Conversations on a Train

“The Amtrak train to Chicago is now arriving on platform two,” the station manager shouted out to a room of fifty people waiting at the New Center station in Detroit. What followed was absolute mayhem, thought Rupi to herself. All around her people leapt at their bags, grabbed their belongings, and prayed internally that the wallet they had taken out twenty minutes ago was still in their bags. Rupi was no different—slipping her jacket on, she stuffed her book in its jacket pocket so she had fewer things to hold. Free hands, free mind was her motto. She stood in the line, part of the fifty, excited for everything her solo trip to Chicago was going to hold. 

She waited on the platform for the train behind the yellow line, like a law-abiding citizen, and was promptly rewarded with an open seat in a four-person booth. Rupi picked the seat next to the window, hoping and praying no one dared to sit in front of her. She took her laptop out and got started on some work for a course she was taking. Headphones on and music blasting till the people around her could probably make out the songs she was listening to. Rupi liked to drown out her mind. It allowed her to focus on the task right in front of her.

Before she knew it, an hour had passed, and the train was stopped at the next station. A group of five people boarded the train, and a middle-aged man sat down right in front of Rupi. Her shoulders tensed but she looked up at him from her laptop and gave a small smile. He smiled back at her, and Rupi felt a little bit more at ease. She finished typing out her last sentence for homework that was due this weekend and shut her laptop. She grabbed her book and got sucked into the story immediately. 

Her headphones around her neck, she rested her head on them as she read about this Irish woman’s life. She loved this style of writing; it was a memoir about Molly, the main character’s life, as she walked around her home and town recalling stories related to objects and people as she came across them. It was unique in the gentle way that people teach babies how to swim, by throwing them in the pool. She was thrown into Molly’s life and had come out swimming at the other end, entranced by the objects of what was such a full life. She noticed out the corner of her eye that her seat neighbor had picked out his own book—The Old Man and the Sea, a Hemingway novel which was on Rupi’s never-ending list of books to read. She loved the classics and wondered if she should ask him how he was faring while reading it, swimming or sinking. 

She looked up from her book and smiled at him again. “What do you think of that book so far?” she asked, half-whispering, half-yelling, so the rest of the train car couldn’t hear her feeble attempt at making conversation. The old man smiled back and closed his book, folding the corner of his page. Somehow this move made Rupi feel like she was among friends. A firm defender of the dog-ear method of bookmarking, she liked to think she was leaving her mark on her books for years to come. It would be found in a used bookstore, if those still existed in fifty years after she died, and someone would open her copy to see her mark on page fifty, where Molly talks about her relationship with her brother. Maybe this will connect with someone down the line, or maybe they’ll wish Rupi used a bookmark. 

“You know, I’ve only recently gotten into reading. I’m recently retired, so I’ve had a list of classics that I need to get through. And I like it so far. The language is harder than I expected, at least for an electrical engineer like me to follow,” the old man responded, with a slight twinge of an English accent. He spoke with a fervor that can only be described as that of a retired man longing to have conversations that didn’t revolve around his ailing knees.

“That’s fun. What other books do you have on your list?” Rupi asked, unable to resist a conversation about books. 

“Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence was a book I recently finished. I liked it a lot, it’s a controversial book. You know, the place I’m from in the UK, it was way outside of London, and at the time, books, and reading books like that one especially was considered out of our class. So, I’m glad I’m getting to it in my retirement,” he responded.

“Yeah, my culture also comes from different types of class constructs that people are constantly trying to break. It’s interesting to hear that that’s prevalent in a first world country like the UK.”

“May I ask where you’re from?”

“Yeah, I’m from India,” Rupi responded, expecting the conversation to go south now that she had admitted this. A Brit and an Indian sat across from each other on a train to Chicago was faring to be a good joke so far, and she didn’t want it to turn bitter. 

“Not that class issues didn’t exist before colonization, but I’m sure the British didn’t help.”

