I was anxious to be travelling east that evening. A state bus had taken me from Chandigarh, across the Punjab, to the railway station at Ambala Cantonment Junction. This place would become one that I would remember well for the rest of my life.
Unperturbed by the five-hour wait ahead of me, I hoped to board the 23.10 Howrah mail from Amritsar. I say ‘hoped’. Nobody would have advised me to travel on a train journey of this magnitude without a reservation. I had never attempted it before. I knew that I needed to get one, and I had no experience of how to do that.
My first call was obvious, so I visited the ticket office, where I was emphatically told, ’Reservation not available!’. I moved onto the Reservations office where again, I received the same three-word response. The train was officially full and the waiting list was too long for there to be any hope of a reservation on that train.
I felt deflated by the time I arrived at the Station Master’s office, which issued the same disappointment, until I was given a glimmer of hope by the station master himself. He told me not to worry, there would definitely be a chance of getting on that train without a reservation, so I naively clutched onto that glimmer of hope.
In the half-light I strolled onto the platform. Next to a row of parcel trolleys, I settled into a pile of hessian sacks, and took out my diary.
My lack of reservation notwithstanding, I now felt at peace with myself, spending five hours lying comfortably on my bed of parcels in an ambient evening temperature, eating sumptuous deep-fried snacks, sipping sweet masala chai, and watching the demographic of the Indian sub-continent join me on the seemingly endless platform. It was not only time well spent, I considered it to be a quintessential Indian affair.
Built in 1891, the buildings housed offices that still performed their original function, with separate entrances for the office of the Chief Luggage Transhipment Clerk and the Senior Electric Foreman (power), as well as the Head Ticket Collector, the Chief Reservation Inspector, the Station Superintendent and the Govt. Railway Police. There was a Waiting Room (1st Class) and a Waiting Room (2nd Class) with a seated guard at each entrance. Vegetarian Refreshment Rooms, serving tea in a pot, and non-Vegetarian Refreshment Rooms which were clean and tidy. There were the well-kept Railway Retiring Rooms too, but the most nostalgic of all was the 3-sided, Higginbotham’s Bookshop, painted a peacock blue. Higginbottom’s was ubiquitous to all large stations. In this case its counters and shutters were projected into the main platform, the serving counter was parallel to the track, and the other two sides were on a 60-degree splay to the main building.
This was colonial cultural fusion at its most nostalgic best.
The volume of noise rose and fell over 5 hours of trains arriving and leaving, but now I was witnessing the rise in the beat of my own heart, as the anticipated Howrah Mail was only twenty minutes away. A slow swell in platform activity increased the tension; each time I looked over to a space that I had looked at only 2 minutes previously, there were an extra 3 or 4 people standing in it.
Like a Hitchcock thriller, this apprehension continued until the platform was filled up, and there emerged a palpable energy, a force that might carry the threat of a surge, and maybe even a tsunami. Was everybody here hoping to enter a non-reserved carriage? Were they as desperate as I was to be travelling east that night? I had never tried to do this before, and my inexperience put me at a disadvantage.
Vendors arrived, settling their wares at their feet before hoisting them onto their heads once the train arrived. Now, we were all standing shoulder to shoulder. There was a pregnant hum in the air.
The track displayed its first subtle vibration. ‘Om’, I thought – the vibration that signified the creation of the universe, but it was the Big Bang that followed, as the first distant powerful beam of light, from the front of the engine, was seen approaching the curve into the station. The hum became a clatter of jostling passengers and luggage; vendors calling out, ‘chai, chai’, ‘roti, roti’, and ‘soupy, soupy, tomato soupy’. Eggs were cracked and omelettes made in a flash, samosas were scooped out of woks of boiling oil and wrapped in newspaper, and roasting peanuts were tossed into paper cones. The brake linings of the train screeched against the steel tracks, emitting a pungent burning smell.
I gawped as the first and second class (sleeper) carriages slowly passed me, then the crowd approached to within a couple of feet of the unreserved carriages.
The train’s passengers that were gathered around the open doors hoping to step down, had to think again, as the onrush of passengers hoping to embark, laid charge.
War was declared. Those who whipped themselves into a frenzy clearly felt that all was fair. Elderly ladies took elbows to the face. No harm was intended, but many silently suffered.
