25 de mayo, 2016
Relax.
Or that I want to do.
These past few days have been awesome.
On the morning of the 21st in Rameswaram, we packed our bags and walked out at 10am to find milk. On the way to the trusty store that had bags of cold milk just like my dad likes it, I also found a SIM card place. The "1GB" that the SIM card I was sold supposedly had was exhausted after 120MB (so maybe they meant 1Gb?), so I needed a recharge. Luckily, I found an unlimited 2G data package during 28 days for 199 rupees, so I asked for a 210-rupee balance recharge in order to buy it myself, and have some leftover balance for any reason. But I saw the guy kinda stumble with what I was telling him, so I told him "I'm buying the 210 rupees so I can buy this package", and showed him the option on my phone. By that, he understood that I ALSO wanted the internet package, in addition to the 210-rupee balance. So I ended up paying 409 rupees total, though I only wanted the 199 data package. It worked great, though, and it was only $6 total, so it wasn't bad at all.
Then after buying and drinking a half-liter of nice cold milk each, we began walking to the train station in the wrong direction. 5 bearded men sitting on the sidewalk (or the shambles of concrete that resembled it) called at us, and told us to go in the other direction. I guess it was pretty clear we were foreigners and that we were headed to the train station, but their immediate candidness and helpfulness was a delightful surprise. We confirmed with them that the railway station was the other way, thanked them, I waved my head in Indian nodding style, and walked the right way to the station.
70 rupees and an hour later, we sat on the train back to Madurai, squeezed in between a family with 3 kids. They had extended out two dresses on the luggage racks, so we couldn't jump up there and lay down throughout the trip as we did before. Instead, we sat down on a bench next to the father and the older kid, and we stayed there for 5 hours. More people gradually came into the train and began shoving everyone to make space for themselves. There was some palpable tension and a few words in Tamil spoken in argument, but eventually everyone seemed content enough and seated.
Having internet access on the train made it much more informative. We found out that the place with the Naadi readings was closer to an earlier train station, so we got off at that one. We took a TucTuc there, and while we were heading there, we got a call from Mr. Kumar, asking us when we'd be there. "5 minutes", we said, and he agreed to cater to us then.
We waited for about half an hour in a small office until Mr. Kumar was able to attend us. In that time, my dad and I looked around at the Hindu god pictures all around us, and tried to identify them. We saw Shiva and Parvati in several forms, Durga also, and Vishnu, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Ganesha, probably Gayatri, and also Kali, sticking her iconic tongue out, about to kill Shiva. I readied a voice recording app on my phone to have my own recording besides what he offered to record for me, and talked with dad about what we were going to hear.
When Mr. Kumar came in, we listened intently. He brought in two long and narrow wooden slates tied to a collection of dry palm leaves cut up in the exact same shape with some rustic string on their four corners. There were some very neat and very unintelligible markings in black, similar to pencil, on the leaves, 5 lines of such in each leaf, top to bottom across the narrow side.
Right then I began recording, and he then explained to me what was going to happen. He was going to start recording and telling me what the Naadi leaves said. He would then give me a CD with what he recorded, and if I wanted to know anything in more detail, we could then request other specific cantos about my life (e.g. wealth, family, love, etc). We nodded at most of it, and then he began talking. The prediction itself is in the 50min recording.
After the reading, as most soothsayers I know by person, he said that to ward off specific problems later in life, I would need to pay him N thousands of rupees for him to pray and dedicate a specific copper thingy for me, and then I'd need to wear that for all of my life. He also said I should pay 3800 rupees (or 3008, I didn't quite get that) for them to do a Pooja for me, and so that... I don't know... to ward off something else or something. I was ready to respectfully deny his offer, but my dad suddenly was enthused about the whole situation, and he said we'd do it.
- "How much is 3800 rupees?", he said.
- "About $50-$60".
- "Oh, that's great! Let's do it!"
- "We don't have 3800 rupees".
- "But I have dollars!"
- "You only have $100 bills.
- "That's fine! This is for you!" And he smiled at me warmly.
I did not deny him, so we did the Pooja. Mr. Kumar opened up a side door to a hotter room (ours had A/C), and he said they were getting the Pooja ready. A few minutes later, they asked us to go in.
