Train of Memories

From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson

"Faster than fairies, faster than witches, Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches; ……

And here is a mill, and there is a river: Each a glimpse and gone forever!"

These lines from RL Stevenson’s famous poem reverberate in my mind whenever I think of trains. For me, trains possess some undefined charm, a return to an old world scenario, where time doesn’t fly and instead languidly envelops one, a cocoon where you get time to think things through or day dream or read or just watch life outside the window pass by – I enjoy train journeys.

I must specify that this preference relates to the under 24-hr journeys – my 2 experiences of long train journeys [one from Bangalore to Indore and the other a terribly delayed train from Delhi to Bangalore] are enough to make me shudder and adopt an ‘amnesia-cal’ approach.

To me, train journeys are almost 2 dimensional in nature. One where the traveller creates the memories and the other where the traveller is an observer. I also know that a lot of folks cannot appreciate the width of the visual feast that a train journey offers. The initial awe and wonder wanes off. It is easy to turn a blind eye and act as if one were travelling in an underground tube. But when one opens one’s mind and senses, and looks out at the world out there, one realizes that the journey has a parallel existence. One more overt, the memories inside the carriage and the other more sublime, the outside images that fly by.

As I try and recount some of my memories inside the carriage, a whole bevy of pleasant memories rush in and I’m left with a smile. Time to leave the platform, put up my feet and retreat into the chuk chuk of recollections. No wonder it’s called a train of thought.

My earliest memories of train travel are the annual ones we took every summer when we travelled from Vizag [where Dad was posted, courtesy the Indian Navy] to my grandparents’ home in Trichur, Kerala, stopping enroute in Chennai [where my cousins lived] for a day or two. We always travelled first-class in an independent coupe for the four of us and typically with the entire works – individually packed food for different meals, the brilliant turquoise and amber mega water container, basic linen, etc – quite like a caravan of our own. It was an adventure, especially for my elder brother and I who used to keep hopping across our upper berths. For me, through the eyes of a young 6 year old, it was awesome - getting to spend time with working parents or playing with an older brother who usually didn’t want his little sister trailing his friends and him.

Another childhood memory I have is of travelling from Moscow to St Petersburg when I was 7 – I was so impressed by the plush comfortable interiors of the Russian trains – a huge departure from the spartan India trains that we were accustomed to. Our train section was full of most of my dad’s ship crew and their families, so we could keep moving from one end to the other end, chatting with almost everyone in between and literally running wild.

Over the years, as both a student and while working, I have travelled innumerable times by train, alone & with friends, though the frequency has progressively decreased. Train times are spent either reading, sleeping, thinking and observing people if I’m travelling alone or cackling away with constant chitter-chatter all the way if I’m travelling with friends and family.

Travel by the AC chair car train, Shatabdi tends to be more serious, hardly any privacy with the theatre-style close seating and voices tending to travel far. Though I must admit, we tried to defy the trend during an all-girls fun trip recently from New Delhi to Hardwar [nothing remotely religious, it was a stop en-route to the Valley of Flowers].

Travelling by the normal 2^nd class chair car trains like Brindavan/ Lalbagh [usually to Chennai] was more fun. During a journey when we were in college, I remember a friend of mine, Pi & I leaving our luggage with a sympathetic aunty and sitting together on the steps of the boogie at the entry point, watching the world in true Stevenson style. Dangerous in retrospect but nothing to beat the high we felt during that time. After drawing much unwanted attention, we scrambled back to our seats to retrieve our luggage and in the process, also gained 2 marriage proposals from the aunty for her 2 sons for Pi & I – the situation was so bizarrely hilarious that it was a surprise that we didn’t burst out laughing right away. Anyway, moral of the story was to be wary of over-friendly aunties too - baah! Really there isn’t any free lunch, even to take care of luggage.

I moved to travelling by 3AC - certainly safer and more comfortable. I travelled all over by train from Bangalore during those last years in college – Pune, Kerala, Bombay, Vizag, Chennai, etc. Soon, the 50% flight discount for students proved too good and when I started working, I almost completely moved to travelling by air.

Travelling in the unreserved compartment is something most people in India have done atleast once in their lives. No such exciting tales in my repertoire - I did a watered down version as a child with my Mum when travelling between Trichur & Tiruvalla – stations some hours apart and anyway, no one books seats for it. One just jumps in & hunts for a seat and hangs on to it for the rest of the journey. A piece of cake compared to travelling in rush hour in the Bombay local trains. The other time that came close is while travelling from Indore to Bombay, sharing a berth with a batchmate due to our tickets being RAC [where you are entitled to half a seat].

During my long break from work last year, I travelled alone to Hyderabad by 2AC and I must say that I was quite delighted. In my opinion, the coaches are cleaner, more comfortable, less crowded and the crowd is better. Infact, I felt it was better than the experience I had of travelling from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur this December by the KTMB train in a 2^nd class coach.

Taking the train of thoughts forward, on my wish list are the luxury trains that we now have in India – the splendid Palace-on-wheels that runs through Rajasthan & more recently and closer home, the Golden Chariot that runs through Karnataka.

An interesting consumer behaviour trivia that I noticed is that people behave differently when travelling by train. I know of some people who talk garrulously with their neighbours and most often are just nosey parkers. Others like me keep to their group or their books/ music. Others wait to experiment with the different food available in the different regions that the train traverses by. Most often, people sleep almost the entire journey. My mother falls in the latter category, though she vehemently denies it. I used to say each one to his/her own.

I’m usually not one to sleep a lot of train journeys – especially when travelling in groups; I’m all for playing games – card games like UNO, word games, etc. However, a recent train journey from Jaisalmer to New Delhi saw me sleeping most of the time – I was too tired from an exhausting 10 day break in Rajasthan and was only too glad of the peaceful respite that the train offered, complemented by the characteristic swaying and rocking that one experiences when travelling by train. I now say each one to his/her own and a little bit of each for each, as I discovered myself.

The more I think about my train journeys, more memories come flooding in. In true parallel theme existence, almost simultaneously, images of the many country sides that I’ve been fortunate to witness are conjured up – myriad colours emanating from various forms of geographical elements [hills, valleys, fields, plains, etc] – numerous scenes from life in villages, towns and cities – innumerable attires and features of people from a country so diverse and so rich – each a source to creatively enthuse you, each an avenue to lose yourself - each a glimpse and gone forever, yet these mini stills do stamp their impression on life. Such is a train journey with its unforgettable duality!