I stood rigidly with my rucksack on my back, and my daysack cradled in my arms. I watched, astounded at this impasse. I would have had to break through at least seven layers of determined passengers ahead of me if I were to board the train.
In a state of shock, I surveyed the situation. Each and every door was jammed, and looking to the inside of the train, it was almost equally choked.
I looked up to find many passengers on the roof, and thought for an instant that I had the solution. In a reckless moment, I swiftly skirted the crowd, and went between the carriages in an attempt to climb onto the roof for the journey of a lifetime. Reaching up for a helping hand, I only received the sole of a bare foot from above, full in the face, followed by a hostile mouthful of Punjabi abuse. The blow stung me, and the train’s warning hooter blew, signifying 2 remaining minutes before departure. The red-eyed Punjabi guarded the roof to ensure a more comfortable journey for himself and his compatriots, he was not up for negotiating.
The situation around the doors had not improved; the second hooter blew, and the train slowly set in motion. Hordes ran alongside it, hoping to grab hold of any available projection, but there was nothing left to hang onto. The train gently gathered speed, and I had to contend with the taste of my first defeat.
Utterly dejected and feeling a little sorry for myself, I shuffled over to the Station Master’s office and described the situation that he was already well aware of.
‘But I need to get to Varanasi!’ I claimed, indignantly.
‘Don’t worry!’ he said, ‘There is another train at five past midnight, you will get on that, it will not be so crowded. You can be sure’.
In my continuing naivety, I took solace in his re-assurances and returned to the platform with some hope of reaching Varanasi partially restored.
I needed a battle plan. I had noticed at the scene of the previous train arrival, that there had been several men dressed in Bengal-red tunics, carrying small mountains of luggage on their heads and running amongst the crowds. They wore official brass arm plates, and looked very purposeful. Wondering if they could be of help to me, I decided to investigate.
They were the station’s official porters and they understood everything in minute detail, regarding the on-the-ground running of their station.
I recruited one to help me get onto the next Howrah bound train, but he insisted that I needed to employ his colleague too – they worked as a team.
There was no doubt in their minds that I would be on the next Howrah mail. They instructed me to stand in a specific spot until the train arrived.
Having just about recovered from the blow to my face, my stress levels were increasing again. I wondered if any of these hopeful passengers without reservations, managed to cope with the situation without reaching the verge of a cardiac arrest. I was convinced that living like this must contribute to India’s statistics of low life-expectancy.
It was then that I met Nirmal, a Nepalese stranger, on the platform. He appeared to be the antithesis of stress. I was drawn to his radiant calm, as he stood within his protective aura of tranquillity, cradling a small parcel like it was his baby.
This most gentle of men introduced me to his benign, elderly mother. A woman of seventy-two years, she dressed very modestly and stood poised in a gracefully upright stance, amongst a pile of luggage heaped on the floor around their feet. Her possessions suggested she could have been a peasant, but observing her demeanour, she could have been a royal.
I was interested in Nirmal’s small parcel. He spoke to me with reverence, explaining that it was a clay pot of holy water that he was carrying home for the spiritual benefit of his family and his village.
He had carefully transported it many miles from a holy place he clearly expected me to have heard of, but I had not. It was wrapped in a Calico cotton cloth. I spent my time with them, and my heartbeat returned to normal. My faith in the human race was gently returning, along with my love of travelling in this serendipitous country brimming with interest and vitality.
My newfound stillness was broken by the arrival of the Howrah Mail, and I looked anxiously around for the two porters I had enlisted to help me onto the train. They duly arrived just as the railway tracks began to vibrate as they had done fifty-five minutes earlier. My heartbeat raced again, and once more they told me to stand precisely on one spot. I was at their command.
The train slowly passed through, looking almost as crowded as the previous one. It decelerated almost to a standstill, and then, with the same screech as before, it abruptly jolted to a halt.
