I remember the time

I remember the time right after we had finished out 12th grade. My cousins and I had just got our 12th grade results. We had given almost all conceivable entrance exams. So, here we were sitting in Mumbai, Malad to be specific. Like every normal Indian, you have to have a relative or a family member in Mumbai who can be called upon to provide shelter in times of need. So it was in our case too. The reason we were in Mumbai was that we had the very important task of attending admission counseling sessions for the state of Maharashtra.

So, it was a nice day, we had on the previous night reached Mumbai and let ourselves into an uncle's apartment. I had imagined an apartment to be pretty bigand spacious. From where I came from, they were simply humongous compared to what we saw there. This was my first taste of Mumbai, not to mention the travel in the Local trains (Of which I will be talking about soon.) So, we were hungry, andmy cousin sister's dad being the person who knew how to do a lot of things, helped us cook. Until that time I was pretty fussy about eating food. Well not any more. Heena’s dad made undhiu and khichdi or at least that’s what we called it. I hated it but ate it without much comment .

Mumbai Trains:

The next day we had to go and attend counseling and so we decided or at least our dad’s decided that Vishal and I were going to go on to the counseling center alone. We were grown up now, we shold be able to handle traveling alone in Mumbai or for that matter anywhere. So Vishal and I headed out to the Railway Station at Malad. It wasn't too far away, and all we had to do was walk across a vegetable market to get there. So we got there at the station, bought the tickets and proceeded towards the platform and my reaction was:

Whoa..!!! where did so many people come from??!!!

Whoa! Whoa!! What in the world. I hade never seen so many people in my entire life. Well you gotta do what you gotta do and so we did it and we went on down to the platform from the walkover. We chitchatted some while we waited for the train. Suddenly there was a burst of activity and we noticed this meant the train was arriving. Well, we said better get ready to climb on because it did not look like there was going to be any order whatsoever for people to enter or get off.

As soon as the train pulled up on the platform, people started to jump off and climb in at the same time. It was a sight to see. Both Vishal and I were just stumped. Before we had time to realize what was happening, people pushed past us and the train was moving again. Whoa!! Well like the decent non-mumbai’ites that we were we thought if all of these people just got on the train there wont be many who were gonna get on the next one. So we waited for the next one on an almost empty platform. But wait…. Whoa !!! Even before we knew it, the whole platform was full of people once again waiting on the next train. I kind of got the feeling we were not going to make it again.

Well there we were thinking we could handle Mumbai by ourselves…. So we tried and we tried and we tried for almost half and hour. Trains came and trains went, and we never caught one train. After about half and hour of sincere trying to get on the train, we gave up and went back home to report that it was impossible for normal people like us to catch a train in Mumbai. So we went by taxi that first time….

But, if you stay in Mumbai for some time, you learn by experience and that you cannot exist without learning to travel in the local train and so we did. That’s another story. To make a long story short, we went to counseling, we got our admissions and Vishal and I got admission to the same college.