A Family Steeped In The Indian Railways

For some reason, solving this quest was far more complicated than it appeared to be and hours were spent 🦋in permutations and combinations. My father prided himself in knowing the nuanc﷽es of a goods train enough to be able to demonstrate the answer.

“Not to be loose shunted” is a warning label we often saw on the sides of wagons of good trains, as we waited for other, more important trains that would take us to places. I now know that it is a reminder to railway workers that the wagon should not be moved or shunted unless it is properly coupled.🌟 (Shunting is simply pushing the wagon to the correct location).

&nbs🐻p;Loose shunting can be dangerous—especially if the wagon is carrying sensitive cargo: cattle, poultry, petroleum products, etc. Hence, such wagons are marked “not to be loose shunted”, implying that they will always be shepherded gingerly into place coupled to a shunting loco.

 Appa of course kne🅷w this, but information was always given to us on a “need to know” basis.  

The goods train has always been an enigma even to us, a family steeped in the Indian Railways for as long as I can remember. Memories of waiting at a railway station for a train (there is always waiting when there is a train) are punctuated by a goods train that audaciously passes througꦇh, somehow is never late, never has to stop anywhere, but always “got in the way” of the important train. “Wait, this goods train has to pass,” Appa would explain. “And then our train will come.”

“But what use is this goods t🐼rain?” We would protest. “It’s not carrying people, there are so many b🐎ogies, sometimes it’s never-ending and you can’t even see what’s inside,” I would whine.

“Goods! It’s carrying important goods,” Apไpa would interrupt.

“And♈ why can’t we travel by it? ꩲIt would be so easy—no people, no ticket and we will reach everywhere sooner. But how do you get inside it?”

“Ah! No, you can’t do ꦫthat. It’s illegal,” Appa would add m🅠ysteriously.

It never struck us to ask what🙈 “goods” were, because the word itself sounded so ominous. So, the goods train reꦚmained a mystery forever. 

I have no idea when the game disappeared from our lives but it was also the time my siblings and I were 🔯moving on to higher grades and family travels slowly diminished.

Until they reappeared when I was around 15 and the entire fওamily made a pilgrimage to Banaras on the Mahanagari Express to perform my grandfather’s last rites. This was something that wasn’t done when he actua🌃lly died a few decades ago, causing the family to be cursed, according to the vadiyar (priest). We were 18 of us and although it was a gathering for a somber occasion for the adults, we kids had a lot of fun.

Each family packed for the 30-hour journey what it was best at. One aunt made chapatis (“because youngsters like chapatis” it seems) and a nice spicy potato curry, my mother was the idli and molagapodi queen, another aunt was in charge of taiyar sadam and pickle, a fourth made bise bele bhaath and lots of karuvadaams (rice crispies). Strangely, no one th𓃲ought to bring water and all we had was a jerry can which was empty in a few hours as we travelled in summer.

We greedily eyed a huge surahi (clay pot) of a Muslim family who occupied the side berths (upper and lower) with their three children. They had packed food modestly but had an elegant surahi  full of cold water and that somehow seemed to make up for it all. Now there was an awkwardness because we had not shared our food with them (my grandmother said they were non-veg and would not appreciate our food) so how could we ask them for water? We finally did and they were super generous and then my mother offered them some molagapodi-smothered idlis, which they eyed suspiciously and politely decl🌺ined.

Once in Banaras, while the elders performed various ancestral rites at Hanuman Ghat, we kids took boat rides, immersed ourselves in the Ganga with our clothes on (because swimsuits were only for posh people) and eagerly looked forward to the nai (ghee) roast at Rajan’s café and later, the mango lassi laced with pistachios from a streetside vendor that Appa treated the whole gang to. Of course this was followed by full traditional Palakkad meals featuring mountains of rice with assorted kootus, sambar, rasam, pachadi and pappadams at the mattam (dharamshala) we were staying at.  

A dip at the Triveni Sangam at Allahabad was the finale of these rites, our last stop on this trip. My father had already planned a breakout trip for us 🦄five after the larger family headed off in different directions, most of them back home.

