COMING HOME

For me the best part of every semester at college was going home. Not that I missed Madras or home much. Holiday time was an escape from the indescribably bad food in the Hostel.  Vacations also provided a respite, however brief, from the onslaught of lectures, assignments, quizzes and deadlines, not to mention doing one's own laundry. Every course was like a rough sea from which one needed a safe haven now and then. Much later I understood that a certain level of stress actually facilitates learning but by then I was too old to care.

These periodic escapes from the rigours of academia were not without their own set of problems: the chief among them being procuring a ticket on a train going home, which would ordinarily be a very mundane task but which in Socialist India was a great, exciting adventure and an almost insurmountable challenge.

You see, in socialist India, a vast majority could not afford a train ticket which probably cost near about a month's earnings of the average villager. In order to even things out – isn’t that what Socialism is all about, evening things out? –government of the day decided to make the act of procuring a ticket difficult for those that could indeed afford the fare. The idea was that if you have got one thing (money) you can’t have the other (ticket), for Socialism is all about keeping everyone in a state of equal deprivation. 

Either you could not afford a ticket and did not travel or if you dared to travel then you must be made to jump through convoluted hoops at great personal discomfort and financial cost. I cannot imagine, even after all these years, a better way of leveling disparities between people. Pulling poor people up, the oft-suggested cure for poverty, could work; pulling others down down was certain to work, easier to accomplish, and a lot more satisfying. Hence that was the preferred mode of achieving social and economic equality in India circa 1970. 

The politicians and the Babus had their own special quotas in everything from foodstuff to transportation. Trains and planes waited for them to come aboard before commencing their journey – the business of Socialism was a serious one and the movers and shakers of Socialism had to go places and move and shake things for it to work.

The act of procuring a ticket involved standing in queues which were long and doubled back on themselves many times over and criss-crossed each other. It was usually very hard to spot which ticket window a queue led to. This was important, for if yours ended in the “wrong” window, you could be buying a ticket to an East-bound train while you actually wanted to go West. You usually discovered if you were in the right queue only upon reaching the window and thrust your application form in the face of a very hassled, harried, resentful and sweaty clerk.

At the end of the day, usually 5.30 pm, the clerk would shut shop noisily, without a look in your direction and would leave his post, thus nullifying all your efforts of faithfully queuing up the entire day. His preparations for shutting would start as early as 4.30 p.m when a glazed and absent-minded look would descend on him. Thereafter he would orally cross-check four or more times all the details which were in front of him in writing, on the “prescribed” form. Socialism was all about vigilance against waste in general and unnecessary travel in particular and vigilance tended to flag towards the end of a long hot day. If the clerk were a woman the preparations for closing would start an hour earlier.

At the appointed “closing time” everything was “reset” and the progress you had made during the day was erased and you would have to start all over again the next day. Or, like the vast majority of our countrymen, you could choose not to travel. This was Socialism at its best: all were equalized at the end of the day should the aberration of individual progress raise its ugly head during the course of the day. Socialism wasn’t perfect, and could be corrupted in the course of the day, but no longer; by the end of the day the incipient error was noted and rectified and the situation restored to normal.

Soviet Russia and Communist China dealt with the problem rather peremptorily: there the government decided when, where, and if at all you could travel. Given to democratic pretenses, Indian government couldn't take away your right to travel, but they could and did make it damn sight difficult, thus in effect, achieving what they could not mandate but would have liked to. Thus was kept alive the flimsy fiction of Democracy with Socialist underpinnings. 

But this kind of Socialism gave rise to an unexpected consequence: Free Enterprise - the very thing that Socialism sought so assiduously to eliminate.

In this case the free enterprise involved “touts” substituting for you in the queue until you were ready to take your place - in return for a fee of course. That was the first hesitant step towards outsourcing at we which we have become rather good today. Over time it evolved into the touts actually purchasing the tickets on your behalf – being smart entrepreneurs they figured that the margins were better in end-to-end servicing of clients. 

This comprehensive service involved paying the tout a multiple of the official price for the journey. Soon the queues comprised solely of touts, which attracted new rules (like how many tickets a single person can buy at one time) which in turn elicited even cleverer responses from the entrepreneurial touts, which resulted in ever more complex rules, and so on, ad infinitum. It was a Darwinian prey-Vs-predator ball, played out in railway ticket offices all over India to the strains of L’Internationale.

My friends from Kerala, who were born pink and tended to lean left preferred to thumb their noses at us by traveling in "unreserved" coaches. It was darkly muttered that even they employed touts – a different kind, to occupy the required number of seats while the coaches were still in their sheds. Upon the coach arriving at the station platform, and was still in motion, the intending passengers would dive headlong into them through windows strategically opened at the right time by the touts lurking inside. Reserved coach or otherwise, the touts had to be paid in advance. Instances of money and tout disappearing were not uncommon.

