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After nearly a fortnight in Cuttack, I am on board the Konark Express heading back Mumbaiwards. Home was sweet and all but I could use a bit more of the monsoon. The train will pull up at Dadar station late at night.

I have leafed through a couple of magazines and am now forced to look beyond the confines of my top berth. A tiny baby civilisation of sorts has sprouted up down there. It started, methinks, after we passed Secunderabad. Mostly Andhra Pradeshis. Their leader, however is Oriya (the unmistakable tilak mark from Jagannath Puri on his forehead).

There is a year-and-a-half old that pukes with and alarming frequency and convincingly passes it off each time as ‘just water’. Another materialises next to unsuspecting sleeping heads and screams them violently out of sleep and into near unconsciousness. A third smiles benignly as worried travellers all over the compartment look for their shoes.

I am safe for the moment. None of them stand at much over two feet. I take a long draw from my water bottle and look down again. The three gazes are fixed on me. “I am thirsty,” decides their leader. I put the bottle away beyond the reach of anything pesky. “We want water,” they chorus. They want MY water! MY bottle!! I imagine those slobbery mouths at my bottle’s mouth and shudder, then freeze with resolve. “That must never come to pass,” I say to myself.

I would need all my cunning and resolve to ward off these brutes. They commence their onslaught. They scream at their parents and order them to get my bottle for them. The parents, as is natural, live in terror of what the world erroneously calls ‘innocence’. But my awe-inspiring presence (the sight of me huddled in the corner of my berth with all my belongings) jumpstarts their consciences. The babies are provided water from elsewhere and are put to bed. But not before each of them has looked at me with scorn and said, “Whaaaahh!”

If they knew my name and if they could talk properly, they would have said, “You may have defeated us this time Vijayendra Mohanty, but we will return!”

My bottle is where I left it. But I don’t trust the calm sleeping faces I now see down there. Desperate times call for desperate measures. My face stiffens with a newfound resolve and I empty my bottle in one go. If I can’t have it, no one will! I will be thirsty when I wake up but its a small sacrifice. Either this, or I have my house overrun by hordes of two-footers when I am least prepared. No, this is best.

Posted on Saturday, July 1st, 2006 at 9:18 am and filed under personal, babies, adventures.

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