A portentous journey to Bangalore

A portentous journey to Bangalore 

Travelling by Indian railways can be perilous. It took 22 hours for me to realise 

Jojo Puthuparampil

The cabbie’s call comes in at 3 am, the most inappropriate time to disturb one’s sleep.  Abusing someone who perturbs your sleep is not yet a criminal offence in India; so I give vent to my seething annoyance by mutely shouting over the phone—well, an audible expression of anger will wake my wife and the consequences could just be unpredictable—at the cabbie using all the crude epithets I can think of.    

Why the heck is he calling up at so early when he is expected t pick me at 4.30 am and the train I am supposed to board will leave for Bangalore City Junction from Chennai Central only at 5 am? Yes, I am asked to join my entrepreneur friend for an informal discussion on a possibly lucrative business deal but the event is still eight hours away. In the wee hours, when traffic is minimal, even the most inept driver can leisurely maneuver the 10-km distance from Ashok Pillar—this huge, eponymous column of carved stone is a major Chennai landmark though I am not sure if it bears any of King Ashoka’s edicts like the better-known ones in Vaishali or Lumbini—where I reside, to Chennai Central in 20 minutes flat. So why this unsolicited call? What is he up to? 

Thiruvizha, as the cabbie’s name turns out to be, is new to Chennai; hailing from Tirunelveli, this is his first tryst with a metro city. Six months after being hired by Fast Track, he is still not sure which Chennai lane will take him to heaven and which one to hell.  By the time I make intermittent calls to explain in broken Tamil the route from Koyambedu, where he is stuck, to my place, it is 4 am. After taking a quick bath and kissing Anguru and Nunguru, the two little musketeers who make my life livable, I step out in to what seems like utter void to find yet another reason to rekindle the lingering morning annoyance—the maverick night rain has felled the neem tree, the last green shoot in the premises after housing society head honchos a few weeks ago ordered all the trees in the vicinity to be cut for strange reasons. Thiruvizha rings up to say he has finally located the street where I stay; I ask him to wait at the gate and grumblingly cross the half-lit, muddied pathway to the gate. 

I am at Central by quarter to five. A stark contrast to the bustling Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (yes, erstwhile Victoria Terminus) in Mumbai—the peninsular city where I have lived for more than 10 years is the most humane place in the world, let me say—Chennai Central is ghostly this morning. Hordes of passengers, glued on to the central hall’s cement floor (a benign offering from Indian railways: rent-free bed space), wearily snoring; the lone porter in red dozing; and the electronic sign board announcing arrivals and departures erroneously blinking. The giant, glittering Manappuram Gold Loan hoarding featuring almost all the bigwigs of Indian cinema—from Mithun Chakraborty to Akshay Kumar to Vikram to Mohanlal—is the only sign of life. 

It is now thirty past five; no sign of the train I am supposed to board and no announcement either. The sleepy duty station master tells me the train, which comes from Guwahati, is an hour late and that it may either be delayed further or get cancelled, and condescendingly advises me to cancel my e-ticket and re-reserve a seat in 12639 Brindavan Express that leaves at 7.15. I run to the ticket counter in first floor of the adjoining building but all tickets for Brindavan are already sold out. I have no option but to wait for the uncertain arrival of 12510 Guwahati-Bangalore. Beating my pessimistic expectations, however, the train arrives after two hours—better late than never, you know. But my hassles have just begun. 

A couple of hours into the journey, the train comes to a grinding halt. I slip in to a nap to make up for the lost sleep. When I woke up after roughly an hour the train is still where it was. By now, my 60 something co-passenger has—with the deftness of a chronicler of maladies—weaved a reasonably convincing story as to why the train is halted and what will happen next based on the information he has collected from the TTE, tea vendors and rail-side hawkers. The train is rerouted to Tirupati, he tells me bluntly, as a goods train derailed before Arakkonam, roughly sixty kilometers from where we are, due to a flawed signal. 


Why rail signals are almost always flawed? Why railway ministers seldom visit accident spots and are perennially morally irresponsible for the way the world’s largest rail network is ill-managed? Why the lives of millions of Indian rail travelers are taken for granted?  Why there hasn’t been a scientific study yet on the art of railway signaling with clear recommendations on how to better it? A litany of questions chokes my throat but who to ask?

The goods carrier’s carcass is expected to be cleared only by evening; hence a free trip to the temple town, roughly 160 kms from Chennai. After touching Tirupathi and crossing half a dozen more stations in Andhra’s Rayalaseema belt including Pudi and Renigunta, the train will reach Bangalore, though nobody is guessing when. “You paid only for a five-hour trip; but now you can enjoy a possible day-long journey without paying anything extra,” chuckles the chronicler. Cracking jokes amid adversity is not a sign of calm impudence but sheer frustration, my friend. 

As uncertainty wraps me like a thick blanket, I call up my friend to say I am indefinitely delayed but he says he will wait. I recline to re-read Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics which I first read as a teenager more than 20 years ago. An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism is not the right topic for reading while stranded in a train, but again I don’t have an option. 

The train trundles along the length and breadth of western Andhra, making way for other rerouted counterparts. As Capra unravels the curious world of sub-atomic particles which don’t actually exist but only show ‘tendencies to exist’, 12510 crosses Tirupati by noon. The IRCTC cuisine is not encouraging, but I need to be alive by the time the train reaches Bangalore; so I munch the elastic chapattis and what is supposedly potato curry.  After a reasonably long nap, I return to Capra whose compelling narrative is the only solace. In the world of quantum physics, Capra tells me, the only certainty is uncertainty; according to Werner Heisenberg, who penned the uncertainty principle, the position and momentum of a sub-atomic particle can never be accurately ascertained—the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be determined. 

This journey has turned out to be unpredictable than the most impulsive elementary particle.  So let me finish Capra’s chronicle. Like a panicked investor who wants to curtail losses than booking profits during a crisis of stock market confidence, I consume the book nonstop. An hour later the train touches Bangalore City Junction—exactly 22 hours after the cabbie’s call annoyed me.  

Even after being ditched and delayed repeatedly, why did I still consider Indian railways as a travel option? I don't believe in omens; but, curiously, was the felled neem tree a portent of things to come? Also, once I was told there were no tickets in Shatabdi, which is allegedly more reliable, why didn’t I think of flying (in which case my travel time would have been just 40 minutes) or boarding a Volvo or simply driving my trusted WagonR? 

When perils await, wisdom deserts you.