The room was probably about squarish in shape, but the large center of it was completely taken by an altar made of either adobe or stone, filled with circular and rectangular slots of many sizes for candles, bronze and wooden thingies, pictures, flowers and herbs, incense, and a thick smell of many fragrances I couldn't have distinguished if I'd tried. There were narrow hallways around the altar that made its way all around it, lined with pictures of various gods along the wall. It was a cocktail of pure hindu altar paraphernalia, and the sudden change in temperature added to its "shock" effect. The pooja was pretty much like this: 1) Mr. Kumar told my dad and I to do something. 2) We did that thing. 3) He and his helpers did stuff, like circle a candle around god pictures, throw flowers and plants on us, or rub red stuff or gray stuff on our foreheads. The instructions, as I remember them, went something like this:
- Pray to Agasthya.
- Take this candle over here and put it over there.
- Take this other candle over here and put it over there.
- Pray to Agasthya.
- Walk around the altar, touching the god pictures on each wall.
- Pray again.
- Put money in the little bronze jar ($100 + 8 rupees)
- Pray again.
Praying on demand seemed overtly??? artificial to me, but I didn't think much about questioning their protocol during their ceremony. So at least I closed my eyes and thought of good stuff. He then asked to take a picture of us, but I didn't quite like the idea, so the picture was taken only of my dad and he, next to the altar.
My dad asked to take a picture of the Naadi leaf, so they brought the leaf back, and I took a picture of it. It was clearly a different leaf than the one he had showed us before (the first writings seemed almost function-like - no two points on the same line were positioned along the same vertical, while in the second leaf, the markings were "almost" character-like, but they looked like they "wanted" to be either latin letters or Tamil characters, but neither of them very much so. Quite certainly incredulous about at least part of what they had told us about the leaves and the "prophecies", but happy to have my dad so happy about the experience, I took a picture of the Naadi leaf, received a paper package with my zodiac and a CD recording of my reading, and asked for a TucTuc to take us to the Madurai train station.
So we went to the station, bought our tickets to Bangalore for 280 rupees (9 hours in a night train for $2 per person!). We still had about 4 hours before our train left at 23:50, so we walked out to see the Meenakshi temple, apparently a big attraction in the city, several blocks long and wide, only about 6 windy Madurai blocks away.
On the way, we saw a mishmash of shops that sold all kinds of stuff, bordering the muddy, weakly-lit, heavily over-used streets we stepped on. Even at the short distance it was at, we asked for directions once to guide us on a turn we weren't sure about when we reached a dead end.
Once there, we saw the enormous west gate of the temple - a colored horde of stone (or clay) statues piled up on top of each other in some symmetric fashion, easily 30m high. The security for the temple was fairly elaborate - it had a shoe holder, a TSA-like conveyor belt for our backpacks, a luggage holder for the stuff they did not allow (like our entire backpacks), and a complete external wooden hallway for people to walk through, a metal detector entry, and as foreigners, we were asked to provide passport information. Way more than I thought justified seeing a temple, but like at the airport, we followed protocol and went inside.
The temple was indeed spectacular. It looked rustic and ancient - the external wall surrounded a large square courtyard about 50m wide, and there were entire families staring at the 20m tall walls and columns, ornamented in bright colors or left in gray stone.
A further entrance on the southern side crossed the inner walls, which led to an area with a tall golden column on a stone altar, in the middle of a fenced-off area, next to a kneeling stone cow. This center altar was surrounded by a myriad of stone statues, most of which I did not recognize. Many of them were lion-like, boar-like, that of a lion eating a serpent with its penis fully on display (the lion's), and one could tell that some statues were not made with a cookie-cutter - each one of them had slightly different attributes - eyes slightly more apart, more teeth than the others, paws on its face, and so on. This temple was distinguished by its bright colors. Whether old or new, I could not tell. A few minor carvings of a dancing Shiva were also visible among the walls.
As we walked around, we saw there were areas only available to Hindus. Not only one, but several. The inner area itself was very large - we walked all the way around it, we saw rooms around us that looked like specific houses of worship for some god or another, some kind of library, altars tucked into tight niches, Hindus holding active ceremonies and chanting right there and then, and a large statue of Ganesha (or of some form that looked pretty close to it) of which pictures of were "strictly prohibited". We lost our sense of direction within it within it a few times, and by the time we managed to find the temple exit, we were on the other (eastern) side of the temple. Confused but content, we walked barefoot around the temple to the western side to pick up our shoes and backpacks.
