PUBLISHED IN THE MAY 2012 ISSUE OF THE INDIAN RAILWAYS' MAGAZINE

ALL ABOARD FOR LIFE'S LESSON

   My mother recently travelled with her Bhagwad Geeta group all the way from Trivandrum in Kerala to Sidhbari ashram in Himachal Pradesh. My uncle, who saw my mother off on the Himsagar Express, expressed his distress on the phone later that morning.

  ‘What need is there for this long trip?’  he asked. ‘And by train! She forgets she is seventy five.’

  I tried to allay his brotherly fears. My mother had certainly passed the age for adventure travel but she had explained that many in her group could not afford the air fare. ‘Never mind, mama, they’ll be fine. After all she’s got Leela Aunty with her.’

  He snorted. ‘Leela Chechi is nearly eighty!’

  His concern was natural. My mother’s friends were a sparky bunch, luckily in relative good health, but they were all septuagenarians or older, and the three-day journey in the summer heat was sure to be gruelling. I felt all sorts of dire misgivings stir within me.

 However, with a remarkable display of organizational skills, the group had rallied their India-wide network of friends and relatives so that fresh food and beverages would be made available to them at various stations along their route. I was delegated to provide Dinner in Delhi and so off I trotted on the assigned evening armed with a towering stack of poories, a dabba of aloo big enough to feed, literally, a trainload of passengers and, of course, the obligatory mithai that must accompany every meal.

  I had the coach number and, thanks to mobile phone technology, was able to find the group within minutes of their arrival at New Delhi railway station. When I boarded the compartment, it was like walking into a favourite aunt’s house. Various foodstuffs were pressed on me and the box of sweets was promptly opened too. It was offered around to not just my mother’s group but also many of their fellow passengers, some of whom had clearly become friends in their two days of voluntary enforced captivity. I looked at what had been my mother’s dwelling for the past couple of days and saw the pillows, razais, magazines and snacks that had transformed this minuscule space into a home away from home. Despite the dust and heat of a Delhi summer, it was – whatever my mama thought – not a bad place to be.

  I know this (and perhaps this explained my mother’s confidence too in undertaking such a marathon journey) because, as a family, we had travelled every summer holiday on the Indian Railways from Delhi to Kerala, where my grandparents lived. In those days, it took us three whole days by train but air travel for the entire family was too exorbitant on a government salary. Besides, my father firmly believed that education did not always come from the pages of a book. ‘By experiencing first-hand the variety of terrain and cultures that we pass, you children will learn much more than any text-book can convey,’ he said. 

  And he was right. For my brother and me, it was the journey traversing the heart of India that was often the most exciting part of our summer holidays. It was while gazing through those train windows that I first picked up a sense of the magnitude of the land I was born in: the endless stretch of her dun brown landscape, the cool green of her forests and the massive river beds that reduced to a trickle in the merciless summers. I picked up knowledge of the many tongues and many hues and – best of all – many foods that sprang from India’s different states, the latter often generously handed out by fellow passengers who had obviously observed with amusement a pair of children unenthusiastically swallowing idli and chutney while eyeing up their stuffed parathas and achaar.

  Many experiences have remained unforgettable: not least, the pleasures to be had in clambering up to the cocoon of the third tier and immersing myself in book after book while soft drinks and snacks were passed up to me. Or throwing coins into the Narmada River in a stirring act of devotion and solidarity with hundreds of other passengers and watching dozens of glinting bits catch the sunlight before falling away under the bridge to the rolling waters below. I remember too watching my mother lock up our compartment in readiness for the night and falling asleep to the blue hue of the night-light and the gentle rocking of the train. Hair-raising at it was, I even have fond memories of going into a toilet and doing my business as I watched India’s great land shoot past through a hole in the floor. Even more hair-raising is the memory of looking out with awe and wonder as our train passed through the Chambal, feeling a frisson of fear as my father told us about the dacoits who hid in those endless mud folds and ravines, growling in his most sinister voice, ‘You can’t see them but they can see you. Just think, a hundred eyes are watching you right now.’

  But nothing bad ever happened and perhaps it was this that gave both me and my mother the confidence that she would be fine on her train journey.

  In fact, it was memories of my many train journeys that provided the images I needed when I later became a novelist and wrote ‘Rani’, a fictionalised biography of Rani Lakshmibai who made her own marathon journey from Varanasi to Jhansi when she married its king.  Lakshmibai would have travelled by road, in a caravan of elephants and bullocks, but rail lines were already being planned and laid in her time and it would not have been many years later that trains were cutting across the landscape. There was, it must be said, an exploitative element to this great innovation as the British needed to transport their troops, and carry cotton and other raw materials to ports from where they would go to mills in England. But, by Independence, India had the fourth longest railway network in the world and today it is a system that links its furthest reaches and disparate peoples with an incredible 65,000 km of tracks and 7,500 stations.    

  Progress is undoubtedly desirable and imperative but there are inevitably losses too when we move on. One of these, in my view, lies in the manner in which we travel today. In an increasingly busy and stressful world, people demand ever shorter journeys. Besides, it’s natural to believe that one of the benefits of prosperity lies in not having to rough it out any more. Far be it for me to preach but, for those people whose are fortunate enough to afford the luxury of air travel and foreign holidays, I say only this:  please take your children on a long-haul train journey at least once. There is no better way for them to learn about their country and its multifarious people. It will give them the confidence to travel anywhere in the world. It will provide them with some of their best memories. And, best of all, the lessons they learn on such a journey will equip them for life.