My precise location left me facing the middle of a carriage with gangs of battling, hopeful passengers all rushing for the doors at either end of the bogey. I was in the wrong place! My position appeared to put me at a great disadvantage, I became confused. My faith in the porters began to plummet. Angry at their incompetence I turned to walk towards one of the doors when my feet were swiftly swept from beneath me. ‘What the….!?’ I began to exclaim, but my speech was thwarted by fear, as my face fell rapidly towards the ground, only to suddenly feel my chest and shoulders mysteriously supported by a Bengal red arm, sporting a brass arm plate.
I was now held at my shoulders and at my feet, parallel to the ground and was thrust forwards like a battering ram, headlong towards the carriage. Unlike many of the other cars, this particular carriage did not have bars at the window. That would have been known to the porters. They ran directly at it, with confidence, until I was thrust half way through the open window.
The passengers inside realised what was happening, and they reacted quickly. I was poised, half-way inside, and half-way out of the carriage for an interminable length of time. On the inside, passengers were pushing me out, and on the outside, the porters, with re-enforcements of other hopefuls, were pushing me in. My genitals lay resting on an aluminium ridge that was the window sill. Heaved one way, then the other, I see-sawed on the aluminium ridge in great pain. The strap of my daysack covered my eyes, I could not see, and it became a battle of strength, and only my genitals could tell which side was winning.
A leather strap came crashing down onto the back of my head, and as I was still wondering what it was, it came crashing down again with yet another sting, and I could see only coloured stars in this darkness of hell.
In great pain I girded my loins, and with an inspired heave from outside, I ended up in the laps of several seated passengers.
There was now quite a crowd on the platform trying to enter the train via this window. With only 10 minutes remaining until the train had to depart, there was panic from within the carriage. Under no circumstances would the Howrah Mail be held up.
With this in mind, and the fight well under way, I jumped to my feet with adrenaline pumping through my veins. Dragging the defenders away from the window, I spotted my rucksack over the heads of the melee on the platform. The porters hurled it towards me, and I dragged it through the window, not minding who might incur a blackened eye as a consequence. I too, had become degenerate.
In the midst of this battle I saw Nirmal on the shoulders of outsiders. His still benign face was contorted by flailing arms and hands, behind him his hoisted mother was stretching and bending like a rubber ring. I dragged them both through the window onto the floor of the carriage as a nearby army commander thrashed at them with the wide leather belt he had stripped from his khaki trousers.
The train lurched, its hooter signifying the end of conflict as the last remnants of Nirmal’s luggage fell onto passengers’ heads.
I was on my feet, lathered in sweat, my head stinging, my genitals throbbing; I finally allowed myself the luxury of a slow exhalation. Half way through it I noticed two Bengal red tunics running alongside the train. I gulped, interrupting that long slow breath. I had not paid my two heroic porters their fee!
I groped around in my trouser pocket and took out a fistful of change and thrust it out of the window. I saw a chink of light reflect off one of the bouncing coins as it hit the downward slope at the very end of the long station platform. I held my hands up in the gesture of prayer and shouted ‘Thank you’, as they scraped amongst the detritus for their reward which I could only hope exceeded our arrangement.
There was a long journey ahead of me. My objective was achieved, so it was perhaps time to make amends with those I had fought, but I anticipated a lot of bitter feeling coming my way.
To my confusion, there was none of it. The new intake jostled to find space, and each and every passenger edged over an inch here, and an inch there, offering snacks and smiles to their new companions. I was offered enough room on the filthy floor to sit hugging my rucksack eventually curling up into a position for sleep.
My emotional state was beyond exhaustion. I dreamily took in this surprising camaraderie, wondering how the same folk, who were a moment earlier behaving like wild animals competing for a mating partner, were transformed into kind and civil beings. I could only consider that these two situations were not opposites, but were in fact the same. That is, they were both acts of survival. There was no better option, once space had been conceded, than to show consideration and civility. This would be the most tolerable way to survive the next nineteen hours.
This sudden change of behaviour kept me awake for a while, but I was fighting sleep, and as I drifted in between the two states, I looked out through my bleary eyes, and I saw Nirmal and his mother sitting on the floor in lotus position, like two calm and erudite Shakyamuni Buddhas. The Howrah mail sped eastwards into the night, as Nirmal held on to his Calico cotton cloth which no longer held the shape of a clay pot. It was sodden, and there was a small pool of holy water at his feet, and I felt deeply sad for him, his mother and his village back home.