Trackside, by Bharath Moro.
Disclaimer: This is not intended to be a review; it is especially not intended to be an impartial review. I've had the chance to travel with Bharath on a few wonderful trips, and to have met some of the people he speaks of and quotes fondly in this collection of stories; and for these opportunities I am grateful. Perhaps the best way to think of this post is as a rumination on why I read this.
Books, documentaries, magazine features, movies -- over the years, there have been many efforts that try to capture the romance and fascination of an entire nation and people with what, on the surface, would seem to be just another way to get from point to point. As the introduction to this book puts it:Â
Train travel in India has always had a romance attached to it. The sheer scale of the Indian Railways' network means that there are stunning vistas to see, interesting people to meet, sumptuous food to eat on most journeys. As children, most of our summer holidays began and ended with such journeys.
There was always something to look at, some goodness to munch on, someone to talk to. Some of us grew out of that, yet many of us are reminded of that bond well into adulthood when we find ourselves suddenly awake at 2 in the morning, a sudden thud or a gentle jolt from the train's entry into a station the cause. There, by the light of the yellow sodium vapor lamp from the platform, we crane our necks and try to catch a glimpse of the sudden activity on that sleepy platform through the grimy metal bars on the window. Years on, the world -- the stations, trains, timings, announcements -- everything has changed, yet the smells and sounds somehow remain the same.
Dispatches from the Cauvery Delta captures this mood in its quest to repeat the journeys of the past in the present time. Comparisons are inevitable, for these venerable towns have been around since the beginning of history itself. It is a curious paradox: the higher you gaze, the lesser it seems that anything has changed at all. The towering gopurams of the temple at Chidambaram, or the temple complex at Thanjavur - these haven't changed since the day they were consecrated. Yet the lower your eyes (inevitably) wander, the more transformation there is for it to take in. Change not just on the scale of history documented, but also through history that is very personal. Places that you visited as a child, food and juice stalls, a favorite station, the frightening bridge; travel brings new loves, but it tempers that bounty with the knowledge that old loves are now forever gone. Or even worse - changed beyond recognition; and that is somehow much harder to reconcile oneself to. In Search of the Lost Railway of Tisiyanvilai takes the romance to a different level -- a grown man looking for a place, and an entire railway, that captured his imagination as a child.Â
But equally -- perhaps more -- importantly, this book is also about what the Indian Railways are not.
Yet, as much as I tried to keep the romance going growing up, I couldn't help notice that people who worked for and around the railways hardly ever associated the word to whatever they did. ... So began an exploration of these people and places. Their hard, tough lives. Their pitiable conditions of travel.
It is here that the book truly differentiates itself from other work that uses the railways as a lauching pad into nostalgia, romance, or merely as a setting for a larger story. It is all too easy to be romantic about a reality that is not one's own, to co-opt for a few fleeting moments the harsh reality of someone's every day and write about living it as an achievement of one's own. The harder task is recognizing the questions that come from it -- questions that may never have answers -- and the despair that is born of seeing, yet not being able to effect any change. Some of the best writing in the book comes from the bleakest of places, and lives; from the despair of the outsider who sees something that seems unfair and alien.
Rolling through the crowded suburbs of the city, I notice how everything seems to be covered by a thin sheet of coal dust - rails, catenary poles, concrete sleepers, houses, drains.
âSo, Rupa, why do you carry these coal sacks? Where do you get them from? Where do you take them? And why is that I only see women doing this work?â
âSaab, what to do. We scavenge coal and eat mud. This is how our life isâ, continues to haunt me.
The coal scavengers who use the train as a beast of burden. The boys who ran away from home and to whom the train provides a daily samosa and chai. The workers to whom the train is the only way across the country and home, boxed in for days together in unimaginable conditions. The gangman to whom the railways means more than a hobby, a job; an entire lifetime itself, but who means very little to that same organization. The hopeless, to whom the train is the final means to escape. The experienced hands at the helm of every train who have to face this not out of choice, but as an everyday occurrence on a job.
It is their stories that are not told, and that must really be known to complete the picture. These parts of the book don't make for easy reading, certainly; sometimes an iron stomach is required, at other times a detachment that borders on cruel. But they must be read, for any story about India's lifeline is incomplete without the lives of the people that give it a reason to exist.
The stories here represent both ends of this spectrum - happy, fun journeys where all I wanted to do was to stare out of the windows and eat good food and the tough, introspective journeys where I went in search of people for whom none of it (was) very enjoyable.
And this, more than anything else, is the real reason that this book deserves to be read. It does not seek to lionize the love of the railways beyond what you or I have experienced, nor does it try to frame the lives of others unknown to us within moral or philosophical boundaries.
Instead, it indulges the explorer in us all -- the side of us that wishes to escape the confines of the steady and mundane, and instead encounter the stories, journeys and people that make the railways both magical and thought-provoking.
You can download an electronic copy of Trackside here.
And here is a review by Neha Mujumdar in The Hindu.
