Much ado about nothing

Spoiler - If the whole thing seems like a lot of noise about nothing, it is because that is exactly what it is.

A parent and a grandparent were to leave on a trip to the Motherland, to oversee additions to the family. Partly due to the Great Indian RailwayTamasha, it so happened that the parent had to catch a bus from Pune to Bombay to catch a train, that, left to its own devices, would have anyway made its way to Pune. So, it fell on the kids to deposit the grandparent at Pune Railway Station. At 3 in the night. Since the family car was not yet part of the family, they had to stoop to a rick. And thus started the hunt for the Great Indian Looter. After several atrocious candidates who left them laughing with tears, they stumbled across one who seemed too reasonable to be true. Desperation won over suspicion however, and an exchange of mobile numbers later, the kids were home. The next day being a regular working dayand the kids being, at least in the outside world, responsible working professionals, bed time that day was Calvinistic. (Calvinoian?) She slept to the sound of Karan Thapar droning about a racist calling Shilpa Shetty a Big Brother. He slept. With two mobiles and an old fashioned alarm clock set to signal the end of the world at 2 a.m.

Everything went off at 2 a.m. and they wished the world could have ended instead. They spread the morning cheer by waking up therickshawala . The grandparent of course was all packed and ready to go. There is something about the people of that generation. Sometimes, the seem more alive at 80 than you did at 20. Dressed forAntarctica , they stepped into the surprisingly warm January night. The journey to the railway station passed in relative silence because before they could really get down and dirty aboutrickshawalas, the specimen driving them confessed to being a Tamilain. She could not have been entirely awake during the journey because later she distinctly remembered feeling envious of the sleeping homeless, all tucked in and comfortable on the footpath. The railway station was surprisingly full of life. The train was surprisingly on time. A brief family reunion and the kids were off, with warnings about eating food offered bystrangers and footboard travel. All this work had made her hungry. A midnight snack and a motorcycle ride later, they were back in bed and fast asleep. The world had not ended, after all.

(Nope. No forgotten tickets. No wrong station, no wrong platform, no wrong train, no wrong grandparent... Me and the Indian Railway come together and the world does not end! Almost makes a believer out of me.)