I was squatting over an Indian style toilet in a third class compartment on a train hurtling through South India.  The toilet was a stained stainless steel hole in the ground.  It was entirely possible that my Fallopian tubes could be sucked away by centrifugal force should I expose my nether region for any longer than absolutely necessary. The story of how I came to be precariously perched over a hole is a story about how life can simply happen to you even when you’ve charted out your itinerary on Microsoft Project one year ago.

My family doesn’t travel third class on Indian trains. We compromise once in a while by settling for first class travel in an air-conditioned compartment on a train. We’ve mostly graduated to flights. Since travel to Kerala from Chennai is booked up many months in advance, my meticulous father had booked our tickets over six months prior to travel to make sure we’d be able to attend my cousin’s wedding in Kerala in the monsoon month of July.

The evening we trudged into the station, however, all our Hindu gods to whom we prayed just before leaving home, had absconded. We caught Trivandrum Mail chugging out of Platform Number 2 of the Chennai Central station just as the five of us–Dad (82), my sister (55), myself (44) and my two children (16 and 12)–rolled in, with our suitcases.

Missing a train or a flight offers a true test of character. Are you calm in the face of disaster? Are you tolerant? What are your priorities? Are you focused positively on the next step or dwelling needlessly on the past?  Or are you, like 99% of the human species, looking to offload the blame onto someone else? And, most of all, how insecure are you? 

As he watched his train hiss on its way out, dad turned indignant. “That’s our train! What’s going on? For as long as I’ve lived, Trivandrum Mail has always left Chennai one hour after I arrived in the station. At 9PM.”

My son, a favorite grandson, took his first potshot at grandpa. “Apparently not, Thatha. That’s Trivandrum Mail leaving the station. And it is from Platform Number 2. And it’s 8PM, buttercutter.”  The term ‘buttercutter’ was coined by dad some sixty odd years ago. Dad has awarded it to almost all members of the immediate and extended family whenever they showed themselves to be so lazy and ineffectual that they couldn’t even cut butter with a knife. The use of the term ‘buttercutter’ at this delicate hour was like driving a steak knife through Wonderbread.

“How friggin’ dumb is this? NOW what do we do?” Our daughter, steeped in Americanese, was convulsing. She was Regular-Short on patience but Extra-Wide on sarcasm. “How does someone not read departure times right? Did someone say we’re going to the wedding in Kerala? It’s So-O NOT happening.” 

My sister, the self-appointed matriarch of the family now that our dear mother had abdicated the throne and gone off to heaven, constantly worried about extreme self-preservation in the face of jeering relatives. “What is everyone at the wedding going to think?” she asked. “They’ll smirk and laugh their heads off when they find out that we, the perfectionist family, missed our train and hence couldn’t make the wedding. And my husband is going to snicker the loudest. What’s his problem? He decided to jet into Cochin and is luxuriating at the Le Meridian by the Arabian Sea even as I speak.”

Then she made sure dad knew who was head honcho from now on. “Pa, I asked to look at the ticket yesterday and you wouldn’t give it to me. This wouldn’t have happened had you only shown it to me.”

I offered the kindest cut of all. I tried to tell dad that you can’t always trust our valet and driver to do everything right for us all the time. “You shouldn’t have let Vinayagam book it. You think  he knows everything but he doesn’t.”

The mention of the name Vinayagam was like lighting one end of a Lakshmi firecracker on a smoky Diwali morning in Chennai. The wisecracks began again, starting with The Cynic.

“Vinayagam?  Book train tickets? Pray, what else does he do for us? Wash our underwear?”

“So, okay, when Vinayagam comes, can we all, like, ask him to bring the car back from the parking lot and go back home? I really didn’t want to go the wedding anyways. I’m about to finish Angels and Demons and I want to begin Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink right away.”

“Can you shut up, for once in your life, about reading? Do we really want to know what you’re reading, Smart-alec-who’s-always-trying-to-impress-everyone-even-when-THEY-DON’T-REALLY-CARE?”