“No, they did not. I feel like a lot of their agenda was focused on dividing people with their differences. And there’s so many differences in India, I mean we don’t even speak the same dialect of a language in a state.”

“The culture is so diverse, and I’ve always wanted to experience that. Visiting India in my retirement has also been a bucket list. My wife, she just recently passed, loved Indian food.”

Rupi froze, thinking of a response that didn’t involve sorry’s and what happened’s. Here was this man, whose name she didn’t know, sharing personal things and having a real conversation with her. Did she have so much in common with an older white man?

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” she mumbled, staring at her hands.

The man put his book down on the table between them and then moved his hand left to right, indicating that it was okay. “She had MS, so it was quick. I just wasn’t prepared to live life alone for so long you know. I’m only sixty-three, our two children are far from us, from me. I’m visiting my son; he’s a PhD candidate for chemistry.”

“Oh no way, my friend is too!” Rupi responded, looking for an out from something that was getting too real. She was twenty-four, struggling with loneliness, and being single. She had recently come to the realization that this feeling would not be curbed permanently and would come up increasingly as she got older. 

The conversation then divulged into niceties about the man’s son and inquiries about how he’s thirty years old and is just now figuring out what he wants to do with his life. This seemed like quite the achievement to Rupi, since absolutely no one around her had any idea what they were doing with their lives. The rest of the train ride was a blur.

If Rupi worked hard to recollect what they talked about, she would’ve said the world, politics, life, and how to navigate it. But really, they talked about nothing and everything. Three hours had passed and she didn’t see herself thinking about how to escape this conversation, just about what to say next. The old man touched on advice navigating the professional world and keeping your cards close to your chest. He spoke more about life after losing a partner and how his vision for what retirement was going to look like was shattered in a day. 

She chose to be vulnerable, too, and talk about how her vision for life at twenty-four was much different than what she thought it was going to be. Nothing gave her purpose so far, and it was hard to work daily without knowing what she was working toward. Her bills were paid, and the daily things didn’t stress her, and while she knew this was a privileged position to be in, she wanted to make her mark on the world. Let the people know she was here, and she was alive, and she had lived. The old man quoted back Not Marble, Nor the Gilded Monuments, and Rupi shrieked back that she had read Sonnet 55 in high school, and how crazy it was that even across continents, and across different generations, they had found common ground in art. 

As the train got closer to Chicago, and Rupi collected her things, the man reached over with a card in his hand and said, “I hope you don’t think this is weird, I just haven’t had a real conversation like this with anyone in a while. Here’s my number and my card, and I’d love to chat books with you, if you ever wanted to.”

Rupi smiled at the card and said, “Not weird.” Unsure if she would use it, the card fell into her bag, into the abyss of things she’d vowed to do but never got around to doing.

“This is the last stop on this train for Union Station.”

All the passengers performed the same tasks they had four hours ago, scrambling for their wallets and belongings. Rupi’s hands were free and her mind felt lighter than it had a couple of hours ago. The old man (Richard, the card said his name was) and Rupi said their goodbyes. And as she got out of the train and put her headphones on, to finally start her solo weekend in Chicago, she heard someone yell out her name. “I’m sorry I couldn’t let you leave without meeting my son—this is James.”

Rupi couldn’t help but smile and wonder if James folded the corners of his pages when reading his books, just like his dad. Rupi thought about how it was just like in the Shakespearean sonnet; this conversation would be swept with sluttish time and stay on in just their memories. The conversation they had wouldn’t be exactly what it was but romanticized by time and longing for something real and raw like bearing your heart out to a stranger at 10:30am on a train to Chicago.

A 25-year-old engineer by day and an aspiring author by night, or whenever she has a second, Ishani Kapoor is an avid enjoyer of the arts. She likes to read/write about uniquely weird female protagonists. She loves to watch movies in her free time, travel, and see the world, and spend time with her cat Matcha. She can often be found exploring cities on foot or train and loves a good chai latte.

Featured image by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash.