The Last Steam Trains of India

When I was a boy, there were still steam trains in India, steam trains pulled by huge black locomotives, juggernauts of steel vitality. Everything is alive to the child, but these locomotives, multiplied into herds at the station, seemed more alive than anything I knew. The locomotive was horse, the locomotive was cow, the locomotive was elephant, the locomotive was tiger. And it pulled whole zoos of us people too: beggars, brahmins, holy men with dung in their hair, hippies on hash, street dentists, legume salesmen, factory workers, housewives, potters, snake charmers, cremationists, typists, accountants, little white boys (dirty cheeks) of missionary extraction. Even blue Krishna himself, I liked to think, would have enjoyed riding the train. Some passengers even spilled up onto the roof to ride in the open breeze and sun although if you did that better look out for bridges and tunnels and electrical lines and such and when you saw them coming better flatten yourself to the riveted metal like a fly to a windshield else risk decapitation or some other gory inglorious end!

And the smoke! We trailed smoke like banners of the apocalypse; we rode under all that was left of a mass incineration of coal, coal that had at one time been (my mother told me) living animals and plants that had died and that after millions of years under the earth were changed by weight and pressure into exactly the coal that now propelled us along. So the pressure of the earth that had forged the coal was now the pressure of steam hurtling us along toward, well...toward wherever we were headed now. Toward the cities of the plains: Bangalore. Madras. Tirichuripalli. Or Trivandrum by the sea. Or if back home, then toward Kodaikanal Road station. 

Shrouded in steam and concentrating on the fire in their bellies, the locomotives made no distinction between one carriage and another; they played no favorites with the allotment of their horsepower but simply pulled every car in the train equally and every car together. For us humans traveling the rails though, the view tended to be different. From our human perspective the train was divided into classes: first class, second, and third. My family always traveled second class. Had we traveled third, few would have credited us with being reasonable. Why after all would anyone without an absolute need to economize put up with all the crowding, all the standing room only, all the dirt and the bodily smells, and also (if you were a woman) all the groping that third class entailed? No, third class was no place for a family with means, even missionary means. But what about first class? I asked my mother. Would we ever be rich enough for that?

"We could afford it, at least sometimes."

"Then why don't we? We could have our own cushioned seats, and our own private compartments."

"Because there are more more important things."

Such as? I asked, and my mother answered without hesitation: "Well, just being with people, for instance. If we rode in a private compartment, your father and I wouldn't get to hear as much Tamil. And you and your brother wouldn't get to see as many interesting things happen."

"My seat is hard," I might say to my father.

"Do you want a blanket to sit on? We brought a blanket."

"I don't want a blanket."

"Then make do."

"With what?"

"With your inner resources."

"Which ones?"

"Try your patience. Try sitting on your patience."

It was good advice always on a train to keep your patience with you, especially your patience with people, because no matter the class or the carriage the train was going to give you an immersion in the human experience. It was a sort of city-in-a-line, an extract of India, a democratic container of life vibrantly spiced with elbow bumps. You couldn't escape or avoid, no it insisted on offering glimpse after glimpse into the lives of others, and therein lay its equalizing power as well as the power of every ride to enrage you or put you in despair, because of course not every human interaction is one that we want to repeat and there certainly are times when we're going to agree with Sartre that hell is other people. 

In general though my family looked on the bright side of the opportunity and the experience. We ate and drank and conversed with fellow passengers and looked out the window and stood up and walked around and eavesdropped. Even in the more idle periods of a trip while the tock tock of the rails lulled me and caused me to float on the waters of consciousness sweetly without direction--even then always there was the hum of humanity in my ears: of mothers humming to their children and the music of conversations in languages familiar and unfamiliar all mixing in a kind of lullaby glossolalia. I like to think that I carry all that conversation with me still, the way a seashell far from the shore is said to carry with it the sound of the waves of the sea.

