I just can’t undertake long-distance train trips unless I get a lower berth. I would rather cancel the planned journey than submit myself to travel in middle and upper berths. I dislike the middle berth more than I dread the upper berth. Until the lower berth passenger finishes reading his book, I cannot put up my berth and lie down at night. In the morning I have to remain flat like a corpse in a coffin until the lower berth passenger-partner chooses to open his eyes and decides at last to call it a night. I am leaving alone the upper berth since I am of the opinion that upper berths are made only for the "Georges of the Jungles".
Due to this obsession with lower berth, I face a number of problems. First, I have to make my travel plans and book tickets well in advance. Now as a senior citizen, it is easier for me to get lower berths, but in the past when I was cruising through the salt-and-pepper stretch of my life, it was very difficult to get lower berths. Those days one has to go to the reservation counter to book the tickets. Every time I had to humbly pray to the booking clerk to be kind enough to allot me a lower berth. Not all booking clerks are merciful. "You are not old, and you are not handicapped. Why should I allot you a lower berth," flared up a clerk once when I pestered him to check one more time for availability of a lower berth. He put me punitively on a side upper berth. Side upper berths are worse than machans from which Jim Corbett and Kenneth Anderson shot man-eaters. To ascend one, one should be a trained trapeze artist.
The story did not end when I somehow got a lower berth. There, would often wait for me an old grandma or grandpa, to request me to exchange my prized lower berth with their middle or even upper berth. Whenever I was forced to sacrifice my hard-earned lower berth that way, I felt as if the trophy was snatched from my hand even before I ascended the podium. It also happened that whenever I happened to board the train at some wayside stations, I often found the lower berth allotted to me occupied. Such trespassers did not only occupy my lower berth but had the audacity to direct me to their upper berth.
