This short story was published in the MNREC College Magazine - SRIJAN 1999
This is what Rama’s mother says to him when he takes her leave in the Ramayana.
This article is dedicated to all those people who have kept the tradition of traveling to far away places for their education, alive. In this piece, I have attempted to recollect my experiences of my journeys to the land of …?
I am writing this on what will perhaps be my last journey from my home to this land. I will be entering my final semester of studies and it seems a culmination of a process that began 3 and a half years ago. A lot many things have changed since; governments have come and governments have gone, the PMO has been occupied by a new person every year, the prices of onions and potatoes have skyrocketed and I should mention the 25percent hike in the train fare, all thanks to our esteemed money sharks (read finance ministers) who have made invaluable contributions towards making “the common man” more so. Almost every journey of mine has had two recurring thoughts – that while one half of my life has gone by waiting for a train, the other half has been spent in the train itself. Undoubtedly, such extreme thoughts stem from the hugely successful attempts of the Indian Railways in making IST an acronym for ‘Indian Stretchable Time. I can readily imagine that the bonzer who said ‘Time is Money’; who have coined the phrase while at a railway station, in much the same uncomfortable situation I inevitable find myself in every time I travel. So much so, I sometimes wish I were back at school now. I could now do such a wonderful job of writing an essay describing the scene at a railway platform …
Traveling the expanse of a country by train gives excellent indications of the different kinds of the people, they said. Well, I had no problems distinguishing ‘Rabri’ from ‘Maya’. I was in the country of blind and had both my eyes ‘intact’. Inferences apart, it soon dawned upon me that I was the right person in the right place. But if the place had been right, I would not have been sitting with the better part of my posterior out of the seat.
The stench of the toilets, the orphaned child, and a poor mother’s helplessness on seeing her baby wail with hunger, would not have made me reach an irrevocable conclusion. That it is well nigh impossible to set right so many wrongs. To rectify this decayed, damaged and dilapidated ‘civilisation’ called India. How could anyone possibly paint a picture on water? (of course, I discount our politicians, who seem adept at mouthing such miracles)
And then, there are the chaiwallahs crying ‘chai coffee chai coffee’ in the middle of the night, giving me a stark reminder that irrespective of the complexity of the algorithms I can solve, there is seemingly no solutions to their ‘jhuggies’, and ‘jhoparpattis’ I do not get a moment’s respite as the ticket collector enters. His reply to my query of a berth being available is directly suggestive to my fishing out a wad of notes. It was a trifle too much to take the shambles that the whole system is in, the ocre of it all being corruption – of thought, of deed and to make a generalization, of humankind. I was left with no option but to oblige. Only to sadly acknowledge that I too was very much a part of it all.
Trains in our country clash less than the number of clashes of the people the carry. With two people, there will be a minimum of three opinions. To touch upon a lighter vein, in how many ways can a woman wrap a cloth of six yards around herself? A lady from the south would argue that it is highly fashionable to strut around in the Gujarati style while a Bengali matriarch points out that the fundamental method of wearing a sari should have an end – that of the aanchal having the bunch of keys so that the daughter-in-law finds it impossible to get her hands on it.
As my journey nears its end, I realize that there is not much one does not come across. From the advertising skills of the hawker coining jingles for his ‘chana jor garam’ the lush fields, the drought struck lands, to scenes of a man toiling to eke out a day’s living; it is all there to be seen from the ‘palace on wheels’. We have a 6000 year old culture, we have beautiful resources, we have a diverse population with immense potential … there is nevertheless, something amiss, and which makes all the difference.
As I disembark, I apologize if I have conveyed a mood of depression; for I have a mood of solemnity, not of anguish, I have a mood of agony, not of desperation; I have a mood of helplessness, not frustration.