I can never call myself a true-blue Bengali because I haven’t seen — and for some reason don’t intend to see — any of the movies in the trilogy that made Satyajit Ray world-famous. But there are three other Ray masterpieces that I’ve watched several times — Aranyer Din Ratri , Ghare Baire and Nayak — and will undoubtedly watch them again, and again.
Only this afternoon I watched Nayak , perhaps for the fourth time, on YouTube, and from the very first scene, was tickled by the let’s-see-what-happens-next curiosity. The protagonist, Uttam Kumar, is an actor whose popularity is just about beginning to fade and who is travelling from Calcutta to Delhi — by train, first-class — to collect a prestigious government award, and the story is all about that train journey.
I had undertaken a similar journey just days before, travelling first-class in the best Calcutta-New Delhi train, Rajdhani Express, even though I did not go all the way to New Delhi, had detrained, after 12 hours of journey, at Kanpur.
But the similarities in our journeys — mine and the protagonist’s — ended with the route taken by the train and some of the luxuries accorded to passengers travelling first-class; in terms of experience, our journeys were totally different. I shall describe mine.
A first-class coach is partitioned into several coupes, each coupe meant to comfortably accommodate four passengers. At the Howrah station, when I entered the coupe assigned to me, one of the three passengers going to travel with me — an elderly, bearded man — was already there, too busy staring at the screen of his Toshiba laptop to even look at me.
Soon after, the second passenger came in: once he had placed his luggage under the seat, he got busy with his mobile phone.
The third passenger, a young woman, probably a student, already had earphones plugged in when we walked in, minutes before the train left. She ignored the rest of us as she took her seat, and assuming a stern, do-not-disturb-me look, fixed her gaze on her smartphone screen.
Once the train started moving, an attendant slid open the coupe door and handed each of us a rose — the thorny stem smoothened out and wrapped in silver foil — and wished us, “Happy journey!”
The “happy journey” was made in total silence: not a word was exchanged between the four passengers during the 12 hours that I was in the train. As I lay on the upper berth after everybody in the coupe had had dinner and slipped under their blankets — the coupe still gently lit by the light emanating from various smartphones — my mind drifted to the various train journeys I had made before the advent of the smartphone.
One particular journey, made from Chennai to New Delhi on the Tamil Nadu Express, stood out. An elderly lady on the opposite seat had thrown the very Indian question at me: “Son, how old are you?”
“Thirty-four,” I had told her.
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well…”
“Doesn’t your mother ask you to get married?”
“All the time.”
“Then why don’t you get married? Imagine how happy your mother will be!”
She went on to play my mother for the rest of the journey. In hindsight, that was a happy journey.
