After finishing dinner, the boy and girl start playing a board game called Monopoly. The father and mother sit side by side and chat. They discuss the latest soaps on TV, something about buying property and travelling to Goa for a holiday.
I pat my abdomen gently where fifty thousand rupees in crisp new notes nestle inside the waistband of my underwear, and feel the power of all that money seep insidiously into my stomach, my intestines, my liver, lungs, heart and brain. The hunger gnawing at my stomach disappears miraculously.
Looking at the typical middle-class family scene in front of me, I don't feel like an interloper any more. I am no longer an outsider peeping into their exotic world, but an insider who can relate to them as an equal, talk to them in their own language. Like them, I too can now watch middle-class soaps, play Nintendo and visit Kids Mart at weekends.
Train journeys are about possibilities. They denote a change in state. When you arrive, you are no longer the same person who departed. You can make new friends en route, or find old enemies; you may get diarrhoea from eating stale samosas or cholera from drinking contaminated water. And, dare I say it, you might even discover love. Sitting in berth number three of coach S7 of train 2926A, with fifty thousand rupees tucked inside my underwear, the tantalizing possibility which tickled my senses and thrilled my heart was that I might, just might, be about to fall in love with a beautiful traveller in a blue salwar kameez. And when I say love, I don't mean the unrequited, unequal love that we profess for movie stars and celebrities. I mean real, practical, possible love. Love which does not end in tears on the pillow, but which can fructify into marriage. And kids. And family holidays in Goa.
I had only fifty thousand rupees, but every rupee had a technicolour dream written on it and they stretched out on a cinemascope screen in my brain to become fifty million. I held my breath and wished for that moment to last as long as it possibly could, because a waking dream is always more fleeting than a sleeping one.
After a while, the brother and sister tire of their board game. The boy comes and sits next to me.
We begin talking. I learn that his name is Akshay and his sister is Meenakshi. They live in Delhi and are going to Mumbai to attend an uncle's wedding. Akshay is excited about his Playstation 2 and his computer games. He asks me about MTV and surfing the Internet and mentions some porn sites. I tell him that I speak English, read Australian Geographic, play Scrabble and have seven girlfriends, three of them foreign. I tell him that I have a Playstation 3 console and a Pentium 5 computer and I surf the Internet day and night. I tell him that I am going to Mumbai to meet my best friend, Salim, and I will be taking a taxi from Bandra Terminus to Ghatkopar.
I should have known that it is more difficult to fool a sixteen-year-old than a sixty-year-old.
Akshay sees through my deception. 'Ha! You don't know anything about computers. Playstation 3 hasn't even been released. You are just a big liar,' he mocks me.
I cannot resist it. 'Oh, so you think it is all a big lie, eh? Well, Mr Akshay, let me tell you that right here, right now, I have fifty thousand rupees in my pocket. Have you ever seen so much money in your life?'
Akshay refuses to believe me. He challenges me to show the money, and the prospect of impressing him is too tempting for me. I turn around, push my hand into my pants and bring out the manila envelope, slightly damp and smelling of urine. I surreptitiously take out the sheaf of crisp thousand-rupee notes and flutter them before him triumphantly. Then I quickly put them back and deposit the envelope in its former resting place.
You should have seen Akshay's eyes. They literally popped out of their sockets. It was a victory to be savoured for eternity. For the first time in my life, I had something more tangible than a dream to back up a claim. And for the first time in my life, I saw something new reflected in the eyes that saw me. Respect. It taught me a very valuable lesson. That dreams have power only over your own mind. But with money you can have power over the minds of others. And once again it made the fifty thousand inside my underwear feel like fifty million.
* * *
It is ten pm now and everybody is about to turn in for the night. Akshay's mother pulls out bed linen from a green holdall and begins preparing the four berths her family will use. The young mother with the baby is sleeping on the side berth, without worrying about pillows and bed sheets. I don't have bedding and I am not that sleepy, so I sit next to the window and feel the cold wind caress my face, watching the train tunnel through the darkness. The lower berth directly opposite me is taken by Akshay's mother, the upper by Meenakshi. The father climbs up on the berth above me and Akshay takes the upper berth on the side, above the mother and child.
