat in any of the Mumbai bound bus at Pune station. After a prolonged waiting period, I somehow managed to get into one of Igatpuri bound bus which had a halt below the Vashi flyover. Now, this bus dropped me near the Vashi flyover at 2 in the night and I was the only one to alight there.

Late for the last local, too early for the first one and apart from the fast speeding cars, I couldn’t see a single person around. I started walking towards the railway station. The Green Day song lyrics that I was listening to made perfect sense…’I walk a lonely road…….’ Nobody in sight till the station arrived. As the station was nearing, I could see around 5 people sleeping next to the closed ticket window. I printed an electronic ticket and was about to enter the platform where one of the security guards prevented me from going in for safety reasons. So, I had to wait staring at the indicator saying 4:00 ST and next to it, the time 2:14.

Instead of staying put, I decided to roam around the place a bit. Outside one of the call centre office, I saw a chaiwala cum omlet-wala. I thought it would be a good idea to converse with him over a cup of tea and omlet. New year has not started on a brighter note for him as most of the BPO employees are on holidays and his business has gone down from 500 cups of tea a night to 50 cups, most customers being mall cleaners. I consolidate him saying his business will prosper soon, not knowing that soon would be too soon!!!

There was a group of around 100 students around my age, walking towards the Vashi station, some of them stopped for having tea. They seemed very friendly; one of them asked me what I was doing alone at this part of the night. He said that they are a group of last year B-com students from Shillong who were on a 3 city trip of Mumbai, Goa and Kolkata and were waiting to go to CST to board the early morning train for Kolkata.

Pretty soon, I found myself talking to many students from the group. They were talking about their trip experiences, the places they saw, the culture difference, the good things the bad things et al. I felt like being a part of the group. I asked them a lot about Manipur, about the North East and they were eagerly telling me about the places to visit, food to eat, ways to travel and lot more. They say Shillong is as safe as Mumbai, if you travel at the right time of the day and that the people considering North-East unsafe is to a great extend untrue.

The topics shifted to songs. After a while, we were singing famous Hindi and English somgs together, out loud. Variety of range from Bryan Adams to Sunidhi Chauhan. It’s 3 in the night, I’m surrounded by 30 unknown people in the wide open space outside Vashi station singing songs and having a good discussion. When does life ever give you such wonderful experience? I had 2 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours, but the songs and the discussion kept me wide awake.

I asked them did you like Mumbai. ‘Fantastic place!’ came the uniform answer. However, they had some minus points as well. They said that people see us as foreigners wherever we go. They are considered more Chinese or Nepali rather than Indian. They are cheated moneywise while paying for the auto fare etc. ‘Why should we be treated as foreigners in our own country’, said one of them. Many of the girls experienced eve-teasing a lot more in Mumbai compared to North-East.

These students were quite different. Normally when you are in a group, you almost never talk to the people outside, but they never made me feel like an outsider, I felt like being one amongst them. They were the people who cared more about the result of confederation cup final between Shillong and Mohun Bagan than Leeds vs United. How quickly time passed and we boarded the first train. On the train, they gave me another reason to visit Shillong. They say they have a student group in their college who arrange jungle trails in Meghalaya. Do visit, it would be the nicest trip of your life, one of them said.

‘One day surely’, I said.