Remember when you wanted to ask your parents for permission to do something, and you’d say, “But xyz’s doing it!” and they’d hit you with the, “If your friends jumped off a train, would you do the same?”
Well, I can officially say that I would.
University is supposed to be the most experimental, slightly stupid time of your life—the era where bad decisions become great stories. In our generation, those stories have a name: Mom Lore. The chaotic, borderline dangerous incidents that somehow become proof that you lived.
And that’s how three teenagers (Rainbow, Fish, and me) ended up at a random train station in Tamil Nadu.
Late at night, far from home, in a place where we don’t speak the language. After jumping out of a moving train.
Nightmare fuel.
If you get on the wrong train, any rational person would wait to get off at the next station. Or maybe pull the emergency chain. But not my dearest friend, Rainbow.
When she realised the train was moving backwards to Chennai rather than forward to Tada, something primal was activated. Adrenaline doesn’t let you fact-check your decisions. It simply whispers: now or never. And before either of us was able to form a coherent thought, she jumped.
And I followed.
I could’ve waited. I could’ve been sensible. But panic doesn’t ask for logic. All I knew in that fraction of a second was that I couldn’t leave her alone—hurt, scared, in the dark. So I jumped. Fish trusted me enough to follow.
For a brief moment after I hit the ground, there was no sound. Just ringing in my ears and the metallic taste of fear. The train kept moving, indifferent to our cinematic disaster. We weren’t protagonists. We were just three idiots on the gravel.
And then the pain arrived. Scraped knees. Bruised elbows. Shaking hands. Rainbow was crying, half from fear, half from shock. Fish looked as if she were reconsidering every life decision that had led her here.
Sitting outside the railway office, getting yelled at by an old lady in rapid-fire Tamil, I felt something strange: clarity.
Now, I didn’t understand a single word she was saying. But tone transcends language. She wasn’t just yelling; she was scolding. The universal grandmother frequency, the “What were you thinking?”.
And then, mid-lecture, she softened, wiping our faces. She kept talking (probably still reprimanding us), but her hands were gentle. I couldn’t decode the language, but I understood the care. The station staff helped too. Instead of threatening fines, they brought water. They checked if we were seriously hurt.
And then one of the men, trying very hard not to smile, looked at us and said:
“You girls should really look up Newton’s three laws of motion.”
We blinked.
And then we burst out laughing.
Because yes, objects in motion stay in motion. Including reckless teenagers exiting trains at unsafe speeds. Equal and opposite reactions? The gravel demonstrated that beautifully. Force equals mass times acceleration? Let’s just say the acceleration was… enthusiastic.
It was ridiculous. It was humiliating. It was deeply educational.
But sitting there—half-injured, half-embarrassed, fully alive—something shifted.
Near-death moments don’t always come with cinematic slow motion or spiritual visions. Sometimes they arrive with railway dust on your jeans and a Tamil grandmother scolding you into enlightenment. Everything suddenly felt sharper: The air, the weight of my friends sitting beside me, the absurd kindness of strangers who owed us nothing.
In that moment, I realised how thin the line is between a “funny story” and a “tragedy”. One slightly worse landing. One misstep. One second of hesitation. And this wouldn’t be Mom Lore. It would be something people whisper about. Near-death experiences don’t just scare you. They rearrange you. They shrink the things you thought were big (grades, social drama, awkward texts) and magnify the things that actually matter.
Bravery, luck, kindness, and being alive.
That night became lore.
Not because it was cool, but because it was real. It was messy and terrifying and stupid and deeply human. Now, whenever one of us spirals about internships or heartbreak or existential dread, someone will inevitably say, “Guys. We jumped off a train. We’ll be fine.”
And somehow, that’s comforting.
Someday, when I’m telling my kids about my “good ol’ days”, I’ll probably sanitise the story. I’ll say something like, “We took the wrong train once.” I’ll conveniently skip the jumping part.
And when they roll their eyes and say, “But everyone’s doing it!”
I’ll pause.
Because technically, Yes.
Yes, I would jump.
But now I know exactly what it means to land.