Photograph by João

[1] “The sounds of trains off in the distance, more or less made me feel at home, like nothing was missing, like I was at some level place, never in any significant danger and that everything was fitting together.”

From Bob Dylan’s brilliant and idiosyncratic memoir, “Chronicles, Volume One”

[2] Standing on the bridge, you see a freight train trundling from under you. A sequence of dark shapes, a chain of ants, oil tankers in a convoy, thirty or forty in number. The big engine up ahead is painted a dull red, the color of rust. The railway logos appear to be washing off from its sides in the steady drizzle. It has been raining all day and you wish to see the sun. Rain rhymes with pain, with train, and makes you ache for something you can’t clearly define.

You hammer your nerves to tell you of those places they are forgetting or have already forgotten. Town and villages in a distant country seen through a train window, to the bars of music played by iron wheels on iron rail – black snake, smelling of grease, shit and wide open spaces.

[3] It occurs to me that trains, both as a reality and as a metaphor, constantly recur in the work of many creative folk. Off the top of my head, from last weekend Eudora Wetly’s descriptions of her childhood train journeys and the strange unexplainable imputes they provided to her writing, in her book “A Writer’s Beginnings”, Nazim Hikmet’s brilliant, free wheeling meditation of a poem on life written on a train between Prague and Moscow, Victor Brombet’s evocative memoir called “Trains of Thought”, where everything in his life is tied to some or the train journey, Manto’s genius short stories that take me back to one of the central metaphors of India-Pakistan partition – exchange of trainloads of dripping corpses, trains in Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago”, cattle trains in “Schindler’s List”, hobo trains in Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road”, the title of a book I gave to a child-woman, as consolation, as a piece of my heart, before I left a country to arrive in this city, which as coincidences go was once called Terminus –Elizabeth Smart's “By The Grand Central Station, I Sat Down And Wept”, I close my eyes and I see those nearly two day long train journeys taken from a disappearing home to college with that friend who doesn’t write back anymore, of drinking tea sprawled over a walkway above train tracks at Hijili, hooting thundering freight trains hauling coal and iron ore providing the pauses in interminable and circular conversations on everything and nothing, W.H. Auden’s British trains, Pablo Neruda’s Chilean trains steered by his engine driver father, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s trains through the territory of Colombian magic realism and Esta Unidos Banana companies, that train which was set on fire, ahead of the train I was traveling in as a young boy on pilgrimage, by educated young men in the name of holy revolution –perfect idea for a novel I should write, bloody writers who want to transform agony into art, Zorba spits on such agony, the train which was completely washed away by the bloody bitch of a sea in Sri Lanka at the turn of this year, Sebastio Salagado’s photograph of Bombay trains and people that made me suffer all of last week, and this train pictured above, steaming on ice covered tracks, taking me on a journey into eternity, where everything fits together, again and again.