Bombay Bound

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Stayed in the hotel room until checkout time and then on to the sprawling train station. I arrived at the station at 12:00 or so and the train wasn’t until 4:00, so I grabbed a sit and almost immediately my head started falling literally into sleep. This off-and-on dance continued for a while, until a young Indian woman started a conversation with me. She lives in North Carolina and had come to India in January for her wedding. She was studying IT and was nearly done with school. Her husband was completing studies for medical school and was worriedly applying for a visa to the US to take on a residency. Both very nice people; it seemed as though it was an arranged marriage, as he had never been to the states, but I did not want to be so forward as to ask directly. After a while, they decided to go out for some lunch and invited me along. We walked out of the station and first went to a street vendor that was crushing cane and selling cane juice. Cane juice is not my first drink of choice, but they were all for it and bought a juice for me. The dirty vendor’s assistant was washing out dirty glasses with water and handing the not-so-dirty glasses to the dirty vendor, who then filled each glass with juice and handed them to us. Down goes the cane juice - slightly sweet but also slightly...something else. This might not have been a good idea. Afterwards we headed to a restaurant across from the station and had a light meal of naan and paneer. This also might not have been a good idea. They continued to take me under their recently coupled collective wing and took me to the correct train platform, waited until the train arrived, boarded the train with me, and showed me my correct berth before departing and starting their new life together. Thanks wherever you are.

I shared a four-berth sleeper with a Frenchman, a young Japanese man, and a young Indian man. The overnight train pulled into Mumbai (Bombay) at 9:30 the next morning, right on time.

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