The Journey with true India

It had been a busy day. I was going home for almost 6 weeks just before the graduation second year exams. This meant I carried the thick recommended course books home not to mention the n number of print outs taken from the so called reference material. The fact that I was a girl and needed to carry all the dresses (after all I needed to look good @ home) and shoes back didn’t help a single bit to the whole situation. Finally when every thing was packed I had an unliftable suitcase and another mammoth bag full of books…which I couldn’t even move a centimeter. However, being a regular traveler (and a pro to this kind of situations) I was sure that some kindly uncleji or bhaiyaji or a youngster would help me out.

The train stopped for 5 minutes at the small station that was near the hostel. I bid farewell to my mates and headed to the station at around 7:30 PM. Dinner was yet not ready so I had to skip it but the kindly Bihari Bhaiya who managed the mess had packed something for me to eat on the train. When I reached the station it was unusually silent and deserted. “Maybe not too many people on the Triveni Express tonight”, was my thought. I wasn’t unusually worried. I called home on reaching the station from the PCO booth (mobiles were still a rarity- especially amongst students) and it was then the information bomb exploded.

My mom told me that there had been a huge rally of the Dalits (which later became known as the Thu-Thu Rally) organized by our very own Mayawati aka Behanji at Lucknow and all the people who had attended it from the regions around Allahabad/my home town were supposed to return by the train I was to take. I made further enquiries and I realized that the train was late by 3 hours. My mom asked me to immediately leave and catch the train from the Central station because she didn’t want me to give company to drunkards, madmen and other unholy elements for the next 4 hours at the deserted station. I did as I was told but it wasn’t all that easy….

Allahabad is basically a student city, dotted with colleges and hostels. It’s old as well with full of sprawling English style bungalows, huge lawns and “a-first-timer-will-get-lost” kinda parks and gardens. Usually its calm but then there is no dearth of the guys commenting/ ogling / trying to be over friendly with the girls. Late hours after darkness aren’t really safe with incidents of chain and purse snatching being common. The Central Station was at the other end of the city- almost 15 kms away and I was supposed to go alone on a rickshaw with 2 unmanageable luggage through dark streets crossing not less than 3 boys hostels and a stretch of 1 kilometer that I usually didn’t even take during the day- thanks to the “incidents” and the ghosts that prowled the area. But at the moment I had no option. I had to go and that was it.

The ride to the station was uneventful…I had put on the jacket hood so as not to be recognized as a girl on the dark roads. I wasn’t really worried about the luggage because I knew no one could snatch it. No ghosts and no unfriendly elements appeared. Once at the station amidst bustling crowds and screaming children things looked easy, all I had to do was to sit and wait for another few hours and the train would be there. I had enough novels to kill time for the whole night. I had already hired a coolie and he was supposed to place my things on the train once it came. He had made me sit at the moment near the place where my boggie as per the reservation ticket. I took out a book and soon was into another world…..I had thought about taking the dinner there but closed in the web of the book a cold dinner didn’t look really tantalizing.

11:20 PM. Frantic announcements about the arrival of Triveni Express within the next 15 minutes brought me back to the reality. The coolie was also prancing around and he even queried about my huge luggage and unaccompanied status. I answered as much as I could but then he said something that made my blood go cold “Beti, aaj train mein bahut bheed hogi, koi reservation se nahi chalega- aap kaise jaoge?” (“Child, the train would be crowded and there wouldn’t be anyone following the reservation system- so how would you go?”) I was in a fix...I couldn’t go back to the hostel, I couldn’t stay at the station and here he was telling me about the train….Finally I decided to go…it seemed senseless not to go when I had already crossed one hurdle of coming to the station. Just another hurdle remained…getting on the train with my things and I was sure I could manage it somehow. Once inside some one kind enough would let me sit and then by morning I would be home…so what if a bit late…..

The train arrived…it was packed to capacity and it looked impossible that anyone could get in. Yet people poured in endlessly and so did I with the flow of the crowd. I had my reservation but then the reserved compartment looked the same if not worse than a general class.The coolie got my things…but the problem was I couldn’t go beyond the first compartment…people were all over, the seats, the floor, one guy was sitting on the top of the door. To make matters worse, I couldn’t find a single educated person in the whole ocean of faces around me. It was a crowd straight out of the poorest villages of India, people for whom getting 2 meals a day was more than what they could ask for. And God!! How the whole place smelt…like an athlete’s closet full of unwashed sportswear.

The eternal optimist in me told me that it was just a matter of few hours and I would be home, while the practical me wanted me to get off from the train at that moment. But the practical I was defeated because I was “locked” now. I had atleast 40 people between me and the door and there was no way I could move with my things in any direction forget towards the door.

Since there wasn’t any space on the seats I sat down on the bag- the bag that was full of books. I was already an object of curiosity a bespectacled, jeans-t-shirt clad girl with so much luggage traveling alone. Women nudged each other looking at me and children wanted to touch me. I cared about none. My mind was focused on nice things, which would take me away from the reality of the whole night ahead of me, the dank smelling compartment, the fact that I was hungry, thirsty and wanted to go to the loo and the terrible back ache that grew worse every moment due to the lack of back support.

The train moved but it was more like a bullock cart. The chains were pulled at every station and even at places where there was no station- the country folk knew the road nearest to home and they were unwilling to walk more or to take another means of transport from the stations where the train was actually supposed to stop. It was already 1:30 AM and we hadn’t really made a huge progress. I had finished off with the list of the “imaginable good things” and hence they no longer acted as a barrier to reality. I took a look around and all of a sudden I felt the patriotic uprising within myself. I thought about the then unknown lawyer Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi whose life got shaped on one such trai journey in South Africa. These were my own country men and my education was doing nothing towards there welfare, nor it would ever. I would, the way things were going would have a nice job and all the comforts but what about these people? They would remain the same even 10 years down the line. They would smell the same, travel the same way and would not know that no numbers of “Thu-Thu rallies” would bring even a minute improvement to their fates. Was there something I could do for those teeming millions? Could I get into an administrative job instead of the MBA I wanted to be? Thoughts like this floated around until the day’s tiredness took over and I fell asleep sitting on my bag of books my head in my lap.

