Train journey nostalgia

It's just a train journey. 

Unless you're part of a not-so-elite club of 90s kids for whom long train journeys were when we finally believed that the vacation was on. A train journey was all it took to move from school, homework and household chores to the carefree village home where Nani cooked everything you loved to eat and scolded your mother for scolding you. To the towns on banks of rivers that were still clean enough for a sneaky dip when daddy wasn't looking and then hiding behind Dadi when he tried to explain to you why that's a sure-shot recipe to catching a summer cold. To being pampered.

Train journeys often connected our city existence to our town royalty. We were the raja betas and darlings of the extended family and the increase in our weight over the summer was a sign of just how much love had been poured into our food with the ghee. 

I know it wasn't like this for many of my friends. Summers for them were never picking mangoes from other people's orchards. But maybe you can see a little bit of what that guilt free haven felt like to a child. And you can imagine how the train journey became our personal cupboard to Narnia.

Even if it wasn't the ritual summer holiday train, it always took you someplace new. You sat by the window, trying to count the trees flashing you by. There was so much to learn - about brick kilns and seasonal crops, irrigation canals and scarecrows, parched land and river bridges - so much to see, and question. I still remember trying to understand why the wide Brahmaputra was a river and not a sea, because you surely could not see its other bank from one end. Or how Sangam was a confluence of not two but three rivers. I remember how different the Konkan railway scenery was from the Bombay-UP one.

When you're one of those 'my-parents-have-a-transferrable-job' kids, you grow up all over the country. 'Back home' becomes your centre and train journeys run along a radius to each new place. Your first lesson in landscapes, agriculture and people comes not from Geography textbooks but from train windows. 

So does your first lesson in human relationships and love, because sometimes trains took you away from cities you loved and had lived in for years. You stand at the door of your coach, waving goodbye to the band of family and friends at the station until you can see them no more. Teary-eyed and with a heavy heart, you wonder if the new place will ever be as good as the old one. It's the gentle humming of the wheels on rail that rock your little body to sleep on these journeys.

And of course, you have your journey constants. The dip-dip waali chai, cutlet and samosas.The choices in breakfast. Watching your parents perfectly layer the chaadar with the kambal and make your bed. Playing Antakshari and reading books and running around from one coach to another finding other kids to play hide and seek with. As you grew older, you also began to have favourites. Like the side upper berth. Or aloo-poori-achaar for packed dinners.

Train journeys were a mini vacation in themselves. And I miss them. In-flight entertainment doesn't quite cut it.

So today was a good day. I was on the train after two long years and the ever faithful not-good-enough but paramparaa waali dip-dip chai comforts my soul. I hadn't realised how much I needed this oasis.

Vocab for the uninitiated:

Nani - maternal grandmother

Dadi - paternal grandmother

Raja Beta - expressing adoration - my prince/princess

Ghee - butter, but better

Chaadar - bedsheet

Kambal - blanket

Antakshari - a game - think Atlas but with songs

Parampara - tradition (and also partial reference to Bollywood movie Mohabbatein)

Waali - helping verb

The post after a hiatus.. eventually.

I've realised I do most of my writing on impromptu text messages to close friends. So I've decided to simply post them here, with a little bit of context. Maybe, it gives the three people who read this some words to feel something about.

Him: Trust yourself Sushruti. And have faith in yourself. I know I do. And things will work out.

Me:

Things will work out.

Eventually.

That's where all faith rests.
And on days I wonder what that place must look like.

I wonder if it's a graveyard for broken dreams or a river catching sun-beams with Tennyson writing me poetry on its banks.

I imagine that one day I'll reach it, and it'll be dark and empty, covered in wet moss from all the years of tears, unspent in the hope packaged for this place.

Eventually.

When I'm drowning, I need to see which way to swim to get to the surface. On days, I wonder if it's this place that beams all my stored sunshine and gets me through.

On days I wonder if sunshine is a finite resource.

I wonder if we ever get there. If in the last moments of our existence, we look at the lives we've led and realise that this elusive eventuality was not a phenomenon of the future. That it's the life we've already led. That it's what's already been done. The only thing you can ever truly rely on.

In our final breath, maybe we realise that eventuality is a purse with an undetectable extension charm and we've carried it in our pocket all along.

That's where we've stashed all our hope and we find it, when we need it, without ever knowing if we will run out. That's the thing about extension charms. We never know where they end.

But every now and then, as I tap my pocket, I feel the slight bulge. And I know. That for today, there is enough in my purse to get me through. And tomorrow, hasn't arrived yet.

And for when I run out, maybe I've lived well enough for someone to lend me a little bit of sunshine from their eventualities.

Eventually, we'll all get there.