I was in the local train. And I has sat on the top berth, which had a fenestrated wall through which I could see who was sitting on the other side. A guy was sat in the lower birth in the other side preached about abstaining meat from the diet. No one responded to his reasoning, yet he continued. Then, he lit a beedi. Few moments later, the smoke hit my nose and burned my eyes. If I wasn’t irritated with his biased talk with fixed ideology, the smoke kicked me into yelling out, “Stop smoking in here.”
“Who said it?”He yelled from his seat and got up. I looked through the grill. He was 6.5 feet, 120 kg men with red eyes of a drug addict. He continued, “What if I don’t?” Came the characteristic reply that you get when someone’s ego had been hurt. I said, “That won’t be a good thing.”
“Who are you? Who gives you the right to say something about smoking?”
“It’s against rule.”
“I fuck the rules. What will you do if I smoke?”
At that time, someone who was sitting in opposite side of me on top berth told me to don’t entertain him. Against the wish of my rule-abiding self, I kept myself mum.
He kept blabbering. My heart palpitated with an adrenaline surge and thought to confront him but none of the people in train compartment spoke anything against him. These must be the people he had won so far with his part religious part bullshit sermon or that they feared him to say a word: who knows what would he say to anyone and no one wanted to get humiliated. What stopped me from doing anything was the realization that I can’t fight him? And he didn’t have anything to lose. So, I didn’t react to whatever he had said despite the fact I wanted to do. Also, I can’t make him understand the effects of secondary smoking. Heck! He didn’t even know what is secondary smoking. So there is no use fighting with him verbally. I got angrier later not at him but at the crowd of getting up for their rights for accepting whatever this uneducated piece of shit had been telling so far. And a crazy idea took birth in my head to buy a pack of beedi and matchbox to light all the beedis in the train compartment to see whether they will wake up or not.
