The Fountainhead in 4 days -- IV

We moved through the land like an errant arrow. Other trains side-stepped to let us pass, station masters waved their green flags - we were the tortoise in this race, putting on the final spurt of speed. And in the book, characters collided, rose and fell like the visions that flew past my window. I had to read, compulsively, to lull my brain into a world different from my present, into believing that nothing could go wrong anymore. I had filled my bottle up and bought a bunch of bananas for dinner at the last brief stop, leaving about Rs.20 for lunch and Rs.2 to call home for my brother to come and get me from the station. And so, with a quarter of my book left, we pulled into Titlagarh. It was about 3 pm, and not even the Parle-G biscuits could keep me from being ravenous.

As the train filled up on water, we filed out into the town outside the station, looking for any place that served anything that could pass as food. Signs like "Sambhu Resturant", "Aanand Hotel" and "Hanuman Palace", written in garish reds, yellows and whites across tin sheets welcomed us into small tumble-down shacks, with menus scrawled in white chalk on blackboard. The proprieters rushed out from behind their little cashier desks to usher us into their establishments. The white guy emerged looking rather lost, his companions having deserted him in their quest for satiation. I gestured to him to join me as I walked towards one of these humble havens, when one of the trains in the station let out a long wail of a whistle. I knew it wasn't our train - the source had been farther away, and it was too soon for ours to leave - but the white man turned on the spot and bolted, with long, loping strides, back into the station. He was back out in a couple of minutes, looking rather pale and sheepish.

We entered the "Sambhu Resturant", and I assisted my new found companion in ordering. We ate fast, in silence, and proceeded back to the train. I was acutely aware of the single Rs.2 coin that rolled in my pocket, and my empty wallet. We exchanged e-mail ids, and that was the first time I had heard of excite.com. His name was John Watson (I swear), and he was a journalism student in London. Back at the train, as he returned to his seat, I lingered at the door, looking back at the platform. We were 12 hours and many miles away from Khurda Road, and I reflected a moment on what it meant, and how much worse it could have been. But now I was on my way home. Whoever said the Indian Railways was bad?

"Jara rasta dijiye", someone said. A lady, almost 5 feet in height, bespectacled, wizened trying to enter the train. I hastened aside and helped her up. Once inside she turned to me and said, hopefully, "Teluga babu?" I couldn't help but smile. She told me she was traveling with her two boys, ages 16 and 10. They were going to Jamshedpur, too. She asked me how I was going to get home. I showed her my 2-rupee coin. "Ayyo pillada," she said, and pressed Rs.15 in my hand. Somehow, I thought, she looked a lot like my mother.

There isn't much more to the story, except that I read all through the night, and finished the book. We pulled into Jamshedpur at about 7am on the 31st of October. I got off, along with a few other people. Mr.Oriya stayed on the train, as did the white man. I called my brother, and as I waited for him, I said good-bye to the good lady and her kids. Auto-rickshaw drivers swarmed me like the press does a celebrity, but I turned them away, knowing that my brother would soon turn up on his noisy, trusty Bajaj Chetak. My legs still felt shaky from the journey, and my skin was covered in grime. But the sun was rising, and the cool morning air felt fresh and full. I would learn later that thousands of people and cattle died in that cyclone, that I had arrived on the same day as the Falaknuma that had left 2 days after us, that our train was even mentioned on the news, that my family had been sick with fear.

Well, that was how I read the Fountainhead.

The Fountainhead in 4 days -- III

It was quite a scene.

The wind and rain had abated a little, and about 40 of us from two compartments were out, trying to coax the tree into loosening its grip on the train. Some tried intimidation with little handsaws, while others tried cajoling it with lengths of rope. The tree however shrugged off our indignation, and stuck stubbornly to its "stand". It was like Gulliver and the Lilliputians all over again, except that we were the travelers, and the tree the erstwhile native of the lost town of Khurda Road. It was like we were but paring the nails on that gigantic hand.

We broke for lunch. The train was supposed to reach Calcutta before dinner, so this was technically the last meal we were to have on the train. Whether they had any more provisions, we had no idea. We had definitely run out of water. So we got back to the tree in earnest, as if getting rid of this one obstacle could put us half-way there. Not quite the kind of guy who would climb aboard a train to hack at the limbs of a tree, I was with the rope crew, rather excited to contribute, but not quite realizing the seriousness of our position. We toiled till the darkness fell, and had managed to clear quite a few of the branches off the top of the train. As my neighbors and I returned to our berths, there were still a few workmen, mostly the Railways crew, hacking away outside.