“The problem is we let Vinayagam do everything in this house.”  My sister observed glumly to no one in particular, adding that there was simply no way to get tickets to Kerala at that hour because all the trains were gone.

Dad headed towards the booking counter, convinced that Vinayagam didn’t tell him about the change in Trivandrum Mail timings when they booked the tickets. “Let him come into the station after parking the car. I’m going to yell at the fellow and give him a big piece of my mind.”  But when Vinayagam came into the station, it became pretty obvious that boss and driver had collectively goofed up over train names and train timings.  The only closure to the situation, if we still wanted to reach in time for the wedding festivities, would be to try to purchase new tickets on the last train bound for Kerala, the 10PM Alleppey Express. 

“Had she been alive our mother would never have let this happen. Mom was a perfectionist and nothing would escape her eye. Can you imagine what might have happened if mom had been around?” My sister mumbled, as we boarded a dusty wagon in a third class section of the train teeming with families and crying babies. “She would have pounced upon dad like a tigress. And dad deserves that sometimes.”

We sat down on cold hard metal seats, pining for the cushioned comfort of a private air-conditioned cabin outfitted with Aquafina water bottles, fresh pillows and hermetically sealed blankets. Beggars of last-minute tickets definitely couldn’t be choosers of neighbors. So we spent the next twelve hours guarding the compartment’s two toilets from which emanated  the strong, anesthetizing smell of fresh and fermented urine. Our long, perturbed faces grew longer as the night wore on.  

“Mom, don’t these Malayali dudes have sisters?” my daughter wondered, an hour into the train ride. “Why do they stare at me like they haven’t seen women?” The problem of Malayali males (folks from Kerala are called Malayalis because their native language is Malayalam) needs a resolution or some such thing to be passed at the United Nations.  They are just everyday guys with ordinary dreams but they get pilloried into the ‘lusty, hungry male’ category of the male species because of their curly mop of black hair, jet-black, piercing eyes under an overhang of bushy eyebrows and handlebar mustaches over full, vulnerable lips.  My daughter soon exiled herself to the uppermost bunk of the compartment, troubled that eight pairs of lust-filled eyes were boring into her nubile body and that she might melt under the heat.

But she wasn’t the only one roasting that night. Dad sat sandwiched between two daughters who brooded over having to spend a night in what felt like a public thoroughfare, with ticketless passengers and other questionable hangers-on biding their time outside the toilet between train stations. Dad decided then to remind us that for most of our lives, our family had traveled third class or second class, after all. That was all he had been able to afford in those days.

“The problem is you have all been spoilt by marrying men who could afford more than I ever could,” our father was saying.  “I am just a retired class I officer from the Government of India and I now get a paltry sum as pension. You both have a lot of hang-ups.  And so, might I say, do both your children.” 

He got off his soapbox after berating us and shrank morosely into his unforgiving metallic throne for the remainder of the journey through the coconut groves of spectacular Kerala.  His two daughters–myself, a Bacchanalian lover of a great Margarita and my sister, the Grande-Dame of First-class travel on Singapore Airlines–sat up through the night, stiff as empresses on a five-layer Simmons mattress atop a split pea. My sister vowed not to drink water so she wouldn’t have to enter either toilet anytime in the night. My bladder, unfortunately, wasn’t made of reinforced concrete. And that is how I found myself pondering the fragility of the human condition over a hole above the moving ground.

The Alleppey express was sashaying through country tracks at 60 mph. So was my derriere, which had presently come unhinged from my torso. One of my hands was holding up the two cotton legs of my pants bunched up at the knees while the other was clinging on, for dear life, to the metallic handle up above, a handle placed strategically so that bodies like mine may not, perchance, be suctioned out from a speeding train by way of toilet holes.

Soon, however, my feet and shoes were soaked. It wasn’t water. And, surely enough, I was on the AllePee Express bound for Kerala, God’s own country, by the verdant foothills of the Western Ghat mountains.