Mumbai local

My friend who lives in Mumbai travels by train everyday to office and back. Suburban trains connecting metro cities like Mumbai and Kolkata are the city’s lifeline. During peak hours they are packed with passengers who have just enough breathing space left around them. Travelling in such trains can be nightmarish for the uninitiated. My friend is a hardcore Mumbaikar and quite used to the hectic pace of the city. On one such typical day he reached office to discover that the office bag he was carrying was not his. He was quite distraught .But not to worry .He received a call soon after this discovery .The owner of the bag had called .A fellow traveller he had inadvertently picked up my friend’s bag and got down in a hurry. Obviously my friend had done the same .So the two men met over coffee, exchanged bags and became friends.


The other incident involves a colleague of mine who was travelling in a Mumbai local with the good intention of seeing his daughter. A Gujarati based in Kolkata my colleague’s daughter was married to a young man working in Mumbai and settled there. My colleague was carrying two boxes of Kolkata’s famed Rassagolla sweets with him. He had boarded one train after several misses .Frustrated he had seen one crowded train after another pass by. Eventually someone had pushed him from behind and he found himself hoisted on the train. At one point he felt his feet were dangling in the air and had not found the ground. It might have been a notion but for seconds he had experienced space walking. Anyway the next challenge was to find space for the two sweet boxes. These were canned sweets packed in small metal containers. The train had no space for these containers. Inside the compartment my colleague was finding it difficult to breathe .At each station the embarking and disembarking crowd created waves in the sea of humanity. My colleague lost balance every time this happened. A tall lanky fellow standing next to him took pity on him and offered to hold the containers for him. My colleague reluctantly agreed .The young man was obviously a seasoned traveller .He immediately held the containers above his head and remained stationed like this till the crowd thinned a bit and my friend found some space to stand comfortably. He thanked the man for his kind deed and continued the onward journey regaining control over the much prized sweet boxes.