My dad seemed tired, so I looked for some cold milk for him to drink. I could find none. The closest I found was the nut-based Badam milk, but he refused it (so I drank it instead). We walked back to the train station, but my dad seemed tired, so we stopped at a restaurant on the way back. It was pretty crowded, but two guys invited us over to their table, so we sat down and dined with them.
We weren't really hungry, so we ordered 2 lassis (because they did not have milk). The two guys ordered a full meal, with potatoes, lentils, naan, spices, and such. They seemed young - early twenties, casual - just two guys having dinner on a Sunday night.
They knew English pretty well, so we were able to have a full conversation. They were two medical students interning in Madurai. The chatty one was from Chennai, and the other was from Rameswaram. We told them we'd been there that same morning, and the first thing they asked was "Did you go to Dhanushkodi?" Encouraged by the question, I said "yes! That's what we went to see there, actually!" And we told them the full story of our walk to the end of the stretch of land, including our run-in with the police, my dad's tiredness, the beautiful stretch of land and sea, and how we found milk over there, but couldn't find it anywhere in Madurai. They said that indeed, milk was not a common thing for people to buy or sell in the area. Hot milk only, but we'd already seen and tried that on the streets.
Then my dad told them we'd be visiting the Patal Bhuvaneshwar caves up near Nepal, and they suggested a few other temples among the area. They mentioned one where a goddess supposedly was being chased by a hunter who wanted to rape her, so she climbed up to the top of the hill and prayed to a god (I think Shiva?), so he came down and killed the hunter. And so they built a temple there, end of story. Then my dad told them about his passion for India and for their great epics, and how he was looking for the Hrisavana, the story of Krishna's childhood. The guys mentioned the book was about 2000 pages long, and my dad just said "well, I just want to find it somewhere, and look at it!". And we kinda left it at that.
After pleasantly saying goodbye and paying our owed 105 rupees for 3 lassis, we walked back to the station and waited for our train to Bangalore. When it arrived, my dad said "let's get in as soon as it comes", so that's we did. To our pleasant surprise, this night train had sleeping bunks within a room kept cool by an A/C system - 3 beds stacked on each spot. As the first ones there, we each took one at the bottom, and pleasantly took our shoes off and lay down.
A few minutes later, a lady walks in and says "can you switch with me? I have a baby.", so I climbed up to the second bed tier and lay down there. A few minutes after, the train starts moving, and the ticket inspector comes in and talks to us, so we give him our ticket. He looks at it, and shakes his head negatively, talking to us in Hindi. He looks at my dad and me, and he tells us these are reserved seats, and that we have unreserved general seats. That made more sense, since our tickets had been as cheap as they were. So we packed up our stuff, put on our shoes, and began walking down the train wagons to the end, where the unreserved area was.
We must've walked at least down a dozen wagons, from A/C sleepers to non A/C sleepers to A/C chairs to non A/C chairs, finally to a wagon closed off with a metal gate, where we found a bunch of people lying on the floor, stretched out as best as they could in the meager space. We found some space right beside the toilets and sat there with our backpacks for about an hour, until the train stopped at a station and someone came in there, telling us all to get out of the train into the general section.
So we tried doing that. Our backpacks with us, we walked towards the end of the train, towards which other people were running. We were puzzled by it only momentarily. The wagons we were supposed to board were brimming full with people - sitting, standing, laying down, crammed against each other within the wagon, and about a dozen people were piled up outside the door, doing their best to push their way in, while the ones inside did their best to keep their own space intact enough for a bearable 9-hour overnight journey.
Those speaking Hindi and without luggage had little chance of getting into the crowded wagons, so us English-speaking foreigners with sizable backpacks could hardly expect to get inside. So we asked a platform officer what to do. He said "next train, three fifty", and walked away.
It was about 1:30am in Didigul Junction, and we weren't the only ones in that situation. Plenty other groups of people lay down on the middle of the platform floor, sprawled out, their stuff scattered around them arbitrarily, fully asleep. "When in India", we thought, so we found an empty corner to lay down on, set an alarm for 3:30AM, and went to sleep.
Well, my dad did. I tried for a bit, but began to feel uncomfortable. There were mosquitoes around us, and I tried to cover my bare arms by pulling them into my shirt. That left my chest uncovered, though, and my head laying on the concrete began to itch for some reason. Maybe it was purely psychological, but the thought of fleas creeping all over me didn't quite let me relax to fall fully asleep.
