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Thursday, February 10, 2011

The special trip to Vadodara

 As I have mentioned everyone in my age group is planning to get married , or getting engaged or by now is possibly already married . Kinju  was also looking for a good life partner . By gujju standards  she was quite late to get married. I mean in general trends , girls of her age in Gujrat were  married and would have one kid in nursery .As usual her parents were worried  and seeing her parents worried and stressed , she was worried. Kinju is smart , intelligent and will be a very good home maker ...

In May 2010 she went to celebrate her birthday to Ahemdabad , and returned with a ring in index finger . Yes !!!  she found her match in Harshil and she is happy .Hence we were happy too for her. Here "we" indicates  Manju , Mangu and me :) . Since Kinju was getting married , it went without saying tht we would attend her wedding in November at Vadodara . We started to plan in "May" itself   ( Planning early helps....:D ). Mangala said , "we will book early air tkts for one way and by train for one way . We will save time and money and will get to attend maximum of her wedding. "  I agreed ( which I always  do ) . Manju  , however had certain task to complete and there was no specific deadline . Hence we decided to postpone plan for a  while and meanwhile we got busy in our prospective lives.

Around July -August , one of the grandparents of Kinju or Harshil passed away . It looked like the wedding would have to be postponed.  Kinju was really worried . Already the wait was quite long for her ( From May to November ) and since Harshil  was working overseas , it was quite difficult for him too  ( I guess he understood her feelings and was not in a position to completely pacify her ).  Soon the clouds of doubts were cleared ( Kudos to Harshil) , and it was announced that wedding is on track.

The wedding was 28th Nov . In September we naturally ruled  out travelling by air , as it would have been very expensive( though we do sometimes behave like high fliers as if we are CEOs , we knew our pockets wont afford it ) .  It was almost third week of September when I spoke to Kinju. I told her one more friend of mine is getting married on 30th at Jalgaon. She asked me what am I going to do . I said I want to attend both the weddings .  Then me , Manju and Mangala spoke again about the modalities of travelling .Somehow by end of October , we decided to go on 27th Night return 29th morning . I checked if I could go directly to Jalgaon from Vadodara . There was a train in afternoon , however  I developed cold feet of travelling alone to unknown location (  I do travel alone sometimes :) ). Since I have never travelled to Jalgaon earlier, I decided to be back in Mumbai on 29th and go with the second set of frnds to Jalgaon.

The tkts were booked by Kinju for 27th night and 29th morning ( amidst all the confusion and urgent -important works of office ) for all of us and Apala  .  Apala is also known acquaintaince to us and a good friend of Kinju . Return was planned on 29th , Apala was taking an early train as she wanted to join office . Manju , on 26th  informed that there is some legal work related to her newly bought house she needs to complete on 29th . Again we rushed to change tkts , Manju even contempletd of not attending the wedding  . She knew this would upset Kinju alot . So I booked return journey by bus , on 28th Nov Night  ( The option of train was checked and rechecked , but it was simply wasn't available). I told Apala to also tag along , rather travelling alone.

27th Nov 2010 , Me  , Mangala and Manju  reached Bandra Terminus where Apala joined us. It was around 2200 hrs. We went to assigned compartment . The train Dehradun express leaves at 2330 hrs . To pass time , Apala started talking about ghost stories.  She told us about the top 10 horror places in India  and google actually gives some ansewrs for this search criteria. I was amused at interenet and google . I did check on this later, its an interesting stuff . Then there were stories Kerala and Maharashtra. They were not first hand accounts of any of us . They had been heard over the ages and repeated . We also covered the topic of dreadful dreams.

We had reserved two middle birth and two lower Berth . Manju mentioned she gets a coffin like feeling on these berths . We set out our explainations on how she may not get the similar feelings (including how middle berth would be installed between upper and lower ). It was 23 :15 ,  fellow came and rested his bags on one of the middle berths and cheerily said "thank you". We looked at him puzzled . I coldly said "these are reserved by us ." He replied politely , "u might be mistaken they are reseved by us" . Soon two guys joined in. Mangala said "can u please check the seat no. and the compartment on ur tkt?" She is always very polite . He confirmed , he infact had a right tkt .I think Manju was quite drowsy to suggest anything.
The  claimaints seemed regular travellers , I mowed down a bit and said may be "I think the problem with IRCTC server and we should wait for Ticket Checker to arrive." ( u see I am the expert on everything) . Everyone agreed on this . The fellow who had annoyed us by saying thank you said "may be date of ur tkt is wrong "  well we didnt  agree ( How can be our tkts wrong , we are one of the best and sincere girls)  . All this while we never considered we could have "wrong tkts". Mangala who had the copy of tkt opened it and quitely checked the date and passed it on to me  . Guess wht it was 27th Dec !!!

and the adventure of the night began :) :)...... Contd.....

1 comment:

  1. a veryyyyyyyyyyyy engaging post!..lovelyyyy... awesome style of writing an incident... cant stop smiling...

    ReplyDelete