Crazy Night, Part One -- Midnight at Haupbahnof

So, there I was at an 12.30 am, at an unusually empty and eerily quiet Bahnof,like one of the scenes from the Matrix trilogy. I awaited Agent Smith, to come crashing out from one of the tunnel walls and do his computer generated stunts on me. Confused? Feel like you have jumped into the middle of a narration with no idea what happened earlier? Right. Flashback time.


Flashback to a few hours before :

I had been to Luzern to watch the Dark Knight, a movie which leaves you all quiet and contemplative, unlike other superhero movies which make you want to wear your briefs over your spandex pants, tie a bedsheet around your neck and jump off the closest skyscraper hoping that you've been bitten by some hybrid spider species. I bid adieu to Sarah (the afore mentioned friend whose directorial debut was a resounding success) and caught the last train back to Zürich. From there I'd have trains to take me back home all night long, or so I thought.

If anybody working at SBB is reading this blog,' Dude/ Dudette, DO SOMETHING about the timetables to my place! The trains arrive Zurich just in time for me to make a full fledged Usain Bolt-like dash to my platform to see my connection slowly chug out. If not, I am going to start saying that my trains to Zurich are always 30-90 seconds late and you wouldn't want me to commit sacrilege like that which means eternal damnation for you now would you?' So anyway, I missed my train by fractions of milli seconds, AGAIN, but I was not worried. There would be one more in less than an hour. I just needed to buy a night pass. The station though was unbelievably empty.


Back to the present :

I knew something weird was up. Usually there are more people at the Zurich main station than there are in all of New Zealand! But today, there were just 7-8 people other than me, all equally lost and looking dazed. The time tables showed no trains. What happened? What was wrong? Was there a nuclear holocaust? Had zombies taken over Zurich? I sighted a solitary ticket checker in the distance, on her way back home. I accosted her and enquired why the time table for the night trains were not displayed, rather haughtily I must say because now that I am Swiss I expect everything to be in near-perfect order. She obviously didn't like my tone or think much of my 'Swissness' because she took great pleasure in responding that the night trains don't operate on weeknights and ended with a half-snigger and half evil laugh which basically meant,' Your F***ED'.


Resigned to the fact of having to spend the night at the station I scouted for benches to sleep on. The stone bench could definitely freeze the balls off a brass monkey (oh, 12th std. English lessons with Poo memories full full coming). The metal one left a pattern of checks on my cheek which on the next day might inspire someone to solve the sudoku or crossword on my face. Draw one or two cartoons (Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes if I had the choice) on my other cheek and put in a gossip headline on my forehead and I'd become the most popular tabloid around. If you know me, you know that I have this amazing capacity to sleep. I can beat Rip Van Vinkle to pulp if I wanted to. I've slept through earthquakes, slept standing and once, even in mid-sentence! So, I figured it's best I sleep on the platform on which my first train back is. I didn't want to miss it as I was in the middle of a marathon test to determine whether I would be offered a long term position at my company.


On my way to the time table to check and re-check a hundred and one times (for want of nothing better to do) when my train was, I was ambushed by a man who proceeded to assault me with a slew of German words, of which I understood not a single one. When he finally realised I understood as much German as the Queen, he switched to English (I wont use the Queen's name in vain here as his English was definitely not the Queen's English). 'You miss train ?', he asked. I answered in the affirmative. 'Where you stay? You want taxi back home?' The idea of a bed seemed very inviting right then and so I said yes, if the price was reasonable. He offered me a 50% discount as I was a student. That reduced the fare to 'just' 60CHF (about 2400INR).

He then proceeded to ask other fellow stranded folk if they wanted a ride back home. He got one new customer. He offered to reduce my fare by five franks if he could drop off the other chap first. Being the scrooge I am, I readily agreed, little knowing of the epic proportions of the journey I was about to undertake. What did strike me as unusual was that the two of them got quite pally, regaling each other with what seemed to be extremely funny recounts of their lives. Swiss strangers are polite and distant. They don't even like sitting next to each other on the train, going so far as to plonk their bags and belongings on all the surrunding seats, just in case, God forbid, someone sat beside them. What they are not, are chummy like these two were. Just returning from a screening of the Dark Knight didn't help. Scenes of chaos and anarchy were running through my head. Were these, two crooks out to get me? Would they just take me somewhere deserted and run away with all my money and leave me for dead? My face puckered up, my brain was lost in a sea of morbid thoughts. What brought me joltingly back to the present was a question the driver posed, and although he didn't say it with the same raspy tone or with any of the blood curdling lip smacking in Heath Ledger's performance, those three words almost terrified the living daylights out of me. ' Why so serious?'

To be continued.....