We only got a few hours’ worth of sleep, before it was time to leave once again. VMK dropped Prit and me to the Kurla railway station in the wee hours of the morning. I had bought myself a ticket to Varanasi, and Prit bought a ticket at the last minute on the same train but only until Nashik.

One of the first of many many travel tickets to be bought this year

A few months earlier, I had decided to buy a new mobile phone for myself (for the last five years, I had been working for a major mobile phone manufacturer where test phones were available aplenty. So I remember feeling a bit odd when I had to actually spend money to buy myself a phone). So I found myself at one of the numerous shops on CMH road - a busy commercial hub of Bangalore - which dealt exclusively with mobile phones. Mobile phones of almost all brands and in various price ranges could be bought there so the choice was large. But I had decided to get one of the cheaper ones so my choice was limited. In the end I had narrowed it down to just two phones. Something inexplicable happened between the time I was looking at the two boxes on the counter trying to decide which one to purchase and the time I walked out the door. Was it excellent salesmenship on the part of the employees of the store or was it plain stupidity on my part could be an interesting research topic I think. But the upshot was that by the time I was walking out the door, I had burned a large hole in my pocket and had a sleek new Blackberry in my hands. It was a phone I tried hard to like. I ignored all the problems I continually had with it from day one. I was in denial, perhaps because of the small fortune that I had spent on it. But it did “look” like a pretty amazing phone.

Getting back to the story, Prit and I were on the train talking about my travels and where I would go. We thought it would be best for me not to travel to unknown, far-off places with such an obviously expensive phone. Prit had a simple Samsung phone, and so we decided to exchange our phones. I told Prit about all that was wrong with the phone, but he said it wouldn’t bother him too much as he wasn’t much of a cellphone user. I had a feeling he would regret the decision, but there was definitely a part of me that rejoiced at finally being rid of that piece of crap.

Eventually, the train rolled into the railway station at Nashik and Prit had to go. We had shared some good times in the past week and I was sad that we now had to go our own ways. He wished me luck for my travels ahead and we parted with hope to meet again in Europe some time later in the year.

The remaining 26 hours till Varanasi were simply an ordeal, and I was happy when it was finally over. As I exited the train station, and into the mass of people, it hit me that in all my rush of the past few days, I had forgotten to bring some small gift for Jana. It was too late now to go looking for something to buy, so I thought I should at least get a bouquet of flowers. I still had one hour before she would be free to come and pick me up from the railway station. That should be time enough to find a florist and buy a bouquet, right?

Wrong.

This is Varanasi, not Bangalore. There are no florists here. There is no concept of gifting flowers to people here. There is actually a flowering flowers business, but those flowers are either for the gods or for the dead (Varanasi, by the way, is for devout Hindus a preferred place to die - because then you’re allegedly guaranteed a place in Heaven).

Asking the locals for a florist finally led me to a “phoolon ki mandi”, a sort of a flower market where flowers are bought and sold only in large quantities. Nobody wanted to sell me a few flowers, and nobody was willing, or had the expertise to make a bouquet. Finally, I decided to make one myself. I collected a few flowers lying around, scrounged some discarded strings, and started earnestly on my ambitious project. One of the flower vendors who had refused to help me earlier now took pity on me and offered to help. But he wasn’t much better than I was, but at the end we somehow made the “thing” resemble a bouquet :) I gave him a tip for his assistance, and that made him visibly happy.

[I have been asked to post a picture of the bouquet, but sadly I never clicked a snap of it :(]

Jana came to the railway station at around 4 pm, and it was simply great to see each other after so long. We went back to her guesthouse and spent the rest of the day just catching up.