A Train of Events – Journey to Chennai

Indian Railways provide services of a remarkable standard. In the air- conditioned comfort of a first class cabin, there is hot food, the ubiquitous chaiwallah (tea seller) who peers over every half-drawn curtain and efficient and courteous service. Contingent, of course, on being able to produce a confirmed ticket for the conductor.

The problem would seem to ultimately lie with the indecisiveness of the Indian mind. Compelled by this Hamletesque affliction, the system of the Railways has found it prudent to prepare an extremely long waiting list of travellers over and above confirmed passengers for the actual journey. If any do change their minds at the last moment, there is still a reasonable equivalent of the Mongol Hordes to take their place. This would in turn imply that you could have moved up from position two hundred and thirty four to third on the waiting list but you’d still be without a seat; and as anyone who has had the bad luck to find out, a miss is as good as a mile.

There are some, however, who prefer to circumvent the rules of the land. For whatever reason, travelling even by wait-listed ticket seems to have too high an opportunity cost to be avoided. An almost sure-fire method of having to do so is by relying on someone else to get your ticket confirmed.

It was in such a situation that I found myself, along with three other unfortunate companions. After being struck by a sudden fit of adventure and half a bottle of rum, it was decided to make a journey deep into the heart of the South, to Chennai. Never having ventured so far away from the Ganges basin was cause for trepidation in itself, and the plans for travel were safely ensconced with a friend who assured us he would get them confirmed if it was the last thing he did.

Despite booking tickets two months in advance, the best he could do was to get only one seat confirmed, which was his. What was coincidental was the fact that it was his father’s travel agency which had taken care of the bookings. And what was ultimately surprising was that we did not think of this before we handed him the money for the tickets. It was only on reaching the station that we discovered this train of events, and having announced our plans to everyone, we decided to try our luck on the train rather than heading back without having stepped out of the city.

The first hundred kilometers after boarding the train isn’t so bad. There are plenty of empty seats, and one begins to relax a little bit. The tension of finding a berth, or ways of throwing other passengers off the train, a la Indiana Jones, gradually seeps out of you. For uninitiated travellers like me, that is. Seasoned travellers seem to have no hesitation in assuring greenhorns of the boarding of confirmed ticketwallahs from other stations, the intractability of train conductors, and the discomfort of the passageway, to which we’d ultimately be relegated.

It wouldn’t be that bad, I proclaimed. We had one berth, where at least the luggage was safe. And the romance of the Railways was sitting by the open door, watching great plains and dusty railway towns pass by, with grubby little children running alongside.

Remember the movies”, I urged them all, think of Half -Ticket and The Burning Train. We were all wild, youthful iconoclasts, typifying the angry young men of yore: Quintessential rebels, all of us. It was then that someone mentioned that it was going to be a two thousand kilometre journey next to the toilets, and instead of being our magnum opus, it would probably wind up being a sort of grand finale.

He wasn’t too far off the mark. By the 200-kilometre mark, all the seats had been taken, we were out in the walkway. It was a sombre scene, and nobody was much for conversation. They were not in the mood to be mollified, I decided, and settled down to watching the scenery whiz by. It’s strange how a few moments in silence can make one so introspective; the next couple of hours were spent in solitude, until the sun settled down into the earth with a final red glare.

Night brought with it another question: What do we do for warmth? It was the middle of November, and the air had that little nip which makes you want to adjust your blanket. If the authorities provide you with one that is. Since that, in turn, depended on having a confirmed ticket, we had to hoof it some other way. Holding each other tight was out of the question. We were all four fairly big north Indian men; physical proximity with others of the same sex tends to be looked upon with suspicion in our neck of the woods. The only recourse was to beg, borrow or bribe. Fortunately, the attendant, faced with the possibility of having to listen to our pleas for the rest of the night gave us two blankets. The hours of darkness passed by desperately holding on to our coverings, and being jostled by fat little husbands and wives as they made their way to the bathrooms.

Morning brought with it a decidedly rosier outlook. We’d been through one night, all in one piece except for a couple of stiff necks, and there was tea on the way. We were also traversing Central India, and the generally agreed upon notion was that it brought us much closer to our destination. It was interesting watching the horizon metamorphose gradually; there were the tannery-towns, with rivulets of burgundy liquid flowing near the tracks. Signboards changed in character, and people seemed indifferent to the clatter of the tracks as we passed by. The children did tend to get animated, but then who wouldn’t, if there were four madmen on a train, just about dislocating a couple of limbs in order to get your attention? The Great Plains of the Deccan Plateau, and the windswept hills of this land seemed to make it seem much more ancient, timeless as compared to the verdant fields of the Ganges Basin. Rocks and whole hillocks had been eroded into strangely recognizable shapes; here was a midsummer night’s fantasy, and in it were four-armed men and gigantic noses, along with old college professors sculpted by a perennial wind and a wicked imagination.

Food was brought and polished off with undue haste. Somehow sitting by the door seemed to make you hungrier than if you were in the cabin. Discussions changed from simply surviving the journey to what we’d do once we got to our destination. Some of the ladies who had passed us by in the night must have noticed our predicament, because one came out and very kindly offered us a couple of berths to sleep in during the day. Not looking gift horses in the mouth is quite a prominent trait of the hard-up; we grabbed at the offer and were off into blissful slumber, only waking to the cookhouse call for lunch and dinner.

The next night wasn’t so peaceful however. Apart from a belligerent conductor, there were also a couple of families which had boarded along the way with the same hopes as ours : Out of 15 people, only two had confirmed seats. Enraged by this ‘give an inch-take a mile’ type imposition on his magnanimity, the conductor threw us all into the next cabin.

This was bad enough in itself; we all had only standing room, and the next stop was a good half an hour away. What was worse was that we were in the tatkaal compartment. There was a good chance that if we were discovered we would be thrown off the train. Visions of landing in towns where some strange sub-dialect of Malayali was spoken conjured up. What could you do in a place where you couldn’t even understand the signboards? It wasn’t that bad, thankfully. The attendant was much more amenable, and after the conductor had made his way back, he let us all in. For a consideration of course, but then it was easier to trade your scruples for a blanket rather than a station in the middle of nowhere.

The next morning, we reached Madras or Chennai as all but the people living there seemed to call it. Getting off the station seemed like graduating a finishing course in diplomacy and negotiation. The fine art of dealing with the conductor, down to the attendant and finally the chaiwallah (tea vendor). Navigating the labyrinthian system of deals and handshakes was fitting a management school course, and one seemed to emerge the wiser for it.

Well, at least we had been through what my father would have categorized as building character, and I vowed that this type of a journey, however much its claims to the beneficial, would not be on the cards in the near future. Well, at the very least, not until after I managed to get back to North India, that is.

The first 100 kilometers after boarding the train isn’t so bad. There are plenty of empty seats, and one begins to relax a little bit. The tension of finding a berth, or ways of throwing other passengers off the train, a la Indiana Jones, gradually seeps out of you.