We were taking a train to Lucknow! Or Luckkknoww as Appa liked to call it. “Bhool bhulaiya” he started chanting along the way, like a jingle on loop of the famous Lucknow monument, much to my mother’s annoyance. Once derailed from the extended family, my father’s sense of adventure had resurfaced. Five hours on the Ganga Gomti Express and we were at Lucknow, totally charmed by the magnificence of the architecture and the way people spoke, the tehzeeb as it were, and the charming cyc𝓰le rickshꦐaws.

Our rickshaw took us to the Gomti Hotel which was at least half hour away. This was where Appa had allegedly made a booking. Turns out the manager had not received the message (from the colleague who was supposed to make the call) and the only thing they could offer us was a dormitory. “Might as well have stayed on the train,” began my mother in full drama mode. “Don’t w♊orry, we will find something. It’s a big city,” said Appa so matter-of-factly that it almost felt like he had been expecting this.

From Bombay to Ramnagar, to Lucknow, Ranikhet, Almora, Dhanaulti, Dehradun, and even Mussoorie—wherever we stopped, BB came out to play. It went to Palani, Coimbatore, Madras, Mahabalipuram and Poondy.  At the railway retiring room in Dehradun, at the ghats in Varanasi, at the forest lodge in Dhanaulti, at Ramnagar featuring the Jim Corbett national park in the backdrop, our clothesline was a motif of our travels. One morning, we woke up in our forest guest house at Dhanaulti to the view of vanilla-capped mountains and there my mother was, hanging clothes. “I can’t believe you came to t🌳he Himalayas to wash clothes,” Appa would say in exasperation. “If I don’t wash, you will all stink, just remember that,” she would retort.

Indian Railways was our default setting for travel.  My most vivid memories are of train travel as a family. I remember us at Kalyan station, when the twins were little and didn’t require a ticket. We were waiting to board the train to Dehradun, and Appa as usual had gone to look at the chart.  My aunt spotted us in the crowd; she was rushing towards us with a flask of hot filter coffee and some idlis wrapped in banana leaves for the journey. “Are you sure this is the correct platform?,” she asked anxiously. “Because they were just making an announcement that the Dehradun Express is arriving on platform 5. 🉐May be that’s another train…” My aunt knew that Appa was an authority on all things railways, so how could he have made a mistake.

We soon made our way back to the railway station and found a cheap hotel right across it with zero charm. Suddenly, we wondered if the dorm at the Gomti overlooking the sprawling lawns would have been better. But we were tired and hungry and didn’t complain. In the evening, we stepped out on the balcony of our room, and there it was! Lucknow station, all lit up, sparkling in its grandeur. “You wouldn’t have this view at the Gomti,” Appa proffered by way of consolation. Amma of course was least interested and was already hanging a clothesline from one pole of the balcony to the other. The next day, there was no view, as Amma had washed our clothes and hung them all out to dry. The BB sabun had struck!

Amma swore by BB sabun it because it didn’t get soggy and disintegrate like those fancy blue bars with lightning motifs and also because she could cut the cake into two and make it last. I guess that was the only way it would fit in her hand as the BB sabun was huge in those days. Whenever the radio jingle of “Dhantak ka BB sabun” would play,  we always imagined Amma in it. Appa said the hotel might start charging us extra if they knew how much water we were consuming. Amma didn’t care. We couldn’t afford dhobi services, so she did what she had to do.

He had. It was the wrong platform. We saw Appa running towards us, waving the tickets, then picking up and counting the luggage and the children and saying, “Come on, come on, fast fast!” as if he had just made this discovery, conveniently evading the apology that he owed us, especially my mother. It must have been a  sight—the five of us with cheap luggage, one suitcase held by a string (which Amma will later use to hang our laundry in EVERY hotel) scrambling from platform 3 to 5 amid an ocean of people, my aunt running behind us with her flask and the idli package and finall🦄y, we were on the right train, hearts beating at 200 per minute, and Appa exclaiming, “The adventure begins!” 

And then the three kids were squeezed into one berth, much to my protest and for some reason, Appa’s seat was not with us, but in the other compartment. Amma was most annoyed by this. “Now I am stuck with three three children while you are enjoying, haan?” she asked him accusingly. “Okay, I ℱwill take one,” he said. It was invariably me and I was happier for it. Sometimes, I would offer to take in one of the twins in ༺my berth grudgingly and Amma would take the other while Appa got to stretch his never-ending legs on a single berth.  