I guess it was good that I stayed awake, though, because with the internet connection I had, I checked up on the train schedule for our station. It turns out the officer had said "three fifTEEN", not "three fifty", as at that time a train in the same direction would reach our station. So I added an alarm at 3AM in case I was right, and tried to relax.
Next thing I knew, the 3AM alarm was waking me up, people were still laying around and walking around the platform, but there was a bit more movement going on. I looked around, played with my phone for a bit, and suddenly I heard a train approaching. People started getting up, everyone seemed excited, including those I *think* were also trying to board the earlier train. So I woke my dad up, we picked up our bags, and just got into the first passenger-looking wagon that we found. Many of them were also pretty packed, but one of them said "luggage", though it had benches and passengers inside it, so in we went. There were a few old people, a few men, a woman with a bunch of children, and a lot of empty space! We grabbed two empty facing seats, and looked around to see whether people told us to leave for any reason. They were fine, though.
Then one of the ticket people comes into the wagon and asks us stuff in Hindi. We respond in English and show him our ticket, to which he goes outside with another guy, and they discuss something about it. Then one of them tells us something like "station, you... next station, ten kilometers", gesturing distances and stations with his body. We say "ok ok", not quite knowing what he meant, get back in the wagon, see that everyone's OK with it, and stay there.
We weren't sure what their comment meant. Were we supposed to get off at the next station, which was situated 10km away? But the next station came and went, nobody told us anything, and the train kept rolling on. A little internet research later, I realized that the station we WERE GOING to arrive at initially (Bangalore Cantonment, written on our ticket) was NOT reached by the train we were in. THIS train would arrive at a station called Khrisharajapuram, 10 kilometers AWAY from that station. But for our purposes, that was peanuts. We just wanted to get close enough to Bangalore to catch a cab and move around the city.
And so we did. We changed our seats for empty overhead luggage racks, on which we lay on for the 9-hour duration of our trip. Nighttime disappeared as we slept the hours away, and I woke up to the steady sound of the rolling train and wind, along with the voice of a few children talking excitedly, and a few men's voices in the adjacent section, as they played cards. The wind was warm and fresh on my entire body, flowing right through the open barred windows.
Somehow we had changed, in a single night, from laying in premium but tight A/C sleepers, to the other end of the train squeezing amidst other sleeping people next to the toilets, to sleeping on a small station's platform at 2AM, to sleeping on a perfectly comfortable luggage rack for 9 hours, delicious wind refreshing us on every kilometer of the trip, and making our destination all the same. It was a magnificent ride.
I took a few pictures of the hurrying landscapes and the people around us. The mother was particularly colorful. She wore a yellow saree with a pretty pattern, simple and worn. Her kids around her seemed 7, 9, and 13 years old, and they mostly slept and watched the landscape move in between brief periods of talking between each other. What they talked about, I have no idea.
She opened up a large bag underneath and poured yellow rice from a pot into disposable aluminum plates, of which she had about 30 in a stack. She gave one to each of the kids, made one for herself, and they ate it by scooping the rice with their hands. I didn't notice, but they probably used their right hands.
The kid about 9 years of age asked me, gesturing, if he could join me up in the luggage rack. I said "yeah, come on up", so he climbed up and soon we were both sitting there, talking to each other about all sorts of stuff.
Unfortunately, I didn't speak Tamil and he didn't speak English, so we quickly got stuck. I managed to tell him my name, and he me his: "Evnuth Kumar". He wrote it on my notebook in latin letters, and I wrote mine as well. I tried to get a little more traction by using Google Translate to tell each other stuff, but that kinda failed. I translated a few basic things about us to Tamil, and he just read it, seemed to understand it, but couldn't really reply to it. So I found out how to use Indic languages on my phone, used Tamil, and asked him to write some. He tried to use it, but he was not familiar with the keyboard layout I had set up, so he couldn't really use it. In the end, all he wrote in Tamil was his own name (which didn't really translate to anything else), and then he seemed uninterested in doing anything else. He climbed back down and kept looking at the land.
Eventually we reached Bangalore at 12:30PM, and headed straight to our destination, Google Bangalore. The map mentioned it was 2km away, so we thought we'd walk it, rejecting all the TucTuc drivers offering us a ride. About 200m later, though, we realized that Bangalore streets weren't all that walkable. There was no noticeable sidewalk at all, and even the tightest corners of the street were all used by squeezing motorcycles and TucTucs. So when another TucTuc driver offered us a ride, we just took it for 100 rupees and told him where we were going. He began heading the other way, though, so I told him "hey, we're going over HERE", showing him the map. He then went "Oooooh! Oh ok, I know where that is, no problem".
