“Sierra Leone” was the answer to the question, “Where’s Freetown?” Reading a magazine, I found a mention of Freetown and asked husband where it was. The answer came from a co-passenger, on the Mangalore-Chennai Mail.
That clinched our connection with the co-passenger for the rest of the 12-hour journey. I don’t remember the last time I accepted anything from a co-passenger. We had tea and dinner together, helping each other buy cups of tea, asking each other what time we wanted to have dinner, what time we wanted the lights off so that the berths could be converted into neatly laid-out beds with the warm, crisp and cosy blankets of IRCTC’s rose-coloured bedrolls, of course not to forget the ever-popular question – “what station is this?” This is very often the connecting question amongst most passengers. Despite taking note of the names of the stations passing by, we still ask/provide self-answers to this question (by thinking aloud). It is such a typical moment for many a train traveller.
All this felt like a leaf from the pages of nostalgia for we hardly have time nowadays to talk to ‘real’ people. This one was a pleasant respite from the usual time-deprived, scurrying flight travel — right from the point when even our journey’s ticket was joyfully the punched variety with a tiny grey font and thick paper as opposed to the printout of an e-ticket.
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As a child, I travelled with my grandfather who is a pensioner from Southern Railway — one of the joys of being with my grandad. Like every other railway employee, he was proud of his work too. The result: train rides and more train rides for almost every travel plan. We made frequent short train trips from Kottayam, our native home to neighbouring districts such as Thrissur, Ernakulam, Kollam, sometimes even Thiruvananthapuram, to visit relatives. These were quite educative rides. Grandad would rattle off the names of the stations with such ease — he knew them like the back of his hand. This is one of the reasons I still remember the fact that the station Angamaly shall always be told as Angamaly for Kalady. The land of Adi Shankaracharya is located less than 10 km from Angamaly.
Random quizzes by grandpa on what station would follow next, kept me on my toes. I would look through the window with rapt attention for those broad yellow boards in every station the train zipped past. To watch the fish plates forming the alphabets X, Y and Z was delightfully engaging.
A pack of cards that I carried along with a Walkman were good company too, of course besides the mercilessly oily banana fritters and paruppu vada with the tea and coffee from the vendors calling their hearts out. The sound of this train vs. that of passing trains almost blended with the music of A.R. Rahman, playing through the earphones. A collection of his songs was reserved for train journeys.
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Those were the times when people of all classes didn’t have a problem striking up conversations with their short-term neighbours.
Sometimes you would even been walking through the shaking vestibules in a moving train to make friends from the next compartment.
No matter how economical flight trips may get, train journeys are closer to the heart. The weather is directly experienced without any computerised weather updates: droplets of rain would fall from the window. This is perhaps why the window seat remains the apple of the eye for every travel enthusiast.
The fact that people on board would be travelling to multiple destinations, creates scope to discuss all things under the sun within the confines of the compartment; unlike a flight which has a boringly elitist set-up, of course with no stations to pause at all.
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