I always wondered if Appa knew as much as he claimed to, why were we always on the wrong platform and sometimes, even on the wrong train? Our tickets were never confirmed until the last minute, but Appa was confident that he could speak to the TT Inspector and “manage something”. No wonder Amma was always stressed an🅠d in a bad mood during our train travels.

Once at Dehr⭕adun, we checked into the Dehradun Railway retiring room. Appa booked it for two nights so we could spend some time in Dehradun before heading to Dhanaulti and Mussoorie.

The retiring room was huge. There were three four-poster beds in it, and the bathroom was as big as our whole house. Suddenly, I wanted to stay here for the rest of the trip. It was like being 🐎in a movie! We could hear the chug of the engines late ✨into the night and it was so much fun tiptoeing out from our room straight onto the platform and walking up and down without a ticket in our nightclothes! It was exciting. We had never done anything like this before.

I decide𒉰d we should always stay at retiring rooms and when we were tired, we should just takeꩵ a train back. It was more fun compared to jumping on buses and more trains.

When we woke up the next morni𓂃ng, a server in uniform got us𝄹 tea and toast on a large tray with a teapot and white serviettes like the ones in the movies. That day, each one of us took a long time bathing, and then Amma tied her clothesline across the room and hung up all the washing,  after which we walked to a nearby restaurant called Samman for lunch.  

We seemed to be the first arrivals there. There was a genial waiter who was wiping tables when he saw us. When we asked what was for lunch, he said he could only do parathas. For us rice eaters, it was disappointing, but we were so hungry, we would eat anything.  He produced before us the most memorable aloo and mooli parathas ever had with dollops of white butter and dahi and pickle on the side. We ate and ate and ate. W🐟e came b𓆏ack to Samman for dinner that day and the next day. We tried everything on the menu.

Two days later, we were to leave Dehradun for Dhanaulti by bus for “the Himalayas”. Suddenly, we were sad. We didn’t want the Himalayas, we didn’t want anything. We just wanted to wake up in our retiring room at Dehradun Station and eat aloo parathas every morning at Samman

Appa got off the train at every station it stopped at, pretending to “fill water” or get some “appuchi” (snacks or goodies) although we knew he was going for a smoke. And then the driver would blow the whistle and train would be leaving and there was no sign of Appa, and then Amma would panic as she knew nothing about the destination (all part of Appa’s laꦦrge plan), and then he would showing up at the next station with a new adventure story.

People collected stamps and watches; Appa collected railway timetables and railway trivia. He had a🍃 timetable to every zone of the Indian Railways, even to places we had never been , because to him, anything that had a route had a possibility. He would scan trains from Hisar to Kanyakumari, from Jammu Tawi to Trivandram, from Bombay to Howrah months before he planned his trip and we would always wonder where we were going next. 

There were no apps then, or live locations. Appa would merely look out the window, look at his timetable and announce that the train was running two hours late. “But it will catch up in the night”, he would say with confidence, as if he just had a word with the engine driver. And we would go to sleep imagining that may be another train would doze off on the way or its alarm wouldn’t ring, and our train would end up being 🐠the tortoise who actually got ahead of the hare.  We were quite certain by now that Appa secretly worked for the railways, because how else could he know so much? 

“They are changing the engine,” he would say at Shoranur junction for example, when the train would wait inordinately long before we approached Palakkad, our final destinati🔯on.   

Or “they are adding one bogie” 

How can you just add a whole bogie? As children it was hard for us to visualise or com𒁏prehend this. Then he would remind us of the board game and was shunting was. 

Sometimes the train would go in one direction and ♏suddenly change direction and we would all wonder- has it forgotten where to go? And Appa woꩵuld have an explanation. “This is a broad gauge. The train is changing to meter gauge. It will save 100 km and 2-3 hours,” he would say. 

Food from other lands or railway stations was a major incentive for Appa to travel. It would be paruppu vada of Vijayawada, pongal at Guntakal, lassi at Amritsar, pazham pori at Ernakulam station, haluva of Calicut, vada pav of Karjat or missal of Pune.  Speaking of food from other lands--we still rag my brother who dropped a whole pot of rasgullas from Calcutta (he insisted on carrying it) on the Howrah express. We managed to collect some rasgullas and stuff it into a dabba, following our own 20-second rule, but there was a sticky mess 🧸all around and every passenger who boarded the train and stepped on it was pointed in our direction and we ꦐhad so many glares on that journey that none of us wanted to leave our seats. It was the longest 36 hours of my life!

