Co-passengers in a small world (1)

I wanted to write about a couple of incidents that happened during the same day during my weekly travel from Chennai to Bangalore. 

I had boarded the 5pm Vande Bharat at Chennai Central about 5 minutes to departure. On reaching my window seat, I found a very young gentleman of about 7 years in the aisle seat. He was travelling with his mom and baby brother (1.5 years) who were seated on the row beyond the walkway. He was very cool and wasn’t too interested in my offers to help when they were serving hot water to go with the premix tea. I was a bit surprised when he said he liked Masala tea, and when I dug a little more, he revealed that he never gets tea at home, so he liked whatever he got on the train!

The next 4 hours or so, I could see the constant activities of this family, with the mother juggling the interests and energies of her two children. She asked to swap my seat with hers, so that all 3 of them could fit into 2 seats and it may be easier to manage. The youngest decided to go for a walk and the brother accompanied him and the mother had to go behind them all the time. 

I tried to read a book, but the bustling activity in my row was hard to ignore. As a father of 3 sons, the ‘ants in the pants’ nature of those young boys was very familiar to me and their little adventures and conversations were just delightful. Their mother was quite resourceful and had planned ahead, with paper and colouring pens and kept them engaged. 

She was so busy with just managing their activities, that I didn’t get introduced to her or learnt anything about her life or career, though I easily learnt the boys names and they were called a few dozen times during the journey. I usually get introduced to those co-passengers who are willing to look beyond their smartphones and happy to converse and learn quite a bit about their background or industry or field of study, but this time I didn’t bother asking.

Since she was travelling alone with them and a few pieces of luggage and a large suitcase, I offered to help when the train were to stop in KRPuram for 5 minutes. Her husband had been waiting for them at the station and I just waived ‘bye’ after arranging the luggage in the platform and walked off without any further ado, just remembering the antics of those boys.

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Three days later, during lunch break in my office, I happened to see the same lady walking down the stairs. She recognised me too and on enquiring, we realised that both of us work for the same company, in a site with about 1000 employees! It was a remarkable coincidence that we met on the train and just didn’t manage to exchange the industry or company name in a few hours of limited interaction. It’s a small world indeed!