Trains

The rail tracks, the speeding trains, the platforms and stations in between, the local vendors and the all- -too-familiar ‘chai walas’. My life has been surrounded by these sights for a very long time. When I retraced my memories, I just realized that for me, life has never been stagnant. It has always kept moving from place to place.

Life has literally been a journey for me. Moving, shifting, settling down, making friends and discovering the unexplored horizons of myself. In these journeys there was a factor that always remained common, the train. Right from when I was two months old, and maybe even a little before that I had started travelling in trains. In those times the journey was almost three days long. As an infant, I obviously do not remember whether I used to enjoy these travel sessions. I would have been whimpering and throwing tantrums for sure, but when I grew up there grew more to these journeys.

As a kid, the three-day journey in the train was something to which I always looked forward to. Not to reach to my hometown at the end of the journey, but for the journey for itself. Train was another world for me. Back then I never used to think of how crowded it was, or for that matter how noisy it was. These things hardly crossed my mind. For me, those three days were wonderful. I used to love watching the places move past us, the cattle grazing on the fields and the box houses here and there. At night, the sight of the moon used to be a delight. I wondered like all other kids, how the moon followed us wherever we went. It used to be an unsolved mystery. The part when our train moved through tunnels and over the long bridges, used to be the best part of the voyage.

There was one more thing that I waited for in the train- the arrival of local vendors. These people used to have all sorts of fluorescent coloured toys with them that made various catchy sounds. Sounds that were enough to prick the ears of the kids like me, who used to wait for them endlessly. These sounds used to reach to me from far itself, as soon as I heard them, I used to stop all that I was doing till then and stretch my neck to get a full view of the things that came along. All the toys looked fascinating to me and I made sure each time that I persuade my parents to buy something from those. If they didn’t I used to make that sullen face and sulk for the rest of the day, so that they buy the same thing from the next vendor. Once that thing got to my hands I used to flash a contended smile at them and get occupied with my newly found stuff.

The next enjoyable thing to look forward to was, making friends in the train. Train is the one place I used to find a lot of kids just like me. At first we would just exchange smiles, then after a few minutes we would break the ice, move from berth to berth, exchange our toys and build a friendship for the next three days. Sometimes this friendship grew and stayed for a real long time even after the journey was complete, the other times it would just present me a few more memories inside the speeding trains.

When I grew up, and crossed the stage of whining for toys, yet another thing caught my attention inside the train; book sellers. Always an avid reader, books started keeping me company throughout the journey. I used to bring along my own books or buy from the sellers, climb onto the upper berth and drown myself in those pages. By then the three day journey had started turning a little bit monotonous and boring. Thanks to the novels, they helped me escape the fact that I was travelling for such a long time. They used to transport me to yet another land where I imagined and lived happily with all those fictitious characters in the story. I no longer used to stare out of the windows and enjoy the scenery, for I had been doing the same for quite a long time. Those were the days when I did not believe I making friends in the train, the do-not-talk-to-strangers thing was working well on me.

The journey was the same each time, the same route and same platforms, just the memories had changed.

As the time passed the three day journey, that I took twice a year came to a halt. For a moment I thought my life was going to be planned in a fixed place for the rest of my life, and that the train journeys had ended. For almost six months life was stagnant. It seemed like someone had pressed the pause button on the song of my life. Everything had become complete standstill, without even the slightest trace of ripples. There was enough time for me to think things through and plan my life. Those were the days I immersed myself again in the books. They accompanied me in all my imprisonments. But my life had other plans for me than just being stagnant and motionless.

Trains had no plan of leaving me alone in my life. Soon enough I started the one-day journeys to my university. Again twice in a year I travel back and forth. But now the journeys are short and more disturbing. As a kid, these days would have been something to look forward to. But growing up had changed a lot of aspects of the journey. Now that travelling alone had started, there was a lot to worry about. Taking care of the luggage, getting down at the right station, avoiding strangers and a lot more. Suddenly the one part of life that I loved so much had turned the other way round. The journey became worrisome and less interesting. I started feeling the noise, the crowd and all the other things the elders used to talk about in the train back then.

I kind of understood why they never looked forward to this journey like I did. As a kid there was some or the other thing to be enjoyed in every part of life including the trains. As an adult these parts in life turned a little bit hard on myself.

I no longer make new friends in the train, I look at the local vendors but refrain from buying anything from them, and the cradling movements of the train that once used to put me to sleep no longer worked the same way. I had a lot going on in my mind now. The days as a child had ended and somewhere in the process of growing up, I was trained to be more responsible and less nonchalant towards life. Growing up had worked itself pretty hard on every aspect of my life. But here I am wishing to go back to those careless, childish days. To spend life enjoying and exploiting every bit it has to offer.

The journey has not stopped, trains still keep taking me from place to place and my life keeps moving, the speed is exhilarating and the journeys, addictive.