When I moved to Kodaikanal recently,&nb💯sp; I was taking a train from Thivim to Dindigul  and called Appa from the train. It’s been a habit of mine, calling him on every train journey, because he always tells me things I don’t know. He asked me about the route, and I must confess I had to look at my “Where is my train app”. I told him. Appa rued the discontinuation of the Coimbatore- Pollachi meter gauge in 2008. He then told me that line was closed for gauge conversion from meter gauge to broad gauge and didn’t open for 15 years when train service resumed, rather sluggishly. Appa blamed the Tamil Nadu-Kerala politics. He has taken it personally that the TN Express via Konkan Railway has decided to route its journey through Erode instead of Pollachi. “Palakkad-Pollachi route is underutilised,” Appa grunted in the manner of a Railway Minister. “You could have saved 100 km!” 

Once, on our way up north, Appa got off the train at Ratlam station, claiming it was famous for puri bhaji. When the whistle blew, no sign of Appa. Ten minutes later, s🌠till no sign of Appa. Half hour later, we were sure Appa was lost or left behind on the platform and asked Amma to pull the chཧain. She refused saying that if she had to pay a fine, she didn’t want to waste her money.

Finally, Appa appeared three hours later at Kota station, shivering. He said he couldn’t make it to our bogie since the signal was given, so he tried to get into another compartment and the door was locked from inside so he had to hang onto the outside bar for three hours in the middle of the night till the next station. We were all in awe and felt bad for Appa but Amma didn’t. “Where is the puri bhaji you went out to get?” she asked. He was annoyed. “My life was in danger and all you can think of is puri bhaji?” 

Appa would also make friends with complete strangers and tru🎐st them with everything he had. Once we had gone for a trip to the south and while changing buses from Madras to Poondy (where Amma wanted to visit a church to make an offering), we met this young couple who got chatty at the bus stop. We travelled with them all the way to Poondy, shared our meals, and the young man also borrowed Appa’s cigarettes and lighter. When we🎉 reached our destination, the man started raving and ranting that his pocket had been picked.

By this time, his wife started beating her chest and wailing loudly, saying they could now not make an offering of 1000 rupees as promised to Our Lady of Velankinni, as she really wanted to have a baby. Appa felt bad for him and offered him the money as a loan. The man promised to send a money order to our hotel as soon as we reached Madras, failing which he would meet us at the station on our return journey. Needless to say, there was n𓂃o money order and by the time the trip ended, we were broke too, and Appa had barely a hundred rupees left.

For once, our tickets were confirmed, but we had no money to travel. All the money Amma had was used for our stay and travel within Madras and Mahabalipuram. Appa was so sure his friend would show up at Madras station with the thousand rupees, that he had spent all his money.  Finally he sold his watch two days prior to departure  (these were pre ATM days) and we got by. On the day of the journey, there was no money to buy food and Amma was getting increasingly worried about how would she feed the children. “God will provide,” said Appa pointing upwards and that was weird because we all knew Appa was an🅷 atheist. 

He still had hope that his friend would show up and was pacing up and down the platform at Madras Central station. My mother kept saying he wouldn’t show up and Appa accused her of having a black tongue and we wondered what the colour of her tongue had to do with anything.  The fake friend didn’t show up finally and we boarded the train. We had a heavy breakfast and weꦫ decided to skip lunch and kept having water. But by dinner, we were hungry again. Appa had just enough money for one thali. He ordered that,  but my brother was so hungry that he ate it all up. The rest of us survived on a bottle of Horlicks, which my mother kept mixing with hot water and doling out cupfulls to all of us like it was a sou𓂃p. Horlicks still reminds me of that train journey.

The last time we traveled by train as a family was in 2010 when we travelled from Mumbai to Chandigarh for a cousin’s wedding. I wa🌞s now a mother to a 18-month-old and it was his first trip on a long distance train, but the ease with which he climbed his berth and swu✤ng off it made me realise that perhaps I had passed on some of Appa’s genes and suddenly all the annoyances of my childhood train travel disappeared. 

I now real🌳ise that perhaps some of us are bogies who ඣlike to be attached to each other, but Appa always enjoyed being loose shunted. I do too. ;

(This appeared in the Print as 'A Family on Wheels')