Rail Yatra- Part 1

Indian Railways , the nervous system of India. They transport millions of people every day. Each train in India is a mini-India in itself. There are all kinds of trains, passenger trains, express trains, super fast express ,Rajdhani, Shatbadi now there are Durontos which are non stop super fast trains between metro cities.

Each city/town/village has a favorite train of its own. R.K.Narayan, the master novelist, realized this when he made 27UP and 27 DOWN pass through Malgudi each day. Of course Malgudi was a small town thus did not have the luxury of having a whole lot of trains passing through. But Surat, the place that I belong to is different. Surat lies midway between Mumbai and Ahmedabad (an 8 hour journey give or take) and the first major stop after Mumbai towards Delhi, possibly the busiest train route in India.

Surat, of course, had trains connecting to Ahmedabad and Mumbai with great frequency. The  favorites were ‘Flying Ranee’ ( one of the oldest trains in India ) , which started from Surat at 5 in the morning and reached Mumbai at 10 and the ‘Gujarat Queen’ which starts in Valsad, city 1 hour east of Surat, but gets filled up in Surat at 5:30 in the morning and reaches A’bad at 10:30 in the morning. Both these trains start their return journeys at 6 from Mumbai and Ahmedabad respectively and reach Surat around 10:30 and 11 in the night. This cycle has been continuing for many decades now.’Flying Ranee’ is one of the few trains in India to have double-decker compartments.

During my formative years, trains used to take a special significance only during summer vacation. My parents ,dutifully, used to book the tickets after much struggle, every year to Kerala. It was a long 3-day journey which I am sure felt like hell at that time but now I recall fondly.

It generally started on the first Saturday after the schools shut down for the summer. The train used to reach Surat at 2:35 in the afternoon. We would have been packing for at least 3 days prior to that. In between there would be fights between me and my sister, me and my mom on what to take and what not to take. On the d- day, my mother would be up early to prepare food for the journey. We would take food to last us until breakfast next day. After much preparation, at last it was time to go the station.

An auto would be fetched to take us till the station. The railway stations, as most of them are, give out a stench which is a mixture of garbage, tea, beggars, and food. For any journey involving my dad we have to reach the station at least an hour in advance, he was preparing us for our current life of waiting for airport security checks. This was before the omnipresence of telephones, so it was usually when we reached the station that we came to know that the train is late.

Wearing new clothes, in anticipation of the journey, we were reduced to languishing on the platform. For anybody who knows Surat Railway station, the south bound trains always come on platform 2. I distinctly remember years when the trains were at least 4-5 hours late, so there we were on platform number 2 waiting for the Kerala train to arrive. And arrive it did, finally rumbling along onto the platform. As soon as it arrived there was a mad rush to get in, though the train stopped for 5 minutes at the station, all of us assumed that it would go away as fast as it came, hence the mad rush to get in at any cost.

The mad rush always led to fights, it was mish-mash of porters balancing suitcases on their heads, bags on their arms, families with babies, me holding my sister’s hand trying to wedge our way into the compartment. If my memory serves me right, S-6 and S-7 was Surat quota. Which meant that these compartments were meant to filled up in Surat, but which also meant free loaders, short distance travelers had monopolized the compartment on the way to Surat, and all of them are trying to get down and we are all (at least 72 of us + people who have come see off people + porters), trying to get in before the damn train started ambling again.   ( To be continued..)

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