Train Dreams

Photo Album From My Trip on the Himsagar Express

Why did I leave my homeland, the town where I grew up, the cities that I liked with their varied food and artists and musicians? Why did I abandon my parents in their old age? Was it all so that I would have a better chance of being published by the New Yorker magazine? I think the answer when seen from this end of history, with its brand of presentism, might be yes. Not the whole truth, of course, but it feels great.

What I’m going to do here in this newsletter is urge you to read my piece (here is the link again) and provide you with a little photo album from my trip.

Here’s a copy from my notebook. It really helps to take notes. The New Yorker’s fact-check department demands proof of everything. I was glad that I had the clipping from the Hindi newspaper with my horoscope for that day saying “Your mind will be unsettled.” (The fact-checker told me she had used an app to check the translation!)

My journey started in Kashmir. But first I had taken a train from Delhi to Jammu. I had been familiar with the Delhi station from my youth. Here is a picture from the second floor—I had gone there because someone told me it now had a lounge. In places like the U.S., you can sometimes find the homeless asleep in a corner of a forgotten train station. Not in India. We are more democratic and even those who have homes but are traveling freely sleep on the floors of the railway stations.

Here is the map of the train’s route. My God! I found it so enticing. I think one could write an epic if one stopped at each place and asked everyone a simple question: Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

Before I boarded the Himsagar Express I spent a couple of days at a hotel in Jammu. It was hot and then rain arrived in the afternoon. Outside the window of my hotel room, I saw baby monkeys dancing in the puddle that had formed on a nearby roof.

The world appeared full of play. Full of possibilities. But soon after I left the hotel, an hour or two before midnight, the possibilities had narrowed. I took it as an ominous sign that the toilet at the train station was locked. Of course, the train was delayed.

The president of my college, a global health expert, not wishing to lose any member of her faculty, had emailed me that day instructing me to buy a particular brand of medicine. It was going to protect me from all manner of bacterial infections. I sent her a picture of my purchase. The surface on which the strip of medicine rests is the rexin cover on my railway berth.

On my first morning, having had very little sleep during the night, exhausted also by the noise inside the train car, I was attracted by the sight of this man. The train had stopped at a small station called Dhuri. The man was sitting, Buddha-like, under a peepul tree, enjoying his tea and his solitude. There was a steel trunk next to him but it didn’t look like he was in a hurry to go anywhere. He was at peace and I envied him.

The pictures below are first from the train car in which I was traveling. These are Mrs and Mr Modi. The pictures that follow those of the couple are from the unreserved train cars. At the end you will see Ganesh Rajwar, with his colorful gamchha, who appears in the opening lines of my piece.

Two more images. First, as if straight out of an Edward Hopper painting, the white woman I saw at an empty train station on my last evening on the train. And then, at the end of this long journey, after only a few minutes walk, the elation I felt at the sight of the sea!