The Economiser

1st January 2012 seemed as good a moment as any to swallow the fuck-it-all pill and get on a random train off the Pune railway platform. I had been working as a freelancer in the city for the last twelve months and my broke-back balance still miraculously contained 5k. It was almost 10 minutes before the 2230 Rajkot-Coimbatore express was about to chug off that my best friend from school and I decided to get on it. Midway through the journey that we were sharing with a lovely old couple from Bangalore, the TT showed up in our compartment and we had to buy tickets. My friend had 5k in her account too and the 2 tickets had cost us a little over 2k. I communicated my panic to her non-verbally and she agreed with a sad nod that after reaching Coimbatore that was 27 hours away, there was no way in hell we'd make it back to Pune. Who wanted to come back anyway? We let the question marks dissolve in the air. After 16 hours of taking in no solid food and some milk, we got off at Bangalore. While gulping down a bunch of 2 buck samosas we cajoled a cyber-cafe owner into letting us book our bus tickets to Mangalore, we looked the part of two stranded innocent college women and he agreed. Mangalore was 10 hours away and had clean beaches. Half a dozen bananas and a carton of milk sufficed as our dinner for the night. We then headed to the bus stand and tarried there for the night . The Volvo bus carried two slumbering souls right to the gates of hotel Goldfinch - an amazing 4-star haven. We went right up to the washroom and each of us took a bath as the other stood guard outside with towels and shampoo. We filled our bellies with soup and frolicked for two days on the beaches of Panambur, Ullal and Surathkal. The beach life-guards shared their shack and rice pancakes with us. Amid heavy rains we found a bus to Coorg. We bathed the elephants of Dubare Reserve, rode a raft and guzzled rich hot, filter coffee. On our way back to Pune with 4k still on us we found our bodies on a bus to Goa, where we rented a two-wheeler and zoomed across Calangute, finding our repose outside a pristine Church in Mapusa. We muddied ourselves on the beaches of Vagator and Baga, and cleaned it all off inside the restrooms of five-star resorts. We had 40 rum chocolate balls inside us when we hit the familiar horizon of Pune and exchanged panic looks of "How did we end up here ?"