Another force of democracy on the train was the WC. This was located generally next to the vestibule that connected one carriage to the next, and you opened the door to the WC and there (often right in the middle of the floor) as you entered the space was the toilet. And the toilet's design was minimalist perhaps to a fault. Simplicity itself.  Specifically it was just a hole in the floor, framed in metal, through which you could look directly down onto the tracks below. Come close and look down into it and there they were: the gravel and the ties down below repeating themselves: the gravel and the ties, the gravel and the ties. Depending on the speed, they might simply be a blur or they might resolve themselves into wooden timbers and individual stones. 

Sometimes, as I recall, the hole featured footprints off to the side (imprinted into the metal of the frame), and these were of course a guide for placing the feet encouraging toilet-goers to squat directly over the hole for best results. And I would say the diameter of the hole was on average large enough to drop say a good-sized cabbage through. Or a cannon ball. Or a genius brain. But then again, this is only recollection and everything seems bigger to a young boy than it probably really is. I can imagine that the size of holes is especially tempting for a boyhood memory to exaggerate. A boy wants to stuff through a hole whatever might possibly fit. And if that item won't fit in reality, then his imagination will generally accomplish the feat, and memory record it for a fact of experience.

Also in every car, without regard I think to class, was a safety feature fascinating to children. You looked for this toward the middle of each car, and up near the ceiling. Yes there it was:  a set of red letters proclaiming “EMERGENCY”, and above that hung a cord with a wooden handle. I inquired with my mother as to the uses of the cord. 

"When you pull on it," she said, "I think it activates the brakes of the car you're in, and then the engineer gets a jolt and knows to brake the whole locomotive."

"So you stop the train with it?"

"Yes. But listen to me. You don't just pull it willy-nilly, or at least no one had better do that. Stopping a train suddenly is always a dangerous business. The carriages can jackknife. People get hurt." 

"But so if there's a fire, or an explosion, or there's a cobra on the loose, someone can pull the emergency cord?"

"Yes. That's the purpose."

"What about jewels? What if someone stole some jewels?"

"Jewels might not be an adequate reason. I think there needs to be danger to human life, if you're going to pull the cord." 

"Anyway, I can't reach it."

"No you can't."

"You seem glad."

"I am."

And yet the unattainable nature of the cord as an object of physical manipulation also made it an object of desire. Dangling high up there like the star in the sonnet "whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken," it served as a goad to story making. In particular I pictured all sorts of occasions when under the pressure of a true emergency--an assassination attempt on the engineer by the caboose man, a tiger attack at Jollarpettai station, a rogue elephant on the loose in the carriage behind--I would discover some extraordinary ability that I had not until that time known existed in me, or had perhaps known it to exist, but been forced to keep a deep unflinching secret.

But you see in that moment, I would be transformed into the very hero I was destined to be! I would leap ten feet through the air, to pull an emergency cord. Or I would grow an extra limb long enough to reach the emergency cord. Or I would grasp the EMERGENCY cord simply by the power of my mind, and activate it by spelling out (with my eyes closed) the word EMERGENCY. Goodness, what superpowers! my fellow passengers would say, after they had been saved by me. We never knew! my parents would whisper. And all this time I thought he was just an ordinary brother! my older brother would say before falling on his knees in awe, and begging forgiveness for how often he had until that point treated me: namely as though I were just any old ordinary younger brother, whom he could banish anytime from looking at his stamp collection and keep from playing with his toy submarine!

Now as it happened, there WAS a story that featured an emergency cord, as well as a toilet, as well as a train that encompassed the two together, all in one mobile setting: a deeply satisfying package. The story was told to me by my good friend Deepak,  a classmate of mine at the boarding school in Kodaikanal, where both my mother and father worked as teachers.

"A certain woman," said Deepak, "boarded a train to Tirichurippali." 

"Steam train or diesel?"

"I do not know. But I suspect steam. However, the essential fact is that during the ride, this mother was feeling the natural need."

"For?"

"For the WC."

"So why didn't she just go?"

"She does go. She does. But she brings along her newborn infant baby (very small) as well. In her arms. I believe the baby was asleep."

"How old was it?"

"Perhaps a week. Maybe two. Maybe three. But very small. Very small still." Deepak held out his hands somewhat like a fisherman demonstrating the length of a fish, only in his case, the point seemed to be to de-emphasize rather than exaggerate its length. He went on: 

"Now in the WC, this mother proceeds to make use of the toilet. However the kingpin is this. The baby, I am saying, falls unmistakeably into the toilet hole. And then all the way through."

