If you’ve gathered anything from the title, this blog entry is about the best way to from Pune to Mumbai when you’re totally out of money! This entry is totally true, it’s based on a true experience that happened not so long ago. I was in it!
Well it all started a couple of days after the internal exams got over in our 3rd year. We had entered the Diwali vacations! It was the day after the exams had ended; last night was a blur of partying at Carnival and exhaustion from exam burnout. All my room-mates are from Mumbai, and a couple of other guys too (ill name them as the story goes on). So Day 1 of the vacation, and it was decided that we will have some fun on this day and leave for Mumbai all together tomorrow morning. The time for departure was set at 10am exact. So on Day 1, we went out, chilled, greeted people and said our goodbyes. As the day wore on, we decided that since it’s our last day here (that was not considering that we’d be back after a month); we should party again, but since we need to conserve some money for the return trip, we can always party at home. So we pooled what money we had, after carefully keeping aside travel allowance, and went and bought the necessities of the party (booze, smokes, food, hookah stuff etc). When we got back, the party had started, unfortunately for us, a few more of the local guys had decided to gate-crash when someone let slip about the home-party. Suddenly there were 9 people instead of 5 (the extras were bipu, jaggy, kadakpav and sudhya – all of whom hail from Pune or its outskirts). This was a problem. When a few of them said they wouldn’t drink, we thought we might about manage.
The party started and went on for a while, everybody drank, suddenly we were out of alcohol. In that deliriously drunken state, we decided to go bring some more booze. This was uncalled-for, but really if anyone reading this has ever been to a party like this, they’ll know that the party doesn’t stop till everyone’s either passed out or puked! A couple of guys took all the money we had and went to some crazy shitty back-alley of Yerwada, and bought some double-priced booze from the back of a whore-house (wait, can I type that? Hell I don’t give a shit).
Now we had booze, the party continued, everyone was shot to hell, and “end of day’s play” was called. The revelers crashed wherever they could find space. Now, since it was decided that we would leave for Mumbai the next day at around 10am, an 8:30am alarm was fixed on every one of the Mumbai-guy’s phones. Early next morning (actually it felt like we’d slept about half an hour back); the alarms started to ring. Curses were thrown, mobiles were thrown and finally it was Upendra Singh (the most mature of the lot) to wake up. With a lot of effort, he managed to wake the rest of us. The local guys, when woken up, promptly left, without even washing their faces (well they did take a dispirin each before going – since we are pharmacists, we keep a stock of these around the house).
It was time to go, we got together by around 2pm. (which was so past the morning deadline, that all trains scheduled between Mumbai and Pune had already left). There were curses thrown again, but a decision had to be made.
Basics of Mumbai-Pune travel with expenses: To go from Pune to Mumbai, there are various transportation schemes I’ll list them out below based on their costs.
- By flight – that will cost about Rs. 3000/- and thus, is totally out of question. Though while I’m at this, I would like to ask a general question – Who the Fu** goes from Pune to Mumbai by flight?
- By Train – Scheduled Trains run either in the morning, i.e. 6am – 8am; or in the evening i.e. 4pm – 6pm. There is one train that goes in the afternoon, which we had initially decided to catch, that leaves around 11am from Pune. It’s a crazily long journey, but then it runs at a human hour, so who gives a shit right? Anyway, these journeys well cost you around Rs. 80/- if you go by General Compartment (means you fight for any inch of space available, or sit on the ground, or stand your way through the 3hr journey); or you can take the scheduled ones which means you gotta reach the station a good couple of hours before the train and it costs around Rs. 100/- or so.
- By Sumo – Or other variants of these transport vehicles. It’s a shared kinda thing, which means you’ll probably be squashed in the middle seat with 3 other behemoths, all of whom haven’t ever heard mention of the word “deodorant”. Well this costs around Rs. 150/- or so depending on the season. (it’s all supply and demand you see).
- By Asiad – This is the bus system that operates between the two cities. There’s two variants here; i.e. the A/C Volvo (Rs. 200/-) or the Regular bus (Rs. 150/-). These leave pretty much all the time but take around 4 hours or so to get there. Which is a tad more than the previous two methods and a whole lot more than method one.
