I was reading an essay of rail travel by Paul Theroux and that remained me of my own travels on rail. As a person who lived in a third world country for the beginning two decades of my life, I guess I had my share of railway travel and some memories about those journeys.

I have a very faint memory of my first railway trip when I was around four. We had gone to a temple town about 700 miles from our house for a pilgrimage when my sister was still a little girl. I don’t recall many details of this journey except that I distinctly recall the engine was an old fashioned steam engine: black, cylindrical and beautiful. And history buffs would recall the fact that the Industrial Revolution, and thus the form of the current world, was shaped by James Watt’s invention of a precursor of such an engine.

Another memory I had of railways as a kid, was that of a boy who lived next door to us. He wanted to a train driver when he grew up and on many a evening he used to sit at the window and make the “coo choo” music as he, I suppose, imagined his train leaving the Hyderabad station. There was also a very popular song in my mother tongue, “Charminar Station Gaadi Raajalingo”, which describes if I recall well, what a villager would find as he arrives to the big city. I grew up in a time when India was transitioning from predominantly rural to more urban and I personally am only a generation away from a farm. So I suppose rail journeys became a part of the larger psyche. And then I wished that my parents’ villages were father from the city in which where I grew up, so that we could take a train rather than the usual overnight bus to visit our grandparents.

The next trip that comes to my mind, is one we took to visit an aunt who lives in a sea side city about 400 miles away. It was in this trip that my father bought me my first novel in English, R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends, at O.H. Wheeler at the Secundrabad station. Even though the book is now very yellow and had been mended a couple of times, I still have it with me. I hope I can introduce my children to the love of reading by giving them this book on a long train journey. While we were at our aunt’s house, our group of kids, a set of our cousins, went to a nearby neighbors home to watch a Hindi movie. This wasn’t because the neighbor invited us, but because in 80’s India, very few people had TV, whose fare consisted of a single channel which broadcast one movie a week. Anyways I mention this movie because in the final scene of this movie, the villain, (who was responsible for killing a dad leading to the separation of three brothers and their mother from one another), gets killed by a train as the brothers watch on.

Trains in India have three classes: the first/AC class, the second class (also called the sleeper class) and the third class (more genteelly called the general class). A lower middle class family like ours usually traveled in the second class. A coupe in a second class compartment seats and sleeps 8 people. There are two long seats which face one another which 3 seats each, a passage way and then two small seats facing one another which seat one person each. On the longer side, the back of the seats can be lifted up and secured by chains from the top to form a bunk bed at night. Above this and two feet from the roof, is a permanent bunk bed. Third class compartments had no bunks to sleep on and since there is no limit on how many people can get into them, I have had the honor to travel a) standing up for a whole night, b) sitting on the steps of the train, holding on to dear life, c) sitting in a corner of a bench, wedged next to the window, with four more people sitting next to me (the bench’s capacity is 3), d) hunched in the small luggage rack above the bench. Gandhi in his auto biography wrote that to see and experience India first hand, travel in third class is indispensable. This journey is shown in that stellar Oscar winning bio epic, Gandhi. And I must say he is not far off from the mark with that observation for real India does travel in the third class. I can’t describe how the inside of an AC/first class compartment looks like because in my 21 years of rail travel, I was never rich enough(AC in India is generally for the seriously rich folks) to travel in an AC compartment. But I think given how the windows of an AC compartment always seemed to be misted up, I suppose I didn’t miss too many views.

The next journey I recall is when my family went on a tourist trip, my first “travel for pleasure” experience, to Bangalore, Mysore and Ooty one summer with three other families. One thing that most people do when they travel in India is that they carry their own kitchen with them. This is not because meals are not available on trains, (they are, however they are not well prepared for what they cost) but because dining in a train is supposed to be just like eating at home, especially on a festive scale. I remember my mom used to always prepare dishes that were cooked on festivals, for train journeys. I suppose given the frequency with which we could afford to travel, train journeys and holiday trips ranked among the occasions demanding celebratory cooking. That trip was fun because for all of us kids (there were 5 of us from three families) it was our first adventure. And I think we had enough window seats for all of us because there was no fighting. What a kid requires on a train is a window seat, take that away and you will have one mad kid.