He then made a U-turn right then and there, and drove in the opposite direction. Exactly where we had come from. Against traffic. And he did that for about 2km worth of a heavily transited street, all the way on the right, frequently swerving to avoid incoming motorcycles and other TucTucs. It was just like in the movies, but with less gunfire and swerving car crashes. What impressed me most was the reaction of the people coming towards us. No shouts, no gestures, no angry vibes. A nonchalant stare was all I saw from one of the motorcyclists. We weren't doing anything special. We were just driving the wrong way on a major artery during pretty heavy traffic.
Eventually he got on the "correct" side of the street again, and drove us to Google Bangalore. He told us it now cost 200 rupees. I said "hey, we did not agree on that". He argued something about police and other way, but I knew it was not our fault he had gone the wrong way in the first place. I wasn't really upset, though - he did a great job avoiding the traffic, and he did get us there fast. I was going to propose a counteroffer of 150, when suddenly my dad shouted at him in an *angry* tone, and said "NO! BAD! YOU DO NOT DO THAT, SIR!" And then he signed a cross at him - the kind that people do, sometimes jokingly, to ward off evil or vampires. It was a bit shocking to see him react so violently to such a small situation. He angrily said "just pay him, come on, let's go!". So I just took out what I had from my wallet, but I could only get 170 before I got to the 500 bills. I was going to take that out, but the driver was OK with that, and drove off.
Now Google Bangalore was a nice stop. I dug up my badge from my backpack, and that one thing hanging from my belt, despite my messy greasy hair, long unkempt beard, sweaty shirt, baggy pants, and large backpack with a plastic bag hanging off of it, was reason enough to get my dad and I inside.
The corporate complex we entered was clearly an elite, westernized area. Au Bon Pain, World Gym, and the Google logo were just unmistakable evidence. We climbed up the steps, went up to the Google building, went to the third floor, and had lunch at the cafeteria. Then we booked a room for 5 hours, grabbed coffee, milk, and pastries from the micro kitchen, and settled into our room.
That stop was a savior. That last night we had learned that the Indian train system had reservations, and that they seemed essential to guaranteeing a spot in the train. The tickets we had bought so far were unreserved tickets, and did not guarantee a spot at all. They allowed one to get into the unreserved wagons IF there was enough space, nothing else. We had another overnight train ride planned that night from Bangalore to Hyderabad, and another from Hyderabad to New Delhi that would take at least 22 hours. Booking reservations was essential to ensuring our arrival to these destinations on time.
So now with a room, a desk, electrical supply, a high-bandwidth internet connection, a whole day before the night train departed, a loose plan of our trip up north, and a micro-kitchen nearby, we got to work. We didn't quite know what we were doing, but at the end of our session, we had accomplished:
- Uploaded our pictures for the trip so far.
- Charged our devices.
- Ate and stuff.
- Emailed family and friends about our status.
- Successfully registered for an IRCTC account through the interface made for Indian residents only.
- Created a ClearTrip account.
- Wrote a list of possible train rides to take to get to Hyderabad and Delhi.
- Researched how to get to the Patal Bhuvaneswar caves.
- Mapped out trains from Delhi to Kathgodam.
- Decided on a plan and contingencies to get to the caves and back.
- Booked a train ride from Bangalore to Hyderabad, got waitlisted.
- Booked a train ride from Hyderabad to New Delhi, got waitlisted.
- Printed our (waitlisted) reservations.
- Replied to comments in a bug and checked up on a pending urgent task, plus relevant emails.
We guessed "waitlist" meant that our reservation on the train was not confirmed, but it was the best we could do at that point. My dad told me to get the 2-tier A/C sleepers (3-tier was too short to sit on), but even at that "premium" level, our two BAN-HYD and HYD-DEL reservations cost us about $30 and $60, respectively (for both people). No buyer's remorse.
After freshening up as much as we could and eating/drinking what we needed, we left the building and walked to the shopping mall on the other side of the street. The major artery reminded of me Blvd. Roosevelt in Guatemala, mostly because crossing it required planning out a path evading buses and motorcycles on our way to the other side.
The mall itself was a bit of a let down. We went there because my dad wanted to see some of those famed phablets that are not sold in the US. We couldn't find a single working mobile phone store, and the stores mostly focused on clothes, jewellery, and pharmacies. After wandering around for a bit though, my dad remembered he wanted a new soap, a comb, and a razor, so we got those at the pharmacy. We also bought 5 gel pens at the supermarket, and we left the mall as two satisfied customers.
