The frivolous aspect of life

I love to observe people and how even life has a sense of humor. Following incident simply exemplifies it.

Last Sunday marked the end of my rote learning of the English vocabulary. Few days before, the more gruesome of the two diabolic exams (read GRE) was already annihilated. TOEFL was the puny foe waiting to be conquered. My train was scheduled to leave Kanpur Central at 6.35 AM, which necessitated my presence at the station by 6:15 AM, which in turn entailed that I catch the 5:00 AM IIT K bus and that was a herculean task. Somehow managing to get up, I boarded the train and slept peacefully on my berth. I woke up to banter with friends who had accompanied me to Delhi. All was boringly normal and I had no idea of the contrariety I was about to see.

Now we had an old lady (whom I will call Auntyji for ease of writing) and a young woman (Dulhan) as our co-passengers from Kanpur itself. The young woman was dressed in a bright red colored sari and her hands were meticulously decorated with henna. It was anybody's guess that she was newly married. She also had her "Ghunghat" in front of her face all the time. Auntyji seemed to be her mother or mother-in-law. Now, the peculiarity here was the excessive attention paid by Auntyji in covering her girl. The bride was sleeping and a part of her sari blew away showing some part of fingernail of her toes (not a hyperbole), Auntyji immediately rushed to cover her up. At another instant, we got a glimpse of the long hair which Dulhan must be proud of and Auntyji was at work again, properly covering up the Dulhan as if she would burn even if some part of her was exposed to public eye. We were amused to find such conventional attitude.

Than came the contradistinction. At one of the stations before Delhi, a college girl boarded the train and decided to sit alongside our Dulhan. Now, this girl was wearing a cream coloured, décolleté t-shirt/top (whatever it is called) and a blue colored jeans to go along with it. She was slightly corpulent but one could condone that easily, given her cute looks. She certainly was well-endowed and her dress showed that she did not intend to hide the gifts of nature. The train ride seemed to be a quotidian affair for her and she sat there reading a collection of stories by Ruskin Bond.

Now we had a "Kodak Moment", the antiquated Indian woman and the modern Indian woman sitting side by side. This bold college girl sitting adjacent to a fully covered, shy and demure young woman. We enjoyed the looks of shock and disbelief on Auntyji's shrivelled face. She just covered up our Dulhan some more and spoke something in her ear, keeping her eyes on the college girl all the time. Rest of the journey was mostly uneventful, except once when Auntyji had almost made up her mind to say something to our college girl but had stopped due to some reason.

Soon, we passed over a flowing, black coloured water body which, we were told, was the river Yamuna and we knew it was time. Some light moments had been sprinkled in our tedious peregrination and we wondered over the varied facets of life.