If you are a frequent traveller, you would surely have encountered all types of fellow passengers.
There is that grim person who sits beside you or in front of you for a good ten to 12 hours in silence and barely exchanges a word with you. They may bury themselves in the newspaper or a magazine or a book and may only curtly respond to the questions you throw at them. You can tell that they are not interested in striking up a conversation with you.
Then there are the curious ones who can put an investigative reporter or a detective to shame. They ask where you are from, where you are going and why, what you do, what the others in your family do ... and a whole stream of other questions that exhaust you and make you wish you had started off the journey as that grim person who made it clear from that closed expression on the face that s/he desired no truck with anyone.
There are also the garrulous fellow travellers, who, with just a little prod from you, will tell you the entire story of their lives and perhaps even go up and down a couple of generations.
And of course, how can one forget the travellers who, in their own group, chatter so much that a keen listener can get a very good idea of their likes, dislikes, pastimes and much more.
Naturally, most of us fit in somewhere in these categories: maybe not as extreme or as annoying, but thereabouts ... Very rarely does one come across a travelling companion who knows when to be pleasant and when to be quiet.
Life history
It has long been a source of embarrassment for me that when we travel, my pleasanter ‘half’ feels honour-bound to strike up conversations and make friends for the space of those few hours, completely convinced that the other person is deeply interested in him and what he has to say.
No amount of wheedling, cajoling, snapping or snarling, all of which I have tried unsuccessfully in the past few decades, will convince him to read a book, mind his own business and refrain from telling strangers his life history. And, since he can only talk about himself for a certain length of time, he eventually takes the next step and goes on to speak for me ...
I try to disappear into my reading material or into the recesses of my imagination and turn a deaf ear to his statements (I am that grim traveller I described a little earlier), but I am willy-nilly dragged into the conversation to amend the exaggerations that spill out of him ...
When we go abroad, I say, “Keep away from intrusive questions, don’t pry,” convinced that what he can get away with among garrulous fellow Indians, he cannot do with “foreigners”.
But of course, sharing stories with strangers has little to do with nationality and everything to do with personal preferences.
Thus, on a three-hour bus trip from Sydney to Canberra, we met a charming 85-year-old lady who was travelling alone. She told us why she was going to Canberra, then gave us a blow-by-blow account of her commute from her home to the bus station — including details of a fall while toting her luggage. She also told us about a concerned daughter who wants to move in with her to take care of her ... but she refuses because she loves her independence too much!
And she was not the only one to open up to complete strangers like us. We heard amusing stories, bizarre stories, stories to learn from, stories to pass on.
Apparently there are more travellers who like to share than those who shut themselves away ...
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