These were the options available to us, it was time to pick. It came to the final straw where the decision would be taken on the basis of the total amount of money that we had left. The options that we gave ourselves were Sumo and Asiad considering Flying was out of the question and the trains had already left unless we would wait for the 6pm train, which meant another wasted day, and that we would reach Mumbai around 9:30pm which made it really difficult for the guys who had to take local trains to their respective residences in various parts of Mumbai.
When it came to the budget calculation, we got a rather rude shock, the total remaining per person on average was Rs. 80/- ; I say average, because Sharad had only 30 bucks on him, and after totaling what everyone had, we managed to scrounge an average 80 bucks per person. This meant that both the above options were out of the question.
Discussions and arguments followed, it wouldn’t help to wait or do anything of that sort, because the remaining money was never going to materialize out of nothing, we HAD to manage on this much. Finally after an hour and a half of deliberation, Harsh suggested we take the local train to lonavala, and from then on, try to hitch a ride or something of the sort. Since there were 5 guys, we couldn’t really get into too much trouble, and, it was an adventure. So that’s how we were going to go. The plan had made everyone a slight bit excited if not weary of the possibilities of the journey.
The Journey:
It started off well enough, we managed to walk upto Pimpri Station, which is not really a casual walk from where we live, but since we were really broke, we decided to try it out. We got there puffing and panting after about 20 minutes of hard labor (meaning a not very brisk walk). We had reached destination 1. Rejoice. But, when we got there, the next local to lonavala was to leave in the next 15 minutes, and we didn’t have tickets. The journey from Pimpri to Lonavala is about an hour and a bit by train and so, too long to risk going ticketless. The line at the ticket window had about enough people to fill up the Wankhede Stadium to capacity (or atleast that’s what it looked like). We took turns and finally managed to get the tickets about a minute before the train left. We scrambled to the station just seconds before the 3:20pm time-limit, just about tumbled into the train in time, only to realize that the train was going to leave the station 15 minutes late. At this time we actually had the enthusiasm to laugh about this. The enthusiasm wasn’t going to last too long.
People continued to pour in, we found place enough for about a quarter of a person on one of the benches they install in the train, one person would squeeze in to the space and enjoy his comforts while the others would bide their time standing until they just couldn’t take it anymore and made that guy get up and sat down in his place. There were so many people in that bogey, we could barely breathe, which was good, considering when I did manage to breathe, I realized a lot of these people thought “bathing” was a serious waste of time! Lonavala arrived after a while, and not a moment too soon. We tumbled out as we had tumbled in, realizing after a while that Kevin had lost his wallet in the train. Disaster struck again, we were now short of his share of the money. The ticket to Lonavala had cost us 28 bucks per head and thus we now had a total of Rs. 260/- remaining which translated to roughly Rs. 52/- per head. Now we had to get from Lonavala to Mumbai and to our respective homes in Mumbai in 50 bloody bucks per head! It was madness already and became nearly anarchic when Upen decided that he would die en-route unless he got something to eat (we had skipped lunch, plainly because we couldn’t afford it).
Upen was rudely told that he wouldn’t get anything to eat unless he reached home, and if he did die on the way, we would leave him there and go home. Needless to say, he didn’t take the last part too well. Anyway, it was time to move on; we were now at Lonavala and had to get to Dadar. The local train we were supposed to take from here would take us directly there, unfortunately though, we missed that one, the next would be after a little more than an hour, so we asked around to find the next best way to get there. People standing around told us that we could take one local to Neral and from there take another one to Katraj, From Katraj there would be regular locals onwards to Dadar. We were rather tired of traveling by locals and the prospect of changing 2 trains to get to our destination didn’t seem very inviting, especially considering 4 out of 5 of us (excluding me) would have to take locals again from Dadar to wherever they lived in Mumbai. Now it was either that or to wait another hour at this station. We decided to take the option that seemed easier (it wasn’t as we realized in due course).
Apparently the next local to Neral was standing there at the platform and if we missed that one, we’d have to wait for the next one, we decided to risk it and run to the ticket counter. Just as we started our sprint, someone told us that the train was about to leave. It was decision time, we had to take this train, and we couldn’t risk buying tickets and coming back for it, we were going to have to travel ticketless. Believe me, this is not an easy task. If we got caught, we’d have to pay Rs. 284/- per head for the offense. This was impossible, considering that was more than we had in total between 5 people!
