The next day

The day before.

Ambala, a small town bordering Punjab and Haryana was the station closest to Delhi, any train that night was going to. We were misinformed and there were none for Delhi. So despite myself, I went ahead and bought these general tickets. And before I could get back after having to wait in a line of drunken people, a couple of whom hurled abuses at each other and almost got into a fight, the train had left. We had missed it by a few minutes. With a series of near misses, S and A were almost on the verge of despair, but under the circumstances, commendably calm. To say, I could think of more difficult company would be an understatement. By then, almost everyone in the station knew about the three of us and that we wanted to go to Delhi! The person who had assisted us with cancelling the tickets turned out to be a TTE for another train called "Garib rath" (a cart for the poor) express. It was an air-conditioned train where we found bunks to sleep after paying the difference between the price of the general tickets and the tickets for the train. It was at midnight when this train left and we were allotted different sets of bunks for different portions of the journey.

A few minutes after the train departed, the rest of our gang reached the station (more than two hours after their train left) and tried making an announcement to track us down. We were about to be one of "those people" who get lost and separated and need to be called out for. But they didn't have to, because the person at Enquiry recognized who they were looking for and promptly informed them that we had just boarded a train for Ambala. Needless to say, it was a sleepless night for me. We were into the inertia of expecting the unexpected, expecting whatever was beyond our control to go wrong. But apart from shuffling from bunk to bunk, the night passed without incident and we reached Ambala by dawn. It was the first time I was visiting Punjab. It still wasn't time to breathe a sign of relief because all the buses we were baited with were nowhere to be seen. Everyone was headed to Delhi on Monday morning and the few buses were spilling over and taxis were charging exorbitantly. I didn't mind the money at that point because we were in a hurry, but the ladies were reluctant. After shuttling between different taxi-stops and bus-stops, we found a regular bus to board. It wasn't as crowded as the others and we had seats. The wind blew into our faces, Punjabi music, which sacrifices melody and lyrics for rhythm, played, and it wasn't as hot. Only then was it time to recount the night, to finally laugh at it. A few hours later, when the wind became hot and bulldozed into us, we knew Delhi wasn't far.

Our last rides were on the Metro rail, timely, fast and sheltered from the heat. We had reached. Battered, sleep-deprived and under another midday sun. Needless to day, it wasn't a day to go back to work.

But before it all began, when my mother-in-law was almost forgetting to carry her medicines, I had jokingly said, "I am sure your sincere prayers will more than compensate for them!" She had replied, "D.., this is not an adventure trip."