"Was it a boy or a girl?."

"I do not know. It is unimportant to the final moral of the tale."

"Did it fall feet or head first?"

"On this point as well, I am uninformed. However, I would consider it most likely to have been a feet first fall, considering the extraordinary outcome of the experience as reported to me. Now as the baby falls, certainly the train is still very much in motion. Quite fast. But the baby falls onto the tracks, you must understand. Onto the ties."

"Did it scream when it fell? Did the baby scream? What about the mother? Sid she pull the emergency cord?" 

"Accounts on this matter vary. Yes however the emergency cord was pulled, but as to who accomplished the pulling it is not known. It may have been the mother. Or perhaps a passenger who was able to hear the mother's painful hullabaloo. But in any case, yes the emergency cord was pulled. And the train comes to a full stop, period, and search parties are eminently dispatched to recover this baby. And this baby is found! Very much alive. Still on the tracks you see, but two miles behind the train. Two miles because you see a great deal of time is required in order to bring a train to a halt. But the baby is alive. The baby is alive!"

It was on the train that I learned to tell time. My mother taught me. We used a handmade clock cobbled together out of a sheet of cardboard (the back of a legal pad maybe) with hands of construction paper held in place by a brass brad poked in through the center of the clock, and the numbers inked on in marker. It was hard work telling the time, there being in the first place so many different ways to express this or that hour of the day. Quarter past seven could also be expressed seven-fifteen. Half past eight was also eight-thirty. Furthermore it could be nine o'clock in the morning or nine o'clock in the evening, which was odd though also not necessarily surprising. A great deal of life was complicated and unpredictable and not very amenable to immediate comprehension, and that was just the truth. You could complain, and of course you did complain but sadly this usually did not change the facts. No, you still had to live with the facts. Well I have learned a great number of facts since that time. Since those boyhood days. Since those last boyhood days of the glory of steam. Among them these:

1. That time runs on and does not stop for anyone. 
2. That death comes for everyone, even mothers. 
3. That landscapes are wounded and betrayed by those who say they own them, and the results are called progress.
4. That far too many people on this earth are liars.
5. That given these truths and under such circumstances sometimes the only thing you have left to lean on is a place called home. 
6. Home is where eventually you hope to get to. It's where people know you. Where they say yes you belong. It's a place you have a hand in making. A place where if you had a baby, you would bring it there to be.
7. Home is a place yes, but it doesn't have to be rooted like a tree. It is any space made magical by love. 

It always made me so wistful to be faced with that necessity of getting off at the station. It was bad enough seeing other passengers detrain at stations prior to our own end-of-the-line. But when it was my OWN family getting off, how much worse THAT was! First far ahead of our arrival my mother would take a census of our belongings to make sure that nothing had gone missing during the ride or was in danger of being left behind. Sometimes too if I was sleepy she would rub my shoulders between the shoulder blades as if to polish me there. Then depending on the time of day and the importance of the station the conductor might come through and announce the name of the stop. And finally the process of deceleration would begin and the train's shrill whistle would blow as a warning to anyone or any creature on the tracks ahead to move off.

When we pulled alongside the platform sometimes I would start to cry. 

"You want to go places," my mother said to me with a certain impatience, "but you don't want to get off the train!" As if rational metaphysics could wipe away my tears! 

And yet in retrospect I suppose I can thank her for identifying so precisely the source of my sorrow. It was the essence of my predicament as a child, and perhaps of my life, truly to be interested in new projects, travels, and in meeting people as yet un-introduced to me, and yet at the same time to wish to hold onto the full sum of my past. I wanted to be curious as well as loyal. Furthermore I wanted my sense of loyalty to be returned, reflected back to me, in this case by the train itself. But here the train was intent on betraying me; it was pushing me off, insisting I go. Was this how my love was rewarded? All my faithful service on board, to the tasks of perception and observation? What a cold uncaring creature this train really was, abandoning us here at the station like a snake leaving her eggs behind, to hatch on their own!

HB