In favour of Koraput and Bodinayakannur

A porter,brilliantly red in his uniform,but bent with age and a lifetime of carrying 50 kilos on his head,ambles by. He seems lost. And for a moment,I am too,as my mind races back some 30 years to a dirty platform in Pachora,a small town in the heart of Maharashtra. Propped up by my father on one of those ubiquitous wooden benches,both of us await the passing by of the Geetanjali Express — the most prestigious train on the Mumbai-Howrah route. The signals have turned green and there is a barely concealed sense of excitement and wonder in the air. The normally vociferous vendors selling vada-pavs and bananas have turned deathly quiet. The station master’s desultory announcement as to the non-stop nature of the train booms through the platform. The wind picks up dead flies and paper and swirls them around the platform. The distant sound of continuous staccato blasts from the horn keeps getting louder and louder. I squeeze my father’s hands a little more. He tucks me in closer. Other parents quickly pull their children in from the edge. The red and cream locomotive screams into the platform with its assortment of coaches bobbing wildly. And just like that,in 30 seconds,it’s all over. My father relaxes his hold on me.

I knew then that I wanted to be a railway traveller.

I took another 30 years to be one. Late in 2009,I did the middle-class unthinkable. Quit a well-playing,cushy job and decided to travel full time. Unlike most people who change careers,I had no illusions of being a writer or a photographer or anything of that sort. I only wanted to travel. And as far as possible,use the railways. But why? I wanted to find a part of me that was missing. Find some part of me that I’d always thought had separated from me and was walking the earth independently. Find the part that was infinitely happier and innocent. Find the part that was a young,romantic fool all the time. Find the part that would gawk at the whistling steam engine,the gurgling diesel and a humming electric. Find that part that existed for a brief minute on Pachora’s platform.

But perhaps what drove me more than anything was to experience life at the edge. What would it be like hanging on for dear life onto the door of a crowded passenger to Dahanu? How would the body react to the bone-crushing difficulty of getting a seat for a 300 km passenger train journey to Balharshah? What would the mind make of the hazards a “gangman” faces while walking the tracks and checking if it is safe. I wanted to search for these hardships. I wanted to feel their mind-numbing regularity and energy-sapping doggedness. For only in doing this would I ever be able to truly view the world using the twin lenses of compassion and knowledge.

So with much determination and gusto,I set off. There were no preferred routes or must see places. However,the one constant in all this was to avoid any sort of tourist haven. So despite being major railway places,Agra,Jodhpur,Bikaner and Goa were discarded in favour of Koraput,Jharsuguda,Vijayawada and Bodinayakannur. There were no set dates or patterns for these trips either. I would wake up one morning and do a sort of rock-paper-scissors on the map and decide to head there the next day. There was a school-boyish exhilaration of hefting a backpack and turning up at the station,not knowing until the last moment which train to take.

But the initial few forays were disappointing. Guntakal was interesting; so were Itarsi and Kharagpur. But why? Was it because of the seedy,shady street bars? Was it because almost everyone in these towns was in some way connected to the railways? Was it because like all growing towns trying to move beyond their main source of sustenance they had temporarily lost their sense of purpose? I grappled with the classic mistake any eager traveller makes — an assumption of the outcome. I was supposed to learn something from this place. I was supposed to come away with unforgettable memories. I was supposed to come away with something tangible. Would the sight of a swollen-bellied child defecating by the tracks in the open still be with me in six months time? Would the memory of seeing a severed head and limbs carted away from a level crossing be filed away for future reference and interpretation?

Towards the middle of last year,I took the slowest available passenger train to Chennai. Not until I got swamped by a family of woodcutters on one side and by the noxious vapours of an old man smoking hash on the other,did I completely understand the futility of thinking along such abstract and pseudo-Proustian lines.

Travel,and particularly by the Indian Railways,is probably the only way to humanise oneself. The rawness of the experience doesn’t allow one to detach oneself from it. There is no way to escape the foul,swarthy smell of a hundred unwashed bodies in a space meant for 30. There is no way around other than holding your urine for three hours because the toilets are overflowing with fellow passengers. There is nothing you can do other than clean up by yourself the dried vomit on the window sill of your favourite seat.

Once you learn to take this assault in,railway travel suddenly transforms itself. Your coach becomes your home,fellow passengers become family. There is food shared. There is old Bollywood music played. There are bets won and lost on card games. There is a unified sense of frustration when the signal stays red. And when it turns green,there is a deep,fulfilling sense of going. Somewhere. Anywhere. It helps that most Indian trains are slow. Kilometres are not just physical,they are temporal too. Unlike the disjointed feeling one gets after a long flight,the railways allows for a gradual takeover. The landscape keeps changing,the houses seem different after a while,the food on the platform becomes less palatable (or the reverse) and the tea tastes better (or worse). And,by the time you arrive,you haven’t so much arrived as you have assimilated the destination.

So,more than a year and hundreds of destinations later,I find myself at a junction. Should I continue doing what I’ve been doing or should I end it? Despite the signal being green on both tracks,I have no easy answers. Perhaps a long trip,sitting by the window,hearing the constant rhythmic thump of steel on steel and letting the wind comb my hair will yield something.

(The writer is a former Google consultant)