Sleepless on Kaveri Express

Before long, the train chugs into the station and slows to a halt. We labouriously manage to pull all five suitcases into it and open the door to the air conditioned compartment… only to find ourselves in pitch darkness. The AC is working alright…it’s just the lights that aren’t. The only light that filters in is the light from the station through the windows.

We somehow stumble to our berths, tripping over a few people in the process and arrange our baggage and ourselves and settle down to sleep. Before long, the ticket conductor comes and wakes us up by pulling on my toe. Groggily I show him our ticket and settle back down to sleep, but somehow, sleep evades me.

I take out my phone and start playing a game of Sky Force. In the darkness of the compartment, the light from the phone seems like a beacon in the night. I realize that my phone battery is almost out so I switch off the phone and peer out the window. I recognize some of the places we pass…East Station… the level crossing that’s been under construction for the past year… the ITC factory….the short cut that I used to take to go to college…ring road….White Field…. After that, there were only fields and no more to be seen outside. I may as well try and get some sleep.

Just as I’m drifting off, I hear a put-put-put sound. Actually, it’s more like a Harley-Davidson engine roaring to life and I wake up with a start. In the darkness, the sound seems to be omnipresent. I slowly pinpoint the source – the man sleeping on the berth opposite mine. His snoring is loud enough to wake the dead….but apparently not the rest of the passengers in close proximity, who seem to be sleeping peacefully.

Living in a hostel dormitory, I’m used to sleeping among people who snore loudly, but this was absurd! It wasn’t even a rhythmic snore which could be soothing under some circumstances. It was more like irregular machine-gun fire that dies down after sometime and starts up again when a target is in sight. In this case, the target must have been me.

I jam the pillow over my ears and turn the other way. It helps to a certain extent but just barely.

A loud BANG right next to me has me almost jumping out of my skin and the compartment begins jerking violently. It’s a wonder that nobody else wakes up to this. The compartment continues jerking and the train begins to slow down. The banging noise next to me continues with each jerk of the compartment.

I mentally picture everything that an AC compartment would have and recognize the noise as the food tray hitting against the wall of the compartment. Just ignore it and you wont notice the sound after some time, I think. But the bloody banging noise combined with the machine-gun snoring was a bit too much and I gave up any hope of sleeping.

I sit up and push the curtain aside to look out the window. We’re approaching a station – Bangarapet. Great, I think. One hour down and five more to go before we reach Chennai. I watch the people milling around on the platform. Even at 1 am, the place is bustling with life.

The train moves on and the banging noise begins again. By this time, I can feel one hell of a headache coming on. Just then, my leg hits against something which I recognize as one of our suitcases. I drag it out from under the berth and jam it up against the food tray. The noise promptly stops. Wish I could do the same thing to machine-gun man opposite me.

I somehow manage to doze off, but my sleep is highly disturbed. It’s just one of things where you’re aware of all your surroundings but you know that you’re asleep. I dream of Harley-Davidson’s and sub-machine guns and war. (To be fair, the dream about the machine guns could have been because of the game Sky Force that I had been playing earlier.) But still, suffice to it say, it was one rotten night.

I wake up a few hours later to loud voices. The machine-gun man had woken up and was having a loud discussion with someone else. I check my watch. It was 5.45 am and nearing daylight. No sense in going back to sleep so I sit up and start checking the names of stations. We’re nearing our station but we’re not too sure which station it comes after so we haul our bags out from under the seats and drag them to the door.

Standing near the open door with the early morning breeze hitting us is refreshing but it still doesn’t make up for lost sleep. My head is still throbbing and I’ve developed a crick in my neck. We stumble out of the train thankfully and head home. Once we reach home, I tumble into bed and sleep the sleep of the dead.

Honestly, I really envy people who can sleep while traveling.