Just another train entry

July 5, 2016. 18:00 or thereabouts

In the evening Jan Shatabdi to Trivandrum. A trip that’s now routine, more than the wake-up-go-to-work-come-home routine. Well there is the come-home ending here. I’m going home, the thrills of it temporarily marred by the fact that I am on an aisle seat today. That’s right. I, Cris who doesn’t like her last name, am on an aisle seat, after specifically booking a window seat (or probably having messed it up).

What do people on aisle seats do? There is music, there’s a book to read. But none of it seems to mean anything on an aisle seat. It’s really like detention. You are forced to sit in your seat and do nothing. You can always observe, be a happy voyeur of other people’s lives. Like that woman in green blouse is reading a magazine and now opening a box of sweet snacks that look yum from here. There’s the man in the parallel aisle seat grabbing these snacks and disturbing her happy moments with the banana fry – that’s the snack. One I normally dislike but now that I can’t have, feel fondly about. It would be impolite to grab a fry, I suppose. The aisle man seems to get away with it, though.

Would it also be impolite – or considered bad manners – to borrow someone’s pen. I love pencils for daily work but this here goes on record. Of great writings by Cris to be discovered on a future date. That’s another thing I want to write about. How everyone is so obsessed with greatness. I want to write about the ungreats. Yes, I shall be doing that.

But not now, not with this half-eaten chewed-up yellow and black pencil, the kind I wrote with in first grade and have fond memories of. Of writing Thiruvananthapuram on a notebook, and thinking how one word took up an entire line.

Now the song is Tharum Thalirum. I might change it. But it’s an effort to remove this book, dig out the MP3 player from the crowded bag and press Next. So I’ll just think about the Friends episode that I saw yesterday and that comes to mind now ‘cause it has music in it – a mixed tape that Chandler gives Monica. A fake gift that becomes funny with Janice’s voice in it. What was the song now? The way you look tonight. That’s Frank Sinatra, right? I could google, but it involves the same tiresome procedure I mentioned before.

Ok. Next song came. It’s still the background score. Mm mm. ‘I wanna live, I wanna give’. Sounds like Neil Young. Ah ‘Heart of Gold’. These old men singers are really the best. With their deep and moving voice. The other day I was listening to Leonard Cohen sing ‘My oh my’. That begins ‘Wasn’t hard to love you. Didn’t have to try’. You have to know Cohen’s voice to imagine how good that’d sound. And don’t even worry about being cheesy. There’s no cheesy in Cohen’s music. There’s just music. That sounds lame. But let it be till I think of another word. Uh that reminds me of David Walliams. He would write as the writer in between his fiction. I think I want to read that now. So I am going to do that. Song when I leave – ‘Guess I’ll always be a soldier of fortune’.

PS: I might come back

PS2: So that’s the good thing about aisle seats. You write and you write and you write. In really crammed space, the way you’ve not written on a clean desk back home.