It was morning when I woke up. It wasn’t a huge progress that we had made in the hours of darkness but then we were moving and home was closer than what it was a few hours ago. However the crowd looked the same to me….there wasn’t a difference in their numbers. But then, everyone had a few inches of space to sit in the tin of sardines. A child sat next to me with her free flowing nose. She was looking at me with awed wonder and I smiled back at her, a smile that was acknowledged by her mother who sat next to her. I figured out that the child’s name was Gudiya and so I called out to her. She immediately came over and held my hands. I started talking to her and soon she was busy laughing and playing, like kids usually do. That made the time go faster…..I was already half dead with hunger the pain in my neck and the by sitting in a hunched position for so long.

It was around 10 AM that some police men came on a round. I had dozed off and was woken up by a thud against the bag I was sitting on. I opened my eyes and it was Mr. Policeman. He asked me what I had inside such a heavy bag. I said books and he didn’t want to believe me. He started lecturing me on bombs and how “people like me” were responsible for the blasts around the country. Me? Blasts? Bombs? I who couldn’t even light a cracker on Diwali? It didn’t make sense so I showed him the ID card and told him I was going home just before exams. Still not pacified. Looking back I realize that there was no doubt about my identity ever. All he wanted was to have a conversation with me and maybe bug me a little. His next interrogation item really pissed me off because he wanted me to open up my bag and show him in. All the pent up anger over the delays and tiredness from the day before came back and I told him I wasn’t showing him a thing...how could he imagine a girl like me traveling alone to be carrying bombs? And if at all he wanted to check my bags he should first create a space of atleast 1 meter on each side. He seemed surprised that I had spoken up and mumbled something but then got away. Gudiya’s mom looked at me with awed attention – she who in all probability hadn’t spoken to any male except her husband in atleast her adult life. The men folk started chatting about how the policemen are all mixed with criminals and soon the conversation took an interesting turn about the politicians. It gave me a first hand view of how the commonest of the common people see the leaders. As Gods. Mayawati is in demand because during her campaign she had provided 2 blankets and a bowl/utensil to each of the families. Sonia Gandhi wasn’t in demand because she had given only one blanket and a day’s meal. I realized that India will always have scams and a bad political situation till the time the majority of the voters were like these-the one who did not have a vision beyond the next meal and the next winter. Somewhere unconsciously, I was so carried on by the discussion that I forgot where I was and gave some input about a much younger politician. I was again the focus of attention (the kind of attention that told that Mayawati and Sonia Gandhi were the only women whom the men traveling with me had heard discussing politics). My opinion was turned down and I didn’t dare to argue further because I didn’t dare to test the political bent of mind of people who were back from a rally. But then I was in the lime light now. A high school drop who was a glib talker (Chandu was his name as I later gathered) and looked like a politician’s chamcha came over and sat beside me. He asked me my surname and what my father did. He spoke aloud about how I with all the “Wealth of my knowledge” could join politics and maybe become an MLA from some unknown village(s) in Bihar. His conversation though intriguing and motivating made me laugh, because I never had any political ambitions. Soon he was discussing the local politics and even gave me his phone number so as to reach him when-ever I wanted to be in for this. He even told me that the local MLA’s son was a good friend of his and was looking for an educated wife, who would pave the way the way to the top. He said I fitted the bill perfectly with my high caste, serious looks and short hair (! ##$$$???) I ignored the comments because I didn’t want to be the attention of a pack of goons from the next day onwards.

Our conversation (trust me, that was the longest conversation I had pertaining to politics in my whole life) could have gone on and on hadn’t the police guy arrived again. Chandu called him over (as if he were an old friend) and told him that I was a perfect to be some Dineshji’s future wife. The policeman looked at me again and gave a weird expression. He asked Chandu to get some tea and biscuits for “Didiji” (well that’s me :-)). I refused, saying I didn’t drink tea. At this the policeman kicked at the butt of Gudiya’s father and blowing out some expletives said aloud in the local dialect “How could you let didiji sit on the bag for the whole night…she should have the whole berth” Then he mumbled sorry for his earlier inconsistencies and the bad experience I had in the train and with him. It looked funny to me to see the turn around in his behaviour….

Soon I had a whole berth to me. The people didn’t want to sit at the same berth because news had spread around that I was a high class Brahmin. I invited them over to sit instead of the floor and they looked at me with surprised pleasure- as if they hadn’t expected that out of a fellow human being. The last hour on the train was the most comfortable one an soon it was time to get home. I was worried about how I would get my luggage out but then I shouldn’t have- I had a whole compartment full of people willing to do something for me….I was escorted to the awaiting car and finally felt relaxed to be finally home(well almost).

I never joined politics and chose to be a consultant rather. Those people must have gone ahead with their lives affected but the churns in the political climate – a blanket here, a meal there, some cattle a bag of wheat….Mayawati is still the dalit Goddess and Chandu must be there acting as a link between one of the MLAs and the poor people , earning a few rupees in middle. The MLA’s son got married to a local business man’s daughter who was 11th dropout. Te marriage was covered by the local press. Gudiya must be 8 by now, ready to embark on the hard life of a woman in the Indian villages.

Do you think are we really free?