With half Ticket, walking on tracks

Photo by sanjiv nayak on Unsplash

I had a boys day out when we were in high school. 5 of my 10th classmates made plan to go to Dongargarh Devi’s Temple which must be around 70 km from Bhilai. It's a pilgrimage centre on a hill top where you need to climb about 1000 steps to reach the temple. We planned to go by morning passenger train and return by evening. Accordingly all of us reached Bhilai Nagar railway station at around 6 am. When we reached station and checked out the train schedule we found train is running late by more than an hour. Then we thought instead of standing there let's walk to Durg Junction which is about 4-5 kms from Bhilai Nagar. So we started walking on the rail track itself. It was fun to walk, hopping on the track sleepers and like acrobats balancing oneself on the rail with arms stretched out, we reached Durg station. There we found a Goods train waiting for signal clearance. One of us gave an idea why not check with train driver and we go along in the engine. The driver told us that Goods train have no fixed timing of reaching the destination and the passenger trains are always given priority to go. That Train driver advised us to go by passenger train. So we went for buying the train tickets. I among my friends was the smallest in size. One was a Sardarji with full grown beard and others too were pretty good in built. In school we had to wear half pants till tenth and one or two of these friends of mine were all hairy on the leg. I am sure they must all have been quite embarrassed to wear half pants; somehow I was lucky not to have such issues. But the problem of looking like a bachcha was that no girls in your class will look at you seriously 😅.

Now coming back to story, when my friends were buying ticket I felt a mischief to buy half ticket for myself. My friends were laughing at the idea. We bought our tickets and boarded the passenger train. Train reached Dongargarh and we disembarked. At the exit point ticket checker was collecting tickets and instead of going out we went into the refreshments room inside the station. We were quite hungry as we did not had breakfast. The ticket collector must have noticed us and he followed us into the canteen. He collected tickets from my friends and saw my half ticket. He asked what's my age. I was mentally prepared for such a question. I knew age limit for half ticket is upto 12 yr olds. Instead of telling him I am 12 yrs old, I thought let him do some mental maths. I looked at him and confidently, told him I am studying in Standard 6. He looked at me and went away nodding. We friends looked at each other and winked. I was ecstatic having fooled the authority with a ticket meant for child… 😉😉