Fragments from my alzheimers

From Mumbai to Aurangabad, the 6:10am train, 2nd class AC Seat car, 7 hours.

This was the one we bought the emergency tickets for at the last minute for the hefty cost of $7 apiece (our later 2nd class non-AC sleeper coming back was $3). Our seats were one in front of the other, both left hand window seats, with Azzam in front and me behind, squeezed in by several dozen Korean middle aged women on a tour.

The short-permed stocky ladies waged a battle of armrests with me for the first hour of the ride, at one point actually demanding in Korean that I give up my assigned window seat and moving ahead to the empty middle seat next to Azzam. In eventual resignation, I did move up front to the empty middle seat next to Azzam, only to discover that the seat back was broken and kept flopping backwards. I returned to my old seat, forcing the squat, permed woman out of it, and asserted my co-ownership of the armrest. This seemed to impress the women, and they spent the next six hours of the journey talking to me in Korean and feeding me from their tour-packed breakfasts.

It started out with a few proffered orange wedges, which were gifted with such volume and vigour that my hands were sticky with juice and littered with seeds. The oranges were followed by an offering of boiled egg, lovely coffee-flavoured boiled sweets from Malaysia(for these they actually demanded that their tour leader give me a handful from his bag- I'm still working my way through them), and a makeshift cup full of spicy korean ramen noodles, made from folding the lid of the noodle cup into a cone and chop-sticking several consecutive courses of noodles and broth into the cone for me to down in one shot.

They had actually demanded that the tour leader bring me my own private ramen cup but I explained that I would be ordering the train breakfast soon, not to worry, please stop feeding me. They made a second shot glass out of the paper lid, filled it with more noodles and broth, and insisted that I pass it forward to my poor starving husband, along with a fistful of coffee candies.

The feeding frenzy carried on for a few more hours, culminating in lunch, when the train stopped for an hour somewhere in the middle of someplace. The train-carful of Korean matrons decided to donate part of their packed lunches to the beggar kids lining the windows, with hands to mouth miming eating and imploring with enormous eyes. One of the women gathered a bag full of the foil-tray packed white bread sandwiches and handed it generously to the kids-- charitable deed du jour accomplished.

The kids, however, opened the bag and peeked inside, lifted the cardboard lids from the foil trays, looked quizzically at the white bread and processed cheese crustless sandwiches, the proceeded to open up each tray, dump the sandwiches out on a bench and assemble all the valuable cardboard and metal in a fresh new bag. They seemed delighted by their massive recyclable haul and ran off skipping to their mother. The foot high stack of sandwiches just sat, slipping downhill, on the grimy bench, untouched. A thin, ragged, old man who had been begging at the train across from us stopped to investigate the sandwiches, nibbled a pinched nub of crust, then walked on.

The sandwiches were ignored by all except a mangy dog who ate the cheese out from the middles. When we pulled away after an hour, the stack of white crustless sponge was still there. The Korean ladies were furious, watching their charitable donation being repeatedly rebuffed. Their fury reached a boiling point when another woman put out a final bag of garbage and the same kids ran back, tipped out the last of the sandwiches onto the ground, and happily set to folding up the metal trays into a neat pile to join the other ones in her old grocery bag. Twenty-odd middle aged korean noses pressed against the window glass and howled, insulted and bewildered. Charity rebuffed. I felt for them, though I also had to stifle a fierce, swallowed burst of laughter.