“You may not argue with me,” said the guard. “I cannot accommodate you. You must pay the excess fare, or get out.”
I wanted to reach Poona somehow. I was not therefore prepared to fight the guard, so I paid the excess fare he demanded, i.e. , up to Poona. But I resented the injustice.
In the morning we reached Mogalsarai. Maganlal had managed to get a seat in the third class, to which I now shifted. I acquainted the ticket examiner with all the facts, and asked him to give me a certificate to the effect that I had shifted to a third-class compartment at Mogalsarai. This he declined to do. I applied to the railway authorities for redress and got a reply to this effect: “It is not our practice to refund excess fares without the production of a certificate, but we make an exception in your case. It is not possible, however, to refund the excess fare from Burdwan to Mogalsarai.”
Since this I have had experiences of third-class travelling which, if I wrote them all down, would easily fill a volume. But I can only touch on them casually in these chapters. It has been and always will be my profound regret that physical incapacity should have compelled me to give up third-class travelling.
The woes of third-class passengers are undoubtedly due to the high-handedness of railway authorities. But the rudeness, dirty habits, selfishness and ignorance of the passengers themselves are no less to blame. The pity is that they often do not realize that they are behaving ill, dirtily or selfishly. They believe that everything they do is in the natural way. All this may be traced to the indifference towards them of us “educated” people.
We reached Kalyan dead tired. Maganlal and I got some water from the station water-pipe and had our bath. As I was proceeding to arrange for my wife’s bath, Sjt. Kaul of the Servants of India Society recognizing us