It was wonderful to wake up next morning (we had boarded the train around 7.00 pm the previous evening) to find myself in a different state and a changed landscape. I remember standing at the door as I brushed my teeth (there are two sinks and four toilets for 72 people in a second class compartment, people sit in the toilets in a third class compartments, so they are unusable) and grinning at bullock carts waiting at various railway crossings. All the while the grown ups were fretting about the train running late by about six hours (Indian Railways takes that Zen saying to heart: it’s better to travel than to arrive!), we kids had fun running up and down the compartment and looking out of the window. I don’t recall how the return train journey ended; perhaps this is because the return is not as exciting as the departure.

Then in class nine, I as a part of the high school nerds contingent got to go to a science camp (in India, “arts” like language, history etc are a dirty word meant for losers who don’t want to go anywhere in life) in another state about 700 miles from home. This journey required us to travel through Bombay (or Mumbai as it is now called). The few highlights of this trip were the train passes through a hilly section (called the Western Ghats section) about 100 miles from Bombay. So it winds up and down the hills passing through quite a few tunnels. For someone who hasn’t been through a tunnel, it’s eerily exciting and fun. We all started making ghost noises and in the process did manage to scare a few women, who then made the teachers going along with us stop doing that. As an aside Western Ghats are now one of the most ecologically endangered places in the world. Another observation was that all the rich people from Bombay, had these huge palace like estates in the most impossible and remote mountain sides in these hills. The British had invented the concept of hill station in India, wherein they escaped to the cooler hills and mountain locale to escape the killer heat of the plains. And for the people with the cash this is still in vogue.

Coming down from these scenic hills nothing prepared me for the shock of arriving at Bombay. One arrives in Bombay not when he disembarks at the Victoria Terminus (now patriotically and for political reasons renamed to Chatrapathi Shivaji Terminus) but when he sees the first slum 3 feet from his train window. And these begin at least 50 miles away from the station. I had never seen poverty (apart from the usual beggars who turned up in our neighborhoods who went begging door to door, usually early in the morning for food) on such a scale before in my life. As one of my friends observed, Bombay is India concentrated into a capsule, where everything good and bad is magnified to the extremes. So I was shocked when I saw slums which sprawled for miles and then in the middle of these 20 storied apartment complexes rising like lighthouses in a sea of dirt and despair.

After miles of such slums, one arrives at Victoria Terminus, a huge Gothic building with clock towers, spires, fluted arches and what have you, one of the legacies of India once being a part of the British On-Which-the-sun-never-set Empire. And since we had arrived at what was the rush hour, under these arches we were among a sea of humanity which mostly sprints. It was a surreal experience for a boy, who lived in a village like neighborhood to be in middle of that mass. It was here I saw people jumping on a train as it pulls away and begins to attain speed for the first time, an acrobatic feat which if missed would mean certain death under the train wheels. One of our teachers, who lived in Bombay before, told us that people die that way yet the speed of life precludes them from acting any different.

From Bombay we caught a mail train (a mail train is a train which stops at every station, stations include a big tree with just a sign board next to it) to our final destination. And since this train had no classes, this was also my first taste of travel in the third class. Since we were then small enough, we crouched and sat in the over head luggage rack. Underneath us, the regulars (who thus occupied all the seats) had set up an elaborate table out of discarded cardboard boxes and were soon playing a mean game of poker involving significant amount of money. It was on this journey I wrote my first lines of verse which are now (thankfully!) lost. I showed these to my parents who patted me on my head and asked me to watch out for those quadratic equations. I suppose they were right in their own way because it was perhaps those equations which afforded my subsequent escape to America.

The next time to travel and which route I would travel for the next four years was when I left home to go to college, 1000 miles and a 30-36 hour train journey from home.

I come to this telling of memory again after watching a movie, the Pianist. His hands moved over the piano and created beauty. And since my hands can’t move over this key board, at least not tonight, with the same kind of music, I suspend this telling here. Renaldo Arenas in a poem called The Procession Begins, writes of the music of his typewriter as words raise like music on a blank page. I have felt that kind of music on days arrive unexpectedly. And when it arrives, it enables me to move beyond myself to touch something that is untarnished. Perhaps its hope that enables man to live in spite of everything, perhaps it’s something that is so beautiful that it can’t be named.