Lena was in berth 14, lower. Arjun was in berth 15, upper. The sleeper car from Jaisalmer to Jaipur in September 2016 was running four hours late, the fan above her head was clicking, and she had just discovered that her paperback was missing its last forty pages. She said, to no one in particular, “Well, that's just rude.”
Arjun, who was not supposed to be awake, laughed. Ten years later, they are sitting across from me on a sofa in their flat in Lisbon, trying to decide which of them tells this story better. She does. He agrees.
The first hour
Lena, German, was three weeks into a six-month post-university trip. Arjun, Indian, was on his way back to Jaipur to visit his grandmother. They did not fall in love on the train. They fell into a conversation that lasted until Ajmer Junction at 5 AM, at which point they had shared two oranges, half a bag of Parle-G biscuits, and the life stories of three complete strangers in the adjacent berths.
“What people get wrong about the meet-cute,” Arjun says, “is they think the romance is the first look. On that train, the romance was that we were both tired and willing to keep talking anyway.”
They got off in Jaipur. He gave her his number in case she got stuck with any logistics. She texted him the next day to ask where to find the best kachori. He took her. That was the first date.
The two weeks that mattered more than the first night
Lena stayed in Jaipur for two weeks longer than she had planned. Not because it was a romantic sweep, but because Arjun's grandmother insisted on teaching her how to make proper dal and they kept finding reasons to extend the tutorial.
“If it had been three days, it would have ended at the airport,” Lena says. “Two weeks was long enough to see each other without the glow on.” She watched him have a serious argument with his brother, one entirely in Hindi that she could not follow, and she saw how he cooled down afterwards. He watched her spend two entire afternoons writing in her notebook and ignoring him completely, and he was fine with that.
Those were the data points. The orange on the train was the invitation. The two weeks were the decision.
The long-distance year they don't recommend
Lena flew back to Hamburg in late October. They spent the next eleven months between her last year of study and his full-time engineering job, with a ten-and-a-half-hour time difference of messages, a shared Google Doc for future trip ideas, and two in-person visits that cost them both more money than they had.
“I do not want to romanticise that year,” Arjun says. “It was hard. We fought. We were both completely broke by June.”
What they credit for surviving it:
- A weekly scheduled call, always on Sundays, that held even when they were annoyed with each other
- A shared rule that neither of them was allowed to make a major life decision without the other in the loop, even non-relationship decisions — a job interview, a lease, a family trip
- A visible end point: they agreed from month two that one of them would move within the year. Long-distance without a deadline, they both believe, is “just slowly breaking up in a nicer font.”
Who moved, and why
Arjun moved. He took a role in Berlin in 2017, mostly because German engineering visas were easier and Lena's family was nearby. He talks about this openly: it was not a neutral decision. He left his parents, a city he knew intimately, and a first language of convenience.
“The hardest year was not year one of the move,” he says. “It was year two. Year one, you are figuring out the IKEA furniture. Year two, you realise you have lost your social ease in the new language and it has not come back yet. That is the lonely year.”
Lena, to her credit, did not treat his loneliness as his project to solve. She re-learned Hindi properly, which she had started on the trip and then let slide. She went back to India with him every year, no exceptions, even when work got in the way. “That was the part I did not negotiate on,” she says. “If we were going to stay together, half the family context could not be optional for me.”
A cross-cultural relationship is not a love story plus a visa. It is two people deciding which parts of the other's life they are willing to make their own.
The yearly ritual
They got married in 2020, quietly, between two lockdowns. No wedding video, no photographer, just twelve people in a garden. Their ritual, the one they are most proud of, started as a joke: every September, the anniversary of the train, they take a long-distance train somewhere new.
They have done:
- Vienna to Venice
- Lisbon to Porto, then Porto to the Douro valley
- Delhi to Amritsar
- Moscow to St Petersburg, in 2018, before it became impossible
- A Caledonian sleeper from London to Fort William
No flights, no cruises, no chain hotels. Just long trains, small towns, and a rule that one full day of the trip is with no phone.
“The train is where we remember how to be curious about each other,” Arjun says. “You cannot work on a train. You cannot really clean a train. You have to talk, or read, or watch the window. That is the whole relationship in a moving box.”
What they tell younger travellers
I asked them what advice they would give someone who meets a stranger on a trip and thinks it might be the real thing. They disagreed slightly, which I am leaving in.
Arjun: “Do not propose anything big inside the trip. Let it end. Go back to your life. If, two weeks later in your boring Tuesday, you still want to fly back, now you have a real signal.”
Lena: “I disagree a little. Do not propose anything, but do not under-commit either. Say out loud, 'I want to see you again, within a month.' Specificity protects the thing.”
They are both right, probably.
The daughter
Their daughter is four. She speaks a sloppy, charming mix of German, Hindi, English, and enough Portuguese to order her own ice cream since they moved to Lisbon last year. She has been on sixteen long-distance trains in her life.
She is asleep in the next room while we talk. Arjun glances at the door every few minutes — a small tell that the life they built works, even on a regular Tuesday, even without the glow of a station announcement at 5 AM.
If you are in the middle of your own sleeper-berth conversation somewhere right now, this is the gentle nudge: keep talking. Let it end when the trip ends. See if it comes back.
