The curse of the single male - Travel woes

Every since I was a kid, I have been marginalised because I am a male. More particularly because I am a single male. I have been marginalised everywhere. Be it the limitations in choosing a fashionable dress or ordering an electric blue coloured mock tail in a pub or renting a decent place to live. It is abandoned territory everywhere for the single male.

While my curse-of-the-single-male experiences could bulge up to a book, I am limited to write about my travel woes today due to another curse of having to work 8 hours a day to earn my daily biryani.

It all started way back when I was a kid. Even if I bought a full ticket for a bus ride, I always had to share my seat with an oversized smelly adult. Girls did not have to go through the agony as their mothers looked at it as a blot in their pristine female sanctity. I had to wait for years before I could grow up and fill the entire seat by myself.

But when I grew up, I had to content with another problem. I was travelling long distances and had to use semi-sleeper buses. A single male is always and automatically allotted a seat at the back. It does not matter even if I reserve the ticket a month in advance. When will I ever sit in seats numbered 2 or 3 and stretch my legs for an entire night?

An optimistic mind always found a solution. I found a way to stretch my legs. I started to use sleeper trains for these overnight journeys. But the curse never left. There invariably was an elderly woman or a young mother who can not climb up to the upper berth, and they invariably spotted me. I was requested to swap berths. And so the claustrophobic little hole between an iron mesh and a couple of rattling fans became the eternal berth of every acrophobic single male.

The fear of looking down the window and realising that I am kilometres above the ground and a weak bladder that is to be deflated every second hour forces me to choose an aisle seat when I travel in long haul airplanes. But here again, the plot is well set against me. Women with children and elderly people board the plane before any (un)able young man does. And so when I look to take my seat, the seat is already taken. 'Please would you sit by the window. I have a kid and he needs to go to the toilet quite often. He has a weak bladder. You know.'

'Mine is just as weak as your son's, only a little bigger'. I wish I had said that to her. But then the curse remained and I sat in a corner looking down the window.