The Girl On The Train
Deepak had to run half the length of the platform to catch the train. Out of breath, he started looking for the berth that was reserved for him. Walking along the aisle of the compartment, he cursed the stupid cab driver who’d turned a thirty-minute drive into a ninety-minute prayer ritual.
A newly-minted ‘Software Engineer’ at an e-commerce startup in the city, Deepak didn’t like travelling in trains or buses. He’d become used to travelling by air over the past few years — pursuing his Bachelors in Computer Science at one of Bangalore’s most prestigious Engineering colleges and going home to visit family every few months. Now that he was paying his own bills though, he’d realized that travelling by air to Delhi every month was too expensive!
After a ten-minute search through three consecutive compartments, Deepak found his berth at the end of the third compartment. With a sigh of relief, he stowed his rucksack under the lower berth, stashed his laptop bag against the window and sat down heavily. He was still breathing hard.
He glanced out of the window and saw a few cars ambling along the road that ran parallel to the railway tracks. That reminded him of the horrific ride he had to endure today. The driver was a twenty-something useless idiot that didn’t know even the most famous landmarks or roads in Bangalore! To add to the pain, he was a rash driver. All through the journey, it was Deepak that had to refer to Google Maps and give directions to the driver. Then, his mind on something else, the driver had rammed his Swift DZire into an auto-rickshaw!
That stupid accident started a long argument between the cab driver and the auto-rickshaw driver. Both started fighting about who was right and who was wrong, each of them blaming the other and demanding compensation — they exchanged a few blows while they were at it. Of course, bystanders stood by and watched it all with wide eyes. It was the worst thing that could happen to Deepak, he had a train to catch in an hour or two!
To make matters worse, two policemen noticed the scuffle in the middle of the road as it was causing traffic congestion, and came to resolve it — something that took another half an hour. Halfway through the long ride, Deepak started praying for relief in the form of the railway station appearing magically in front of the cab!
He’d reached the station with hardly a minute to spare and run all the way to the correct platform, boarded the train that’d already started moving and spent another ten minutes searching for his reserved berth! So, he found a place to keep his bags and just sat down heavily, staring out of the window for a few minutes.
Deepak turned his gaze towards the window opposite the one on his right, deciding to forget about the crazy day he’d had and see who else was travelling with him. He was itching for something to do and brooding was not how he wanted to spend the train journey. There was no one in the berth next to the windows on his far-left.
He moved his head, scanning for any faces in the berths on his side of the aisle. No one, the entire box was empty. It looked like he was the only passenger amongst the eight reserved berths in the box that’d boarded the train in Bangalore.
Wait, there was a ladies’ handbag on the berth right in front of him. It was in the same position that he’d stashed his laptop bag in, just on the opposite berth. He looked around for the owner but couldn’t see anyone. A little wary, the “report suspicious items” warning running through his mind, he pulled out his laptop and headphones, plugged them in and started working on his personal fork of the company’s GitHub repo while listening to music.
Deepak loved coding. He was no expert, but he’d realized that tinkering with existing code, changing variables in a few conditional statements or removing a few functions often resulted in something completely different from the original and taught him a lot about how the entire thing worked. So, he’d saved a copy of his company’s back-end server-side program — the code that helped run their e-commerce portal, from the Github repository. In other words, he’d created a fork of it to play with whenever he was bored.
This habit had led to a few breakthroughs. He’d been the one that identified and reported a serious issue with the encryption system that the company used to store and transmit customer data. Apparently, no one in the actual programming team realized that data transmitted between two back-end servers was not encrypted. Luckily, Deepak’s lucky find had helped the company correct it before any data breach occurred, and netted him a fat bonus.
He wasn’t part of the back-end programming team. He was actually hired to develop the front-end interface for the company’s e-commerce portal. After a few months of trial and error, he’d fixed all existing bugs with their front-end e-commerce website and started working on improvements. He’d however keep jumping back to his back-end server scripting hobby to kill time on slow days.
Immersed in his coding hoops, he forgot the world around him, and so, he was surprised when he looked up after sometime and saw a girl in the opposite berth. As most young men do, he checked her out quickly to avoid getting caught and realized that the lady’s handbag belonged to her.
She was gorgeous — a thin, long nose with a shiny stud on the left lobe, lightly dimpled cheeks and long black hair that had brown, burgundy and blonde streaks running through it. He couldn’t see her eyes because she was immersed in some book. In her Pink printed tee and faded Blue jeans, she looked like a carefree college student, but just to confirm, he glanced downwards at her feet. No toe ring, so she was single. Or not. You never knew these days.
He wanted to stare at her for a little longer but didn’t know when she’d look up and he didn’t want to be caught checking her out! The last time he’d been caught, back in college, he’d been slapped and remembering that incident caused him to avert his eyes, look out of the window and act as if he’d not noticed her.
He was a little tired after the morning’s adventure so the rhythmic sounds of the moving train lulled him into a half dozing state. Every few minutes, he peeked at the girl sitting on the opposite berth out of the corner of his eyes but, luckily for him, she didn’t notice at all.
Sometime later, just as he was going to doze off, the train gave a big lurch and stopped. The suddenness and force of the movement made the girl sitting opposite him jerk forward and fall on him. Jolted out of his sleepy state but not yet fully conscious, his hands automatically came up to hold whoever was falling against him.
