JOYRIDE ON A TRAIN?

Today, I have to travel daily in local trains to reach my workplace. Trains hold no thrills for me, only the dreary utility of getting from home to work in the shortest possible time.

Years ago, it was different. Trains were an occasional thrill, not an everyday chore. Trains were meant to take us to Calcutta for a picnic, or to exotic locations like the zoo/museum/New Market/P.C. Sorcar's magic shows, or, sometimes, to homes of interesting and far-away relations for some family occasion. 

Train rides came on Sundays or holidays. Train rides meant getting up earlier than usual and putting on our smartest clothes. Train rides would mean looking with pleasure at the old red-brick colonial-era Barrackpore railway station, and listening with joy to the cacophonous birdcalls of all the thousands of pigeons that roosted under the high asbestos roofs of the paltforms. Train rides meant holding Baba or Ma's hand tightly and waiting breathlessly for the Barrackpore local train to pull in.

And then the rush to get seats. Usually, Baba would be able to bag window seats. Otherwise, Bhai and I would take turns in standing at the window (we were still too short for people to grumble about us blocking the breeze at the window.

Looking at the gradually crowding train compartment, I would check out the other travellers, and look yearningly at Ma everytime a vendor selling foodstuff would board the train. The most yearning silent pleas would be for sour amlaki, sweet Mysore Pak and salt-encrusted guavas.

Looking out of the windiw, we would see the stations flashing past, each with its own stereotyped image in our minds. 

Titagarh was the unruly station crowded with immigrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Khardah was somehow idyllic and village-like, perhaps because of the name ('khar' means hay in Bengali).

Sodepur and Agarpara were interchangeable middle-class Bengali small-towns in my mind, unaspirational and uninspiring.

Belgharia was too crowded, too uncosmopiltan, too RED.

Dumdum was where I would begin to get really excited, because we were now, OFFICIALLY in Calcutta, and also because of the exotic promise of the AIRPORT.

Ulta Danga was just an impatient comma before we landed at

SEALDAH.

The country bumpkin had arrived at the big city, and would be all wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the sights and sounds of Kolkata. But that's another story.

WHAT DID TRAIN RIDES MEAN TO YOU AS A CHILD?

STARRY-EYED DREAMS

When I was a young girl, I had a lot of dreams. Big ones, little ones, recurring ones, once-in-a-while ones. Dreams of all sorts, shapes, and sizes.

One constant was that I would NOT, NOT, NOT, stay in Barrackpore all my life. I mean, I felt that while Barrackpore would be absolutely lovely to COME BACK TO, with its meandering Ganges river, and its crumbling colonial buildings, and its duck-ponds, and green shades, and the familiar comforts of home...I DREAMT OF LIVING ELSEWHERE.

THAT ELSEWHERE WOULD BE UNFIXED, VAGUE, CHANGING WITH WHATEVER BOOK I WOULD BE READING AT THE MOMENT.

It could be Kolkata...which in my childhood dreams had a buzz and bustle that was was belied in reality.

It could be Delhi or Mumbai ... cities that mattered, that were important in the media, that attracted dwellers from all over the country.

It could be London or New York or Los Angelos...places glamourised in the fiction I devoured vicariously.

It could be anywhere but the still centre that was Barrackpore.

WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG, WHERE DID YOU THINK OF LIVING WHEN YOU GREW UP.

TRAIN TO THE HEARTLAND

Staying in Barrackpore and having lots of relations in Calcutta meant that short train journeys (about an hour and a half) were a regular part of our holidays. Trains meant a mix of excitement and apprehension, clutching tightly to Baba's hands on the crowded platform, the pleasure of standing in front of the window with the wind whipping my hair into my eyes, seeing the fields and houses tush by, getting warned every now and then not to put our hands out of the window, buying candies or fruits from the hawkers on the trains. And getting the yellowish cardboard ticket as a keepsake after the journey.

But my first really l-o-o-o-n-g overnight journey on Indian Railways was when I was seven years old, and we (Maa, Bhai and I - Baba had to go to 'office') accompanied my Dadu (mother's father) to Bhopal to visit my Mashi (mother's sister). Bhopal is 1356 kilometers away from Kolkata and we went the distance in an ordinary (not air-conditioned) second-class compartment, in the summer vacation when the temperature outside was often more than 40 degree celsius, in a train that had a coal-engine (which multiplied the heat-factor considerably) and which took two nights (if I remember correctly) to reach Itarsi (the station where we alighted, 77 kilometers away from Bhopal city). But being children, being middle-class, and being part of the frugal-seventies-generation, we never felt the heat or the discomfort. We didn't know any better. Maybe that is a good thing.

Dadu was a meticulous planner, and Maa was his able ally. So we got up on the train accompanied by, among other things, one kunjo of water (earthenware pot) in a wooden stand (to get deliciously cool water - beats refrigerated water any day), unlimited home-made cakes (to last the entire journey and beyond), limited luchi-mangsho (unleavened bread and mutton-curry, for the first night's supper, in such enormous quantities that it could feed an entire coupe of people), and one bedding-roll.

Why bedding-roll? At night, Dadu slept on the lower berth, taking an air-pillow and a two bed-sheets (one to lie upon, one to cover up), Maa and Bhai (then a three-year old enfant docile) slept similarly on the middle berth, and I was put inside the bedding roll with a pillow under my head and the straps tied over my body and bundled up onto the top berth. Despite being strait-jacketed to sleep, I loved the novelty of my high vantage point and spent a large part of the daytime sitting up on the top berth, reaching up to touch the ceiling every now and then.

Only the lure of the window got me down. Travelling through the vastness of India, with its changing terrains, soils, vegetation, cultivated and barren fields, villages, crowds and miles upon miles of empty spaces was an eye-opener. Except when the coal-engine belched extra-vigorously and the sooty smoke wafted into our eyes.

Faces black with soot, tummies full of a constant supply of food, mind replete with a multi-sensory experience of a lifetime, we got down at Itarsi station past midnight, the darkness adding to the mystery of the new place. Maasi (aunt) was waiting for us, and we travelled through the dark and long 77 kilometers to Bhopal clip-clopping in a tonga (horse-drawn carriage). But that's another journey, and another story.

DO SHARE YOUR TRAIN OF MEMORIES WITH US.