Conversation was subdued. Dinner did come, a few last minute supplies thrown together, and we ate thankfully. There was definitely no more food on the train. But then the door opened and there entered a few ragged-looking people carrying large gunny bags over their shoulders. And they started handing out little packages to the passengers. I took one - it contained a small loaf, and a Parle-G biscuit packet. "We are from a nearby bakery", one of them, a youth no older than me, informed us. "We heard your train was stuck so we brought what we could." They were inundated with questions. How bad was it? What were the chances of getting out? Were there any other trains?

They answered as best as they could. There were apparently no chances of going forward. We would have to travel as far back as Vizianagaram, then take an alternate route out of there. The Falaknuma that was to leave the day after ours had been cancelled. The tree on our train was loosening its grip, and it was possible we might start out of there that very night. Hope washed over us like the smell of a warm kitchen. Mr.Oriya even felt light-hearted enough to translate the good news to the white man, who didn't seem very impressed. I went back to reading my book, unable to fall asleep, waiting eagerly for that little jerk which meant we would be leaving that God-forsaken station. And sure enough, at about 3am in the night, after nearly 20 hours of standing in the same place, the train creaked into motion. I fell asleep almost immediately.

I awoke well into the next day. We were speeding away on our new route, which would skirt around the state of Orissa and enter the state of Bengal from the west. I exulted as I learned this, because it meant it would have to pass through Jamshedpur to get there, and I wouldn't have to change trains. The downside, however, was that the train had been unable to replenish its supplies, and would stop at a station late in the afternoon where we would have to go get our own lunch. And as my finances were running low from having had to pay for extra meals already, this news sapped my excitement.

---to be continued

The Fountainhead in 4 days -- II

I woke to the sound of "Ey, chai - haan teen rupaya, saahab", and the inevitable haggling that followed. I got up and surveyed my companions, while pretending to search for my toothbrush. The 8-berth subdivision of my compartment in which I was situated was the one right next to the door, so there were no families. And by corollary, no girls. (You always look for families, that's where the nice-looking girls can be found, at least on this train. And the families try to cluster towards the middle, to avoid having to deal with the 2nd class citizens that generally crowd the door in a 2nd class compartment. In fact I often walked from one compartment to another, just to look at the people's faces, and....but I digress.) Some passengers had got off in the night, so a couple of berths were already empty.

The tea haggler was a loud Oriya man, slightly balding, a big "tiger" moustache and the bleary eyes of one who seeks salvation in intoxication. He wore his full-sleeved shirt tucked in, his pants held up by a thick leather belt. Between ambling to the door for a quick bidi and haggling with every beverage-vendor that came along, he would carry intimate, boisterous conversation in Oriya with his neighbors, a pair of guys clad in lungis, sleeveless under-shirts and hawai chappals (flip-flops, if you will). Then there was the white man, who was trying to keep a meaningful conversation going with his neighbor, who appeared to be a railway employee of some sort, talking about his free passes on the trains. Then there were me and Ayn Rand.

It was about 7:00 am, and we were almost out of Andhra Pradesh. The weather outside had turned cold, dreary, windy. We pulled down our shutters, got some warm chai and talked about nothing in particular. Mr.Oriya was monopolizing the group discussion, switching to heavily accented English now. I tried to stay interested for a while, but soon got back to my book. It wasn't until I was well into the second of the five-part book that the train slowed to a grinding halt. We didn't take much notice, even though this train was rather good about not having random stops in the middle of nowhere, unlike several other trains I had been on (the Tata-Alleppy being a case in point). But hey, this was the Indian Railways -- you never know when a goods train is given priority over a passenger train.

Mr.Oriya was asleep in a sitting position, snoring with his mouth open. The lungi twins had nodded off too, and the white man was probing his travel guide with a vengeance. The railway employee buried himself behind a cheap magazine. I peered out through the glass pane on my window to see that we had pulled into a small station - Khurda Road, Orissa. It looked thoroughly deserted, and the fact that it had started to rain heavily did not help. Oh, well, I thought, this is exactly why I bring books on trains. It seemed like I would have to catch a different train from Kharagpur after all. Probably won't get to Jampot before 1:00 am.

But in a couple of hours, there came the Ticket Collector, and people began crowding him. The news traveled fast: Orissa had been hit. The tracks ahead were damaged, but whether or not they could be cleared for us to go ahead, the officials did not know. They had ordered two engines to come in from a city close by to scout the tracks both sides, to determine which would be a better way to take. Till then, for all practical purposes, we were stranded.

While people sat back uneasily in the Ticket Collector's wake, it just got windier outside. The rain was seeping in through cracks in the walls, under the lining of the window panes, through the doorway. A little puddle had started collecting at the end of the compartment, that slowly trickled inwards, tasting the luggage and the passengers' shoes. And every now and then, the train would rock ominously in the wind.

