Platform fare 2

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 16 Oktober 2013 | 21.16

Jug Suraiya
16 October 2013, 11:32 AM IST

On Indian railways even the tea varies, as my father explained in Tundla. In the east it tended to be somewhat stronger and darker. As one went north and west, and the milk became richer and more plentiful, the taste and the colour constantly changed. The brew became thicker and lighter and, in the west, had an aftertaste of cardamom. My father was not pedantic about all this, just comprehensive. To him travel was a moveable feast, best enjoyed by accepting and relishing the best that each successive stage of the journey had to offer.

He was equally interested in the people we met on the way. Fluent in Bengali and Hindi as well as his native Gujarati, he seldom found it difficult to carry on a conversation with a bewildering variety of people. There were small-town merchants generous with scented zarda and advice; village elders with gnarled hands and shrewd eyes who were knowledgeable about cows, crops and how to keep a small boy engrossed by showing him the best way to tie a turban; young brides-to-be smothered in brocade and parental concern; big city clerks full of self-importance and scandal; pilgrims carrying containers of sacred water from the Ganges and holy men swathed in saffron or smeared with ashes.
Not everyone was a bona fide traveller. There were some short distance passengers who used the train as a means of livelihood. Astrologers and palmists who predicted alliances, births and successful ventures with astute felicity. Herbalists and faith-healers who offered black powders or copper talismans as antidotes for everything from asthma to unhappiness. Devotional singers with stringed instruments who asked for alms. Many of them travelled without the formality of buying a ticket and occasionally a guard would materialise and descend wrathfully to demand their tickets. Often my father would try and intervene, asking the official not to be too hard on them. I think his sympathy to some degree arose out of a wistfulness for their itinerant ways.

After my father died, my travels as I'd known them, came to an end. My excursions became purposeful exercises, conducted via the airconditioned chair-cars of super-fast expresses that thundered across the country without deigning to stop at any but five or six of the most important halts. Then as luck and a lapsed reservation would have it, I had to make the 1,100-mile journey from Bombay to Calcutta, cutting right through the heart of the country, by ordinary passenger train. The inter and third classes of the past had been merged into an omnibus second into which Bunny and I managed to cram ourselves.

The cast of characters had changed. Mingled with the rural folk returning home, agog with the excitement of having visited a big city, there were a couple of young low-budget Western travellers in denims and rucksacks. Junior government employees with railway passes sniffed imperviously at chattering fisherwomen carrying baskets of their catch. Children wailed. A  man with an enormous bedroll asked everyone whether the train would stop at Sewri but seemed not the least put out when no one could tell him. A seller of boiled sweets accompanied his sales pattern with the rhythm of a Hindi pop tune which he tapped out on his glass jar with a spoon.

At nine o'clock it was time to get into our narrow bunks, three to a tier. I crawled in, conjecturing how I was going to stand 40-odd hours, or maybe even two days of this noisy bedlam. The calls of the tea boys woke me next morning. The train had stopped at a small station. The cries of chai, garram chai introduced a sense of the familiar. I got down and bought two bowls of tea on the small platform. There was a hiss of frying puris, and someone saying in a mid-western American voice, "Hey, that smells good."

"It tastes a bit funny," said Bunny. "That is the cardamom," I replied. "It's nice when you get used to it. Anyway I promise to get you the best oranges you've ever eaten when we get to Nagpur this afternoon." As we settled down to the rhythm of the moving train, I began to remember the rites of passage my father had taught me long ago. The distance to Nagpur, or even to Calcutta, didn't seem to matter so much any more. 


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