I was making daily trips to near by town from my place to get engineering entrance exam coaching. In fact, I and my friend were doing it as we both from the same place.
We used to have a monthly train-pass for our trip. That day before returning back to my hometown, I had looked at my pass then I realized that it got expired a week back. I know that it is illegal to travel in train without a ticket or train-pass, but I thought just for a single trip nothing would happen, also so far no one had asked us to present our passes. So I decided to travel with that expired pass. That time I had no idea what would gona happen.
That general compartment was fully crowded as we went inside. Somehow we managed to find a seat and settled there. After a while, the train started and after some time, we heard TC voice asking for ticket, and within a minute he came to our place. It was a big shock to me. I chided myself for traveling without ticket and scolded my fate as exactly the TC had shown up when I was traveling like that. I didn’t know what to do, I was closely observing him. Actually he won’t ask all people to display the ticket; he randomly picks-up few candidates. May be they had gained so much experience and know exactly whom to ask.
I was pretending as if I had a pass, so that I won’t be his random pickup guy. However, how much action I did, he finally turned to my side and asked me to show pass. I stalled and checking my pockets, meanwhile, he was asking some other candidates as well. I didn’t know why I did, but I pulled my friend’s train-pass from his pocket and showed to him. My idea might be he would check that pass and he would leave the place without asking my friend to display his pass. But, he had looked at my pass and then he asked my friend to show his pass.
God! What was going on... all planets were lined-up against us or what? First of all traveling with expired-pass was a mistake, and second trying to trick him by presenting friend’s train-pass as mine. That’s what I thought. My friend told he was holding indeed his pass only, then TC understood what had happened and his face turned red with rage. He almost shouted at me and asked to show my actual pass. I showed my expired pass. He took and said, “So, you were traveling with expired pass from the past one week, aha. Get up and come with me”. He also asked my friend to come with him. I felt ashamed as everyone in that compartment looked at us as if we were thieves and riots.
I tried to convince him by saying I forgot to renew my monthly pass that I would do it immediately after getting down from the train. But later I realized that actually he didn’t care much that I was traveling with expired pass, he felt insulted as I tried to trick him by showing my friend’s pass. So he took us to some other compartment and asked us to sit. He enquired what we were doing; I said that we were taking coaching for engineering entrance. Then he laughed and threatened us saying, we could forgot about doing engineering as he was going to put us in jail, so that would ruin our career. My friend terrified and burst into tears after hearing the word jail from his mouth. My situation was also almost same. I thought he would release us after charging some fine, but didn’t expect that he would put us in jail.
We had pleaded him saying we wouldn’t do that again, please forgive us etc. But he didn’t listen. I felt pity on my friend, although he had a valid pass, unnecessarily he was trapped in that situation. In the rest of the journey, continuously he was saying that we never make into engineering and get a respectable job; instead he had cursed us saying we would end up doing some low profile jobs.
When we had reached the railway station, he asked us to get-down as he wanted to handover us to railway police. As a final chance, we begged him saying don’t do that, but didn’t know why but he was so deterministic to handover us to police.
Daily many people were traveling with-out having tickets in the train, but I never heard a single case where TC putting anyone in jail. I witnessed many times, TCs take money from those people and release them. In few cases, they don’t even take money, simply ignore them. But why he was so rigid in our case, I didn’t understand. I stopped crying. I know there was no use to cry. However, my friend was continuously crying.
He took us to the railway office (note: not a police station). There were two people in side; TC told to them what had happened. One guy looked at us as if that was the first time someone bought into the office because of no ticket. They took the TC to a corner side and they whispered something.
Then one guy returned back and said, “See, you guys are looking like a college students and we don’t want to ruin your career, so we decided to leave you this time”. But, he pointed to me and said, I had to go out and get some money for them, and meanwhile my friend would stay in station.
Our faces flashed as if we had released from Tihar-jail. I quickly went to my uncle’s home and explained my situation to him and got the money. They took it and released us.
Since then we never dared to travel in train without train-pass or ticket.
We still laugh whenever we remember this incident. After getting jobs in s/w, we urged to meet that TC to show our status. But somehow it didn’t happen. May be someday we do that.
