Train of Thoughts

I love traveling in the Second Class- there’s so much air in the compartments…

So once I was on a train (The Tangential Express) to Rajasthan, and I was being exhilarated by the fact that I was standing on a doorway that had no door to contain me, a block of air traversing through my body. I thought- what an opportunity to aerate my cranial hollow, and stuck out so much so that only my palms and feet-fingers were actually inside the massive, hurling lumber of steel; Imagine a horizontally aligned miniature human parachute holding the train in its course.

Air blasted through my left ear, and swept off all of my grievances and misgivings out of my right. My top floor felt aerated. If I stuck both of my pinkies to partially block the left earhole, I could even manage a whistle loud enough to contest with the train’s.

Suddenly, from the corner of my eye, up on a gentle bend, I espied a huge shaft of metal gate on the tracks, which allowed only a few inches of space for the train to shoot through. Wait a minute, I thought- Rajasthan is a hot place- look at all the sand; metals tend to expand, right? The train must be swollen with all the heat; can it really fit through the gate? So I rubbernecked (wincingly) to get a better look…

The train snaked lazily towards the gate, and amazingly shot through the gate. Hurray, I mentally shouted, causing an echo, which was quickly drained out with the air tunnel phenomenon going on inside my head. A classic Doppler effect.

If I hadn’t surfed along this tangent, my amazing experience would have ended right here. For I would have had time to withdraw my chute to the compartment. From where I was, I could see the solid gate hurl towards me in a frightening momentum, and although I managed to get inside up to my neck, I felt more than saw a big thump on my left temple…

My left eye jumped out, but the optic nerve yo-yo’ed it back into my optic hollow- but the pupil was facing inside, noting the amorphous brain sitting sagely inside- I noted a sense of Deja-vu. A loop of optic nerve was now hanging out from my left eye-hole, sort of like a telephone cord holding the receiver in its rightful place…

Staggering with the experience, I propped my body against the wall of the compartment, and hung my left arm limply over the optic loop, and tried to regain the composure. I had shifted my whole weight onto my right leg, which was shaking crazily, threatening to buck. Everybody in the train had a gaped look in their faces. A few passengers started to vomit on each other, and triggered a chain of induced throw-ups all over the compartment. After a while, walls were dripping off dull-colored viscous fluids- I could make out that this lady had chicken sandwich for lunch, while that man had tequila shots the night before. It’s hard not to get the picture…

I looked back at the innocent doorless doorway that had started all this. The air that was now coming in now felt chilly. I felt naked in the audience of annoyed passengers. I pretended that there were some sand grains in my right eye, and rubbed it vigorously with the sides of my forefinger; and during the charade, as surreptitiously as I could (given the situation), I grabbed my left optic nerve and pulled out the eye. I carelessly stuffed the nerve back into my skull and plopped the eye back into its place.