So, we got in and took our allotted seats. In between came the ritual of tucking in of luggage, with no luggage restrictions of any kind, Indian Railways lets people bring in as many suitcases, bags as they want. All of these have to be confined in a small place, there are fights , there are adjustments during the ritual.There also an obligatory fight with my sister about the right to occupy the window seat.Of course,being the elder brother i would have to sacrifice the window seat, which i still think was legitimately mine, since i allowed her the window seat the last time around.
Thus, the journey began. A long 3 day journey to the ‘native place’ or ‘gaon’. The most remarkable thing about the journey happened in the first 30 minutes, at this point the train had not gained much speed and you could still see Surat on the horizon, you became friends with all your co-passengers. It was difficult to believe that just 5 minutes ago they were complete strangers and at each others throats for an inch of space. It began with a smile , a simple ‘where are you from?’, ‘can i have the magazine please?’.
My greatest thrill was opportunity to eat junk food. A procession of hawkers would have started as soon as the train started, and i would not mind any of it. I would leave out the hawkers selling fruits, milk, juices or any healthy stuff. The prized ones where the guys selling ‘bhajiya’, ‘bhelpuri’ , ‘bonda’ basically all items scooped out of boiling oil preferably in crispy state. An Indian Railways catering employee also came around in between asking for dinner orders, he would be carrying a chit of paper on which he would write down the berth numbers of the people who order. That was the sophisticated technology used for recording lunch and dinner orders of the entire train. I do not know about the prestigious trains, but the cooks on our route were not hired for their culinary skills. They did come up with some basics, a watery dal, a chewy roti, half boiled rice and something vaguely resembling a subji. Later i realized that all of them were hired from engineering college canteens. Campus placement, i believe. But i must confess, i enjoyed the food, i had no reason to but i did.
A journey spanning 2 nights and 3 days , taking you through 5 states, covering Maharashtra during the first night, second day alternating between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh , reaching Bangalore late in the evening and covering TN on the second night and reaching the shores of Kerala on the third day morning. Looks good on paper , doesn’t it, but sadly it never played out like that. All the Kerala trains were supposed to arrive at Palghat ( a major junction at the entrance of Kerala from TN) , between 3 -5 in the morning. In all my years of travelling ( at least 10),i cannot remember it happening more than twice.Why was this important, because we had to get down at Palghat and catch a different train to reach our ‘gaon’. Now if we reached early enough in the morning, we had a couple of options, and could be home by 9 or 10 in the morning, but if we missed that range of time, we were looking at spending 3-4 hours waiting at Palghat station waiting for the next train going in that direction.Oh, i could load you up with jargons about connecting trains and bogies being detached and attached, but the long and short of it is , more often than not, we ended up spending the first day of our visit to Kerala on Palghat station.
But , hey, we were in Kerala, I would get excited seeing the latest Mohanlal movie posters, people talking in Malayalam all around me ( Now i wonder why, i do not particularly love mallus, Mohanlal , yes, but others not so much).Around 10 in the morning at Palghat station , came what was called the ‘Link Express’ , as the name makes it amply clear , it was a train linking those forsaken mallus going to North Kerala ( towards Calicut, Kannur) whom the mother train offloaded here. Trains coming from all over India to Kerala had to pass through Palghat during those days, all the trains were timed to arrive at around the same range of time, between 3-6 in the morning, the bogies meant for North Kerala were offloaded in Palghat and joined up to form a new train which left at 10 in the morning. The meticulous indian bureaucratic planning.
In the end, we reached, we reached at 3 in the evening to my dad’s village, to his beautiful ancestral house, which was always our first pit stop during the vacation. Being the first-born grandson meant that i was treated like a prince especially by my grandmother and generally by the rest of the extended family, i could do no wrong. The best food and sweets were prepared for the prince, as also were plans made to get videos and show him all the movies that he must have missed in the past year.
Then one of best engineering feats of modern India, creation of Konkan Railways, which drastically cut the time travel between Gujarat and Kerala. Now it takes just 24 hours to reach Kerala from Surat and it takes you through a picturesque route passing through Konkan Region, Goa and the ghats. I too had grown up by that time to enjoy a train travel anymore, travelling by air became much more practical. But i miss the old route, the summer heat, the laziness of the train, the glimpses of the country from the window bars of those trains, the uncomfortable berths of the trains. How else would i have known about places like , Mantralayam Road, Guntakal, Guntur, Gulbarga, Krishnarajpuram, Whitefield,Gooty, Wadi? Places that are etched in my memory only because my train stopped there every year without fail.
Filed under: General, Humour, Me Vichars about, Uncategorized