Then a TucTuc took us to the train station for 400 rupees. Right after we'd agreed to the price, I remembered "man, I should've used Uber!", as it was one of the options in Google Search, and I'd never tried Uber in India before. It claimed to be half as expensive as the TucTuc, but we'd already agreed, so we took the TucTuc, and left the Uber ride for the next city.
Once at the station, I noticed I'd gotten a text message from the IRCTC confirming our two seats on wagon A-1, seats 4 and 6. So we got on the train, picked our seats, and rode from Bangalore to Hyderabad on the A/C tier for 9 hours. It was pretty comfy. I wouldn't say it felt as good as the night we slept on top of the luggage rack (THAT was refreshing), but we felt certain to get to where we were going!
Once in Hyderabad, I told my dad I wanted to try out Uber. So we did. And it worked great! The first one took us directly to Google Hyderabad. It took over an hour to get there, maneuvering and shuffling through heavy traffic all the way, and it cost $5.37. Given how shifty and windy and unordered the streets in Indian cities are, I'm honestly impressed at how well Google (and/or other companies) have managed to map out their routes so much in detail. Hats off to whomever's doing that.
Upon arrival at Google Hyderabad, I dug up my badge again and got us a room for the day. We ate and drank, used the bathroom, caught up on the status of our train for that night (we'd advanced a little on the waitlist), and sent out emails. I did a little more checking-up on work stuff, my dad read up on his Kindle. In the end, we found a fitness room and showers, so we were able to really freshen up and get dressed with new clothes, which made a nice difference. We even got to ride the slide set up in the office, which was a lot of fun.
After leaving the office, we decided to go check out a shopping mall closer to the railway station to find more mobile devices my dad might be interested in. So we took an Uber there, and again, found out that they had very few mobile devices on display. He looked at some of them, but then we quickly exited the mall and made our way to the train station.
We started walking and went into some electronics stores along the way. But when looking at the time, I realized we didn't really have that much time left, so we took an Uber to "another" railway station, and I proposed that we took a local train from there to get the train station we actually wanted to go to, as an exercise in local public transportation.
The Uber driver had trouble finding the place, but after some help from the locals, he managed to drop us off right in front of it. Once in the station, we crossed the overhead pedestrian pass to buy a ticket on the other side of the platform, and the lady there told us "other side" as her directions to catch the train. It was 21:32 then.
At that moment, though, we saw a train arrive on the "other side" of the platform, so we ran on the overhead pedestrian pass to catch it. We didn't manage to catch it, which worried us some, but we were reassured that some people had remained waiting on that side of the platform, plus the schedule said the train should pass by at 21:39. We decided to trust the schedule, so we waited.
So we waited, and 21:39 came and went. Suddenly it was 21:45, and my dad began to get worried. "What if it doesn't come? What if we miss our train to Delhi?" I told him it should come any time, but he wanted to verify. But the lady to ask was on the other side of the platform, so he would have to cross the rails again.
- "Don't go to the other side", I told him.
- "I'll just be a minute!", he shouted, and he climbed down onto the train tracks, walked across them, and climbed back up on the other side, so as to cross faster.
And then he disappeared into the station. Not a minute later, I heard the train arriving, and my dad was still inside the station, out of sight. Eventually he heard them too, and he ran outside, rushing to cross the tracks again and catch the train. What he did not see was that there was another train approaching from the other side as well, and it was dangerously close to the station already. He had one leg going down, when a guy on the platform yelled at him: "HEY!", and pointed him towards the train. My dad stepped back, looked confused for a while, then decided to run up the overhead pass. Our train was already at the platform by the time he had reached the top, but he kept running. Right as he ran down the stairs, I stood at one of the doorways to prevent it from closing, and waited for him to arrive. He reached the platform just in time - the doors were about to close. Once inside, we almost couldn't believe we were in, but we'd made it. He had not gotten run over, he had reached the train, and we were on our way to take our long ride to Delhi.
Frases célebres:
25 de mayo, 12:23:00, Amla Junction, Madhya Pradesh
Mira! Estamos en no sé donde!
Franklin
25 de mayo, 12:44:56, Betul, Madhya Pradesh
Todo aquí tiene contami... no... condimentación
Franklin