As for reservations procured at high cost, they were usually not of much value.   I was once presented with a very clever argument by a gentleman with his family of nine occupying the seat that had been reserved for me: he claimed that “reservation” was only valid while the train was stationary at the starting point and that once it started moving, those rules did not apply. Surely this guy had read Einstein, and understood that things were different in a moving frame of reference. Years later I read an article on the net by a professor of physics that the principles of Relativity were contained in the teachings of Prophet Mohamed. Perhaps it was written by the man on the train.

One time a group of us managed to keep away the "unreserved" hordes from  form entering our coach by the simple expedient of standing at the door at every station and barring aspirants from getting in, shouting “rejerbed” (= reserved) in what we thought was a North Indian accent. This worked well until we crossed over into the state of Uttar Pradesh at which point our resistance turned futile. With a collective "han, han dekh lenge" (oh yes, we'll see) the mob just burst past us. Things today remain very much the same in that part of India.

The other difficulty in going home was the journey itself, which could last between 32 and 82hours, depending which train I traveled by. It could be longer if the train was "delayed" which was often the case, especially if I took the “people’s express” train. The latter was a brilliant example of Socialism: it was an attempt to please everyone but in reality failed all of them. They had the worst equipment, often broke down,  no lights at night, no water any time, had no priority over anything  else on the tracks and had elastic schedules. They stopped at every wayside station and for good measure in between them too. This train leveled everyone by reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator.

The so-called People's Express trains were hauled by wheezy steam locomotives which were slow and clanged in a most alarming manner as if something big and critical was about to give way rather spectacularly. They also bathed the passengers in considerable amount of coal smoke and soot which evened out the skin tones of the passengers by the end of the journey. It never arrived at the scheduled meal stops at the  appointed meal time and thus every one, irrespective of his station in life, went hungry - a brilliant example of socialism at work. People's Expresses was classless, and always yielded to other trains, presumably carrying important Babus and politicians in plush Air Conditioned First Class.

When the 1971 war broke out I was aboard one such People's Express, heading back to Bombay. It was forced to make way for long trains with their contents (army tanks and field guns) barely covered by inadequate tarpaulins. At one station we were told of a minimum stoppage of 12 hours before we would start moving again; some pious passengers made a quick dash to Tirupathi temple, which was not far off; I watched cock-fights in a nearby village.We did not have to switch off our lights at night as a precaution against air attacks, for lights never worked in these trains any way.

Meals on trains were a challenge. Railways were well organized, providing meals at wayside stations as well as packed ones on board. Both were limited in numbers. If you weren't fast enough off the train at the meal stop or if you weren't awake when orders for on-train meals were taken, you could go hungry  I preferred the former challenge. Alighting nimbly even before the train came to a complete halt, I would make a smart dash to the dining hall where meals were laid out on rows of tables. If I made the first round, I was OK.

The real challenge was catching breakfast at a station named Daund en route to Bombay. The trains usually stopped for 10 minutes which seems like a lot, but actually wasn't. There was no time to order a la carte. I had to choose the table which served my kind of breakfast. I got it right most of the time. The reward was freshly made masala omelets, crisp buttered toast and hot Darjeeling tea. On a cold winter morning that was heaven.

Most times a few of us traveled together – two heading to Madras and the rest further south. The latter's coach would be detached from our train and re-attached to a different train at a station one hour from Madras. On the way to Bombay their coach would be attached to the Bombay bound train at this station. We would spend the almost the entire journey together playing cards, chatting or simply smoking and reading. This involved leaving my luggage in my allotted seat and moving to where the rest of the gang was. I always found my luggage intact when I got back to my own coach, something that cannot happen today.

Sometimes all of us did not get sleeper berths and therefore the available berths would be used by turns. Once, in my absence, my shoes had been moved by someone and had fallen into a gaping hole in the side panel of the coach, far beyond my reach. To the considerable irritation of my brother who had come to receive me at the destination, I arrived barefoot, wearing a colourful batik-printed T shirt in psychedelic patterns and with longish hair. My appearance provided much grist to the family mill.

The biggest problem going home presented was not any of the above. It was timing my smoking so as not to run out of nicotine-high too early or reek of tobacco upon arrival at Madras. You see, mum suspected that I smoked, but hoped otherwise. Breaking that illusion would have been of painful consequences for everyone.The trick was to stop smoking about four hours before arrival at Madras. On the return journey the problem was one of procuring cigarettes: the pater invariably came to see me off and stayed on until the train actually started moving, affording little opportunity to procure cigarettes. He would stoically decline all my entreaties to leave early to beat the traffic. I had to wait till the next big station, two hours away, before being able to buy cigarettes, the longest two hours of my life. The next station brought a double bonus - friends from Kerala and cigarettes.The rest of the journey was heaven.

Arriving at Bombay still left a few mountains to climb: getting on and off commuter trains with all my luggage, fighting for and getting a taxi or fighting to get on the bus with my luggage and finally the long trek from the college gate to my hostel which was at the other end of the campus. 

Back at the hostel I felt as if I had finally come home!