H Narayanan
The Grant Trunk Express chugged off from New Delhi Junction with one of the first class compartments replete with passengers all bound for Madras. Scarcely had the train moved when a few passengers began leafing through the pages of their favourite dailies, some others were engrossed in reading their pocket books while one or two of them were enjoying the sight of beautiful scenery unfolding outside the windows before their eyes.
On the stroke of half past nine in the night on the next day the superfast train screeched to a halt at Vijayawada Junction.
A decent looking, sprucely attired, middle-aged, guy in gabardine pants and a terry cot shirt with a colourfully striped tie around its collar entered the same compartment and parked himself at a cosy corner on the lower berth close to the door. Soon digging into his port, he gently pulled out a small bottle of a pungently sweet smelling perfume and dabbed a dot of it on the back of the palm of everyone in the compartment on his own volition. Its smell pervading the whole compartment and price being dirt-cheap none of those around him could resist the temptation of buying at least one bottle each.
While every passenger was sniffing up the smell of the stuff, the salesman drew out a packet of biscuits from his port and offered one piece to each and everyone around. Keeping company with them, he too began nibbling a piece of it. Relishing its scrumptious taste, some of the passengers took one more packet each. When they asked him the price of the biscuits he said they were free of cost, no matter whether or not they bought the perfume from him. After scarcely an hour or so the whole caboodle of his co-passengers crashed out and the perfumer pretentiously yawned shutting his eyes as if in slumber.
Well before the express could reach its terminus (Madras Central) the apparently upright salesman cashed in on the opportunity by depriving them of the valuables on their person such as watches, minor chains found around the scrag of a few of them as also their money purses and shoving them nippily into his suitcase, he kept awaiting an opportunity to make himself scarce from the spot.
It was slick at half past six in the matinal hour that the express came to a halt at Madras Central. The deceitful bloke letting all his co-passengers fast asleep in the train fled the station unobtrusively carrying the booty. Those who came to the station to receive them as also the cleaners who had come to clean the compartment were shocked to see them sleeping sound despite all their measures to wake them up like shouting, ruffling them up and what not, failing to rouse them up. Soon the staff of the Railway Protection Force who got at the scene and the kith and kin of the passengers who were there to receive them suspecting some foul play shifted them together with their luggage to the nearest hospital where the doctors considered it to be a case of sleep caused by sedative drugs. The off-putting incident was a lesson for passengers travelling in reserved compartments not to consume anything offered by strangers on trains running long distances.