Train of Thoughts

A lot of my most cherished memories are associated with train journeys. Probably because every train ride, for the entire duration of my student life, marked the beginning or the end of vacation season. Every journey was undertaken in states of extreme bouts of joy, if vacations were starting, or glum sadness, if it was the journey back. This, compounded with the fact that train rides in India are a complete assault on the human nervous system make for a heady mix of emotions and sensory activity that give one a high which is not easy to forget.


#1: New Delhi to Bhubaneswar, Utkal Express sometime in 1990
2nd class compartment, peak of holiday season. The bogey looks like a vertical sardine tin. The train stops at Gaya. Another loud horde of people get in to occupy space that never existed before. I and Mom are perched up on the upper side berth. As usually happens with me in such situations, I suddenly realize that I'm feeling thirsty. I look up to mom and tell her I want water. Our 2 liter 'water camper' is under the lower seat. She throws me an expression somewhere between anger and desperation. She looks down at the crowd, looks at me, and whispers, "Play along". She turns around, puts on a worried face and shouts out to the crowd. "Bacha ulti karne walaa hai!". I roll up my eyes, throw my head over the berth, stick my tongue out and make gross, pukey, guttural sounds. The mass of people below dissolves in seconds, amongst shouts of "jooti sunghao", "neembu chatao". Mom steps down cooly, pulls out the water camper, fills a glass and hands it to me with a wink. During subsequent theatrical performances of my life I owed my confidence to that one moment.



#2: Jammu to New Delhi 1989. Jammu Taavi Express
We had a dog. A white, Lhasa Apso pup, and we called him Snowy. Our family was going to Delhi for summer vacations and we had to drop off Snowy at my uncle's place there. None of us wanted to put poor little Snowy into the pet carriage. So, we cooked up a little contraption to carry snowy in with us in the passenger cabin. It was one of those old time plastic vegetable shopping baskets. We lined the inside with a few towels and rags. Drilled holes so that Snowy could breathe and left a couple of bones for him to munch on. The train ride started and Snowy was well and fine for sometime. Then he sarted whining. We would open the windows to let the sound in, to drown out his whimpering. Or if it got too much, Dad or Mom would undertake the extremely silly looking activity of walking a vegetable basket up and down the corridor of the train. I also remember that when the TTE came for checking the tickets, all three of us gave the basket one mighty kick to tell Snowy, shut up!



I end here, doesn't mean I have run out of such incidents, there are numerous more. Like I said, a significant proportion of my life's memories are associated with train journeys. Not just incidents like these which are complete in themselves, but also momentary snatches of associations and recollections like the kulladh ki chai, jhaal mudhi, the train ride skirting Chilika Lake, waking up in the middle of the night and asking someone, bhai sahab kaunsa station hai? And that ultimate plea of desperation which somehow doesn't ever have the impact you expect it to have, Mere paas reservation hai!

Malgudi Express

“The hardest of all things for a novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of most human happiness…Jane Austen, Soseki, Chekov: a few bring it off. Narayan is one of them”. – Francis King

In spite of his abilities of insightful observations, what Mr. King possibly will not be able fathom is the rush of happy memories R K Narayan brings to someone who has grown up reading his stories.

Setting off for work today, I picked up Malgudi Days and as Chennai suburbia zipped past so did the stories roll from one to the other, bringing to life, simultaneously, the characters from a nondescript town somewhere in South India, and days from my past when I came across them.

As I read the first story, An Astrologer’s Day, I could almost see smudgy pencil marks underlining, then strange, words in my reader in class 8th. That was my first acquaintance with these words. As life went on and things started getting complicated, the words and phrases picked up undertones and connotations beyond the simple definitions I had scribbled next to them. But seeing them once again being mouthed by an astrologer who, "...sat under the boughs of a spreading tamarind tree..." the words shrugged off all the grime they had collected over the years and became virgin again, expressing only what the author intended them to.

Narayan’s earthy style enchants you twice, first with the characters and the stories themselves and second, with memories of shared ‘tiffins’ with school time crushes, pot bellied English teachers, butterflies of the night-before-exam variety, Doordarshan, wannabe rock stars giving a rendition of the Malgudi tune on their electric guitars and preparations of elocution pieces . It is said that the sense of smell has the greatest ability to bring back old memories; if it’s true then I’m sure that the stories from Malgudi carry the aroma of childhood.