We risked it, we clambered into the nearest compartments just as the train was leaving the station. Unfortunately for us, a couple of us (Harsh and I) had managed to get into the baggage compartment and that meant one helluva painful ride, thankfully for us, it was a short one. We had no idea where the other guys had got to. A couple of calls later, we found out that Sharad was safely in the Second Class compartment and was trying to hide so as not to get caught in case a TC turned up. Kevin and Upen on the other hand were quite unlucky, the compartment they’d managed to climb into was a Women’s compartment, and they were facing some stern resistance for being there. In desperation they explained their predicament to the ladies and were let off the hook (for a while). After a painfully bumpy ride for the two of us, we managed to reach Katraj station. The both of us hopped off just seconds before the TC came to check on the baggage compartment (this sounds almost hindi movie like doesn’t it? It was true though). We waited at the “vada-pav wala” at the station for a while until the others turned up. Sharad seemed unharmed and quite spritely for some reason (apparently looking at his harried countenance, one of the people in the compartment had offered him a “beedi” and that had helped him out a lot). The other two were a completely different story. Kevin apparently had been sitting next to a Fish-seller woman, and smelled so disgusting, we refused to allow him near us until he emptied almost half a bottle of deodorant on himself (a deodorant he obtained from my bag). Upen seemed to have split a couple of seems in his pants on the way into the bogey back at Neral and had to change in the waiting room to prevent onlookers’ stares.
We thanked our stars that we hadn’t been caught and went to the ticket counter to buy tickets for the rest of the journey. At this stage it was pretty uneventful. The line was small, there weren’t too many people in the line considering it was 5pm in the evening and the rush-hour hadn’t yet begun, anyway we were against the rush-hour “traffic” if you can call it that. The train was waiting at the platform. It was empty. We made silent prayers to thank the Almighty for giving us a place to sit. We sat down looking like a set of people who’d just escaped from a riot. Most managed to catch up on some well-deserved sleep for about 20 minutes until the crowd started pouring in. Somewhere post-Kalyan, a gigantic crowd started pouring into the train. It was back to battle-stations all over again. We had to keep steady to prevent people sitting on us; we were getting trampled by a mass of humanity. Some even tried to throw their bags on us, probably thinking we were part of the furniture. The crowd didn’t subside, but got worse with time, and Dadar didn’t seem to be getting closer. It seems there are atleast 100 stations between Katraj and Dadar and we were stopping at all of them. Unfortunately nobody seemed to be getting out, people just kept getting in.
Sharad managed to produce a bent cigarette out of some pocket and smoked it out the window for a while until some lady up front threatened to call the TC. It was impossible for her to do such a thing considering the mass of people in between her and the door, but we weren’t going to take any more chances. We asked him to throw it out. The rest of the journey passed rather uneventfully. We managed to get to Dadar just before we crashed out of exhaustion. We got off and assembled at the gate where everyone would disperse into various directions.
There was little discussion at that point. We had realized we’d made one of the most dangerous journeys in the history of time (at this point, I’d like to ask Edmund Hillory to swap and wonder if he’d make it). Nevertheless, it’d been an adventure to remember. We’d done something very few I’m sure have tried before and come out victorious. We’d never believed it would be like this, to save a little money we’d put ourselves through one of the biggest bungles in history, but survived, only just. A bit of our sanity got taken from us in this journey. Dripping with sweat, exhausted to the bone, bleeding (Upen had managed to cut himself where his pant had torn). But our spirits felt well, the only plus point probably. Until, we decided to count the money. Turns out, the journey from Katraj to Dadar had cost us about Rs. 30/- per head approximately, which meant we’d spent a total of Rs. 150/- on that trip and thus had almost Rs. 110/- remaining (later we realized that Sharad had spent 12 bucks on cigarettes and thus we had 98 bucks remaining). This was to be divided equally among 5 of us and thus had about Rs. 19.60/- remaining with which to find our way home. Which was more than enough in most cases.
The result of this was, that we had traveled from Pune to Mumbai in Rs. 290/- even with one person losing his wallet somewhere in the middle and one stopping to buy cigarettes. This divided by 5 makes it Rs. 58/- per person. Which was what we spent per head to travel nearly 200km inter-city. This was a feat I don’t believe many have achieved before. This was my inspiration behind writing this. So if anyone falls short of money before that trip, just use my guide. (Or, just take my advise and quit binge-drinking)!
Cheers!
