If you want to kill an earthworm by asphynxation, pinching its nose is not going to help. Or so the girl-on-the-train told me. Which revealed to me a mystery which has haunted me for long ... more than 8 years actually.

The first thing that every normal, decent guy with the right mind (and no girlfriend or wife tagging along) does when he is getting on a train, is check the list of passengers next to the door for entries marked with F**!! (The ** can be filled up with any double digit number depending on his age and choice!) Such scans more often than not end up with negative results. On this occassion however, there was an young girl in the compartment, and she was actually occupying the very next seat! The trip back from Kolkata promised to be interesting! The girl turned out to be a student of Zoology going for an interview at a Bangalore college. The Zoology of course explains her extensive knowledge on cockroaches, earthworms, etc and their breathing habits. Earthworms for example breathe sub-cutaneously! So if you want to kill an earthworm, you should rather skin it alive than pinch its nose! More on earthworms coming up later.

She (the-girl-on-the-train, hereafter referred to as 'she'), apart from being a student of the world of animals, also turned out to be a big fan of the television serial F.R.I.E.N.D.S and an avid reader of thrillers etc. This discovery was the point when the conversation really took off! When two F.R.I.E.N.D.S fans get together and happen to have similar choice in books also, the combination is deadly, specially for the fellow passengers who die of boredom as these two keep talking about incidents involving Joey and Monica and Phoebe, and which author should be read after trying out Jeffrey Archer. The fact that she is not interested in sports and detests cricket was overlooked with plenty of common interests to discuss over the one-and-a-half day ride. At the end of the journey, she was all armed up with a list of authors to try out, and I had strengthened my resolution to go through my to-read waiting list fast (both her suggestions were already present in my to-read list!)

Coming back to the earthworm. It all started on a fine summer day in the year of 1997. It was summer vacation for me, and I was spending the month long vacation at my grandma's / uncle's playing carrom with my one-year-elder cousin sister and devicing methods to kill the innumerable earthworms that infested their (my grandma's / uncle's / cousin's) habitat. One of the more innovative ways to kill earthworms that I had perfected during that time was to burn them with a concentrated beam of sunlight by holding a strong magnifying glass (intended to study stamps) behind their back! With such earth(worm)-shattering ideas, I attempted to slay one worm by dropping it into a tank of water. It went straight to the bottom, and then start a long and tedious climb up the side of the tank. Although it was under water for about half an hour, I was amazed to see that it did not die of drowning after clutching its throat with its tail or thrashing about in the water or anything. Rather, it made its way all the way up to the sill of the tank, and calmly proceeded on its own business as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Well, now I know, it was because the worm could still breathe under water, through its skin. That's what she told me.