A Paean to the Indian Railways

I’ve always been sceptical of the nostalgia and sentimentality associated with bygone eras and yesteryears. But despite this, each and every time I step into an Indian railway platform, a wave of memories washes over me. There were the childhood journeys from Bombay to Kozhikode in the pre-Konkan era, the Madras Mail to Salem, the 50-hour Allepey-Bokaro Express which used to ferry me and my batchmates to Rourkela, the Maveli and Malabar Expresses which were my staples during the Trivandrum days, the journeys to Anand and ofcourse the multiple Rajdhanis each year from Nizamuddin, with the kids when they were toddlers.

I haven’t seen everything in this vast country, nor do I claim to understand it fully. But having travelled its length and breadth by train often enough, I sometimes allow myself the small comfort of believing that I know a little of India.

It was with this sentiment that I read Rahul Bhattacharya’s ‘Railsong’. He traces the life of a young girl who grows up in a Railway Colony and then ends up getting employed by the Indian Railways after her father’s sudden demise. And through this tale, Bhattacharya shows us the monstrosity that the Indian Railways is. In a country that adopted socialism, shunned the private sector and decided that planning an economy was a thing, getting a sarkaari job was the ultimate aspiration. Through this story that plays out with the Indian Railways in the background, you get to see how central such organizations can become to a persons, a family’s and nation’s identity. The payscales, the transfers, the paper pushers, the invisible power centers of the bureaucracy, the vastness of our territory and the violence hidden beneath our everyday interactions with the people all come together in this book.

The work is also a study of what it means to be a woman in India. No amount of theory can substitute for a well-told story about the lived experience of womanhood in this country.

She recalled what retired dy.c.p.o. Sinha had posited all those years ago, that every person on average harboured five to seven grievances at any given point of time – so if youcould understand the approximately hundred million grievances of all seventeen lakh railway employees, from chairman to cinderwoman, why, you could understand the life of the entire country! She felt close to the country, to life itself, and the nutrients of the physically resilient life, the life of emotional survival, of mental curiosity, seep into one another, feed the whole like the elements do a tree.

On the paperwork of moving a dead body from the tracks:

Afterwards, running around morning, noon and night, it was she who obtained the police panchnama, the serial number in the accidental-death register, the post-mortem report, the death certificate, the dependants’ information, the rough sketch of the accident site. She put together the Workmen’s Compensation Act claim. She had the body placed in a coffin provided by Edward Jones Special Contractor & Undertaker of Clare Road, Byculla, obtained a certificate from the coroner stating that the coffin has been properly sealed and the corpse would not decompose on the way, and another one stating that this was done in the presence of a municipal doctor (she was not sure this had been the case). It was she who obtained permission letters from the police commissioner and the municipality to transfer the body from one district to another, and from the stationmaster to load the coffin on the train. She reserved, through the commercial manager, space for the coffin in the brake van, and handed copies of the receipt to the booking office, the guard and the accompanying teenage brother who would become eligible for a compassionate appointment at a concessional age the following year – and thus set Gangubai Waghmare on her journey home

 
The book ends in the 90s, at the height of the Mandir movement. The complexity of the movement and its adherents can be neatly summed up by this observation:

Some of our people are such hardcore Vaishnavs, like our Hareshbhai on the second floor – if he goes to the tailor, he will not say kapda shivdava che. He does not want to use the word Shiv

Try modelling India with this insight.

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