On my way back to Barcelona I was on a train from Santiago which was a day journey, something that I’d been looking forward to, especially since my mother had always said that how beautiful Europe was, and in countless movies that we had watched which had scenes across Europe’s landscapes through train journeys and so here it was, happening to me.
Before looking outside the windows and admiring the countryside, I was also quite impressed at how efficient and pretty the trains were when compared to the ones back home; they just felt like two different modes of travel altogether, two different worlds, both beautiful in their own ways...
The journey was enchanting and some scenes across Spain’s northern landscapes were really breathtaking, I felt like getting off at every station and spending an entire week at each village, or better still, just walking around and maybe just living in one of those hills in their green tranquility.
The night before my journey, I knew that being a vegetarian was hard enough, and being on a ‘train in Spain’ would be even harder, so I’d gone shopping and bought a few munchies to keep me going. Once on board I remember smiling to myself when I went to the little restaurant on wheels and asked them if they had anything vegetarian to offer and after a few seconds of silence there was just a ‘no’ that came back with a smile and probably an unasked question - which planet did I come from. This made me laugh, for some reason.
So there I was - cold, hungry, and with just a little bag of goodies and a good 12 hour journey ahead of me, but for some reason I was delighted and looking forward to whatever unfolded itself.
A few hours later, when I decided to take a little walk down the aisle, I came back to see this old man sitting on the seat next to mine which had been previously empty. He looked at me strangely, as though he had never seen an Indian before...I had on me a green shawl which was unlike anything he had probably seen.
Nevertheless I took my seat and smiled at him; he was busy reading the newspaper and scribbling some notes into his dairy which was just a few scraps of paper stapled together and which I couldn't help notice, since he now partially obstructed my view of the lovely scenery from the moving train.
Then suddenly as I reclined to rest, he asked me something in Spanish and a few seconds later I understood he meant something on the lines of whether I speak Spanish... Habla espanol? To which I smiled and told him that I didn’t and he was so disappointed.
As he continued conversing by waving his hands, I found myself holding him by his shoulder telling him that I knew just a few words and I recited my favorite line in Spanish “mi casa, tu casa” and that was the beginning of a love story, we both shared a hearty laugh.
So we spent hours in silence with the occasional smiles exchanged and then began to talk a little bit in sign language where he would occasionally tell me that he was going for a smoke. When he returned, I would indicate it was not good for his lungs and then a laugh after that, and so on.
We passed Pamplona and I remembered watching the Bollywood movie that inspired me to visit Spain (Zindagi Milegi Na Dobara) in which one of the adventures the actors took on was to attend the festival in town where they were chased by bulls and they had to run for their lives... and I just knew I would love to come back just to visit the town and also, if possible, to see the festival des Tomatinas where they smashed tomatoes and went crazy with the celebrations, but definitely not to be chased by bulls.
I opened my bag of walnuts and offering my companion some, he looked at me quite perplexed at first, but then smiled and took a handful, and for some reason he reminded me of my grandfather who also smoked and if he were still here I could imagine us traveling together, eating walnuts and going through life taking it as one big adventure.
As the day passed my new friend asked me to join him for lunch and I somehow managed to tell him that I was vegetarian and they didn't have anything on the menu for me. By then all the people in our coach knew every word we tried to exchange.
I remember paying close attention to how long it took us in the train to reach that same spot from where I had begun my Camino – a pilgrimage that took me about seven days to reach by foot. It was a good flashback of many things, a déjà vu experience, maybe something many talk about when they can recall past lives, or when one has had a near death experience of some sort.
It was getting darker and we were getting closer to Barcelona where there was another adventure at play, my hostel’s reception would shut by 6 pm and I had a friend from the Camino who lived in Pamplona who would have another friend in Barcelona collect the key and have it for me at a bar around the University square. It so happened that our train got delayed by about an hour and many were upset including my own companion who was speaking to me in Spanish and all I could gather was that he would miss a connecting bus from where he was to get off.
Soon it was time for us to part, as his station was about to arrive, he asked me to help him get his bag down from the overhead luggage hold and to my amazement it looked like a backpack and some walking gear and I immediately asked him if he had done the Camino too, and he said “yes!” and we were both thrilled and delighted when I told him in sign language that I had done it as well! We both had that expression and feeling of wishing we knew this earlier as we had spent several hours together, completely unaware of this shared common experience, but there was something beautiful about this too.
That’s when in a short span of twenty minutes we had a wonderful exchange where using maps we somehow told each other where we started on our respective trips, and he told me he did a part of the journey through the mountains and I told him I had done just the last stretch. He asked me where I was from and I showed him on the map and suddenly my first words to him really felt like they were very true. We didn't exchange names or numbers, but I did give him my favorite keychain that I got as a souvenir and gave it to him before he left, our last words exchanged to each other were “Buen Camino!” with a hearty smile, and he patted my head as he left.
This is what the Camino does to us, it is a journey that makes us all connect in ways where there is something we have in common, a sense of belonging, and a special connection. And what happened throughout this train journey happened at the very end too, or rather another beginning, the Camino of Life.