It took Deepak a moment to realize that the person he was holding up was the same girl he’d been peeking at and he pushed back slightly, helping her stand up. She apologized and was going to sit back on her bench when the train jerked as it started.
Caught off-guard once again, she slipped but he was able to get out of his seat and hold her up quickly. This time, she thanked him and gave him a small smile. He smiled back saying that it wasn’t a problem and got back to his seat though he didn’t fail to notice that her eyes were a pretty shade of green that he’d never ever seen before.
The train was moving again and out of things to do, he pulled out his phone, plugged in earphones and started listening to music to pass the time. The first song that came up on his random playlist was Don’t Let Me Down by Daya, a song that he’d fallen in love with the first time he heard it. Though he didn’t realize it, he closed his eyes and started nodding his head along to the music.
It took him a few minutes to realize that he was nodding his head to the music and that he might look like an idiot to anyone else. He opened his eyes to make sure that no one was watching, only to find the girl sitting opposite him looking at him with a funny smile. He stopped nodding his head, unplugged the earphones and smiled back sheepishly, while thinking “Oh my God! She has a smile to die for!”
“It’s okay! Have fun listening to it. I love that song too!” the girl said.
“How did you know?”
“Ummm… you were playing it at the highest possible volume…?”
“Ah! Yeah, I love that song!”
“Mind playing it over my Bluetooth Speaker?”
“Sure! Let me turn on Bluetooth on my phone.”
She pulled out a cute little Bluetooth Speaker, it was a cylindrical box with a button on top, and switched it on. He connected his phone to it within a second and the song automatically started blaring out at a surprisingly high volume.
“Oh! I’m Deepika.” she said over the music.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Deepak.”
“Oh! Coincidence?” she said, giggling at their names being so similar.
“Well, I like to think that everything happens for a reason.” he replied back.
“Really? So, why were you staring at me all this time? Was there a reason?”
Flushing at being caught so easily, he tried refuting it, “When?”
“You want me to start listing every instance of you staring at me over the past hour? I also caught you peeking from the corner of your eyes!” she asked.
Caught without an out, with a sheepish expression on his face, he answered, “Sorry, I couldn’t help it! You’re gorgeous!”
She blushed while saying, “I know. Thank you. Thanks for being honest too.”
Deepak muttered to himself, “As if you gave me an option…”
“So, where are you going to?” Deepika asked him.
“I’m going to visit my parents in Delhi. You?”
“Me too! It’s been months and I’m looking forward to seeing my mom and brother!” she replied.
“Cool! So, you live in Bangalore?”
“Yeah, I just started working as a Software Engineer at a startup called Mantri Infotech. Have you heard of it?”
“Really? I work at Mantri Infotech too, it’s a small world! Do you work in the Kormangla office? I joined in December last year and I work out of the Whitefield office.”
“Ha ha ha! True, I work from the Kormangla office. Are you THE Deepak Kumar that everyone raves about?”
“I didn’t know I was famous! How did you hear about me?”
“Oh, you know, your name keeps cropping up in our new hire orientation discussions… The whiz who found and corrected an encryption issue with the website! The programming team can’t decide if they should love you for the help or hate you for making them look bad…” she answered while smiling at him.
Her smile was infectious, so he started smiling as he became self-conscious and ran a hand through his hair while replying, “Ah! That’s me, but I really didn’t want to make them mad.”
“Well, I’d say it’s okay but I’m just three weeks old in the company and don’t know yet if my team members are the forgiving sort.”
“So, you are part of the back-end server programming team? Good to know.”
“Yep. I’m the youngest employee of the company and the newest member of the programming team.”
“Cool!” He looked out of the window immediately after saying that and both of them lapsed into silence. Unlike earlier, he didn’t try to check her out again and the silence was a comfortable one. She went back to her book and he went back to his music, and slowly, his drowsiness took over.
When he woke up again, it was dark outside and drizzling slightly. He looked at the opposite berth and found it empty. There was no handbag on the berth or luggage underneath it either. Puzzled, he looked at his watch and realized it was almost midnight. Wondering if he’d slept an entire day and dreamed up everything, he looked around and saw some sleeping passengers in the other berths.
“Well, if it was not a dream and she’s real, it’s not like she’d get off at some station before reaching Delhi… Maybe she went to the washroom and took her handbag.” he thought to himself as he continued to think about her.
Unfortunately, the girl didn’t come back to the berth all night or the next morning. In fact, she didn’t show up again throughout the entire journey at all. Extremely confused, he decided to forget about it for a while, got off the train at the Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station and caught a cab to his house.
On reaching home, he took a quick shower, connected to the Wi-Fi network, and decided to try to find out if the whole encounter had been a dream or real. He connected to the company VPN and looked up Deepika on their internal Sharepoint site listings and found a Deepika Purohit on it. Some more searching on social media sites and he found her profile on Twitter with the latest tweet being a few minutes ago from Bangalore. Even the profile pic was a recent one that helped him identify her as the girl he’d met on the train.
“How did that happen? Did I imagine all of it?”
“Was it all a dream? If yes, where did all that information come from? Dreams are not supposed to be so detailed, are they?”
“If she’s real and still in Bangalore, then how did I meet the girl on the train? How did I know her name or that she works in the same company as I do?”
Questions that he had no answers to.