There was a small wave of reassurance as the lunch guy came around. But we ate our lunches in silence, knowing that the train had only so much food aboard. I wondered about how sparingly I should use the money I had left after buying two meals and tea already. Suddenly there was a tremendous CRASH!! and Mr.Oriya leapt right off his seat with an "Uri Baba!" The other passengers had been jolted awake too, and the white man leapt to his feet. I threw my book aside and followed the others as they pulled open the door, trying not to let too much rain inside.

A giant peepal (holy fig) tree had keeled over, and had landed exactly in between two compartments, ours and the next, heavily denting the vestibule passage between the two. Its base was behind a brick wall on the other side of the platform, about 80 feet away, but now the wall had been crushed and the top of the tree, branches and all, sat on the back of the train like a gigantic hand that had emerged from the ground to hold us in place.

--- to be continued.

The Fountainhead in 4 days -- I

The auto-rickshaw swerved to an unceremonious halt outside the Secunderabad railway station, and I got out gingerly, tugging my weather-worn travel bag out from behind the seat before I paid the driver. (You always do that, just so he can't leave with your luggage as soon as he gets his fare.) The coolies that passed gave me disdainful glances at the lack of challenge that my luggage presented, and flitted away in their red outfits towards more promising travellers, not unlike scavenging birds in search of meaty carcasses. I pretended not to notice, hoisted my bag over my shoulder and walked to the enquiry queue to find out which platform my train was on.

A couple of minutes later, up and down two staircases, through a corridor overlooking the tracks, past a few beggars, there I was before the grand Falaknuma, my home for the next day-and-a-half (or so I thought then) till I got to Kharagpur, where I usually had anywhere from 1.5 hours to 15 minutes to catch a connecting train to Jamshedpur, where my family lived then. This time I was expecting my train to run a little late, because Orissa had just been hit by one of its annual cyclones. But what the hell, it happens every year. Nobody knows (or usually cares) what happens in that state, right. Most of it passes in the night, anyway - we usually get to Bhubhaneshwar (the state capital) by 11:00 am.

So at 4:00 pm on the 28th of October, 1999, I boarded the train and found my berth - a side upper, my favorite. No one asking you to get up so that they can pull out their middle berths to sleep on, no one asking to "share" seats till the next station. You get to do your own thing on the side upper. Unless you're six feet or taller, which I wasn't. So I took off my sandals, pushed them to one end, propped up my bag at the other, and lay down with my head on it, pulled out my Koti market copy of the Fountainhead and began reading. (You always lie down with as many of your body parts on top of your luggage as possible, so no one sneaks off with it at a stop. My bag and I had a symbiotic relationship: it served as my pillow, and my head on it kept it from changing owners.)

The train soon gave a gentle shudder, and the platform outside began rolling away. People stood in doorways and waved to their loved ones, who ran alongside the train just to prolong the moment of separation, addicted to the "sweet sorrow" of parting. Vendors of snacks and cheap magazines, coolies, the waifs who swept the compartments for a living, all hurriedly jumped off before the train gathered speed. But I had to get through at least five chapters before dinner, so I read on, lost in the stark world of Ayn Rand till I heard the crew member come around asking what each traveler wanted for dinner. (You always keep an ear pricked for this guy, especially if you're on a side upper, because sometimes he just walks right past and then your only hope is to get off and buy something on the platform, which is always risky - you could lose your wallet, or your luggage, or miss your train, or just buy bad food.)

But then I heard the guy speaking in English, rather loudly. And I heard a gruff voice reply, "I'll have the non-vegetarian, please. Yes, the egg curry, too, thank you." I looked up from my book to see that on the top berth opposite me, there perched, quite comfortably, a white man, lean and about 6' 7", in his twenties, bald, glasses. His neighbors were looking at him with curious but indulgent smiles, but he, seemingly oblivious, returned to his little travel guide. The Western tourist, I thought, hungry for the third-world experience. Good for him. I ordered my dinner, which arrived in due time. Night fell outside, and my train, the Sec'bad-Calcutta Falaknuma Express, cruised at a fair clip into the lesser known parts of Andhra Pradesh, ever nearing the Orissa border. About ten chapters into the book, I fell asleep, while the lights around me went out one after another, and the desultory conversations of the others sharing my compartment died down in the darkness.

That night into the wee hours of the morning, a massive cyclone struck Orissa, obliterating an entire village, destroying thousands of homes. The monster reared out of the Bay of Bengal days after its predecessor had sent in the first warnings.

....to be continued.