Ways Of Escape Part II:
The Tribulations of Timeless Travelling

I am suddenly reminded of a moment of my youth. Of a grimy Indian town, the pavements overflowing with hawkers, the roads crammed with vehicles of all conceivable makes, and in the background an old brick railway bridge with an ancient steam engine hooting and struggling with a rake of rusty wagons. The main station is beyond: an anachronism of brightly painted brick and cement arches, which, all said and done, could still have been majestic had the advertisers not blocked its entirety with hdieous advertisements propagating one or another tobacco or paan masaala brand.

I hated such places. Always had. The clamour, the insistent coolies and the ubiquitous odour of urine made me yearn for open spaces. Someone said that India has more men on trains at any given moment of time than the entire population of a smaller European country. And its men most of the time. Women don't get to move around much. They're usually in the farms, tending the land whatever way they can, while the menfolk go to the towns and the richer pastures of Punjab to make a decent rupee.

In short, there's nothing more dismal than a colonial railway station going to seed in a small Indian town. You could weep. Not many miles away are the old railway quarters, their stone or carefully worked brick exteriors still intact. But the old colonies look as if they havn't been washed for centuries and the dust of countless summers have settled indelibly over what was. The music died out a long time ago, even though one evening scurrying down those lanes in search of a girl, I had once heard what must have been a gramaphone playing an ancient swing number. But that was a long time ago and for all I know that wench is dead.

That evening was like one of many. It was the beginning of another trip on a railway compartment, going back to the big city: Calcutta. I had travelled so often that I didnt even look out of the window. Somewhere in my subsconscious, the names of stations lit up for an instant, and then were lost again. The train rocked on, the clattering dying and falling, and coming on again like a capricious orchestra.

The sound of train returns like an insistent out-of-tune tom-tom hammering a prelude of its own. The beginning of countless mis-adventures, never knowing whether I am coming or going, reaching or leaving, or approaching the moment of crisis. I am always stranded in mid motion, the the middle of nowhere, in a vast subcontinent that knows no beginning or no end. So how shall I presume?

The train grinds to a halt. Its two in the morning. A nightmare perhaps. I clamber down from my perch on the topmost of the three tiered berths and make my way to the compartment door. Outside, lamps are swinging in the gloom and people are conversing through eerie whistles. An old railwayman comes along swinging his lantern and hitting the brakes on the huge wheels. Far away I can see traffic gleaming on what must be a road. Maybe the Grand Trunk Road. I drop down from the train and without a look back, walk towards the distant road. I had bought no ticket and had no luggage. I could go as I pleased.

The road was further away than I thought and it was a long trudge before I got there. Once there, found there was no traffic at all. Thankfully it was a warm night and I could breathe in the dewy air of the night. Breathing deeply and smoking, I fell asleep, only to wake up a few hours later soaked in dew and chilled to the bone. Dawn was breaking and it was the coolest time of the day. As I sat up, I saw next to me, another figure huddled on the ground. It was Dutta Kawle. I stood up, shocked at myself. I had completely forgotten him, the singular man who had turned up in my father's and my life after a gap of twenty years. Suddenly one morning there was Kawle, saluting my astounded father, back from the dead like Lazarus come back to tell the never written stories of the Indian Army in Burma. My father and Kawle had shared a few things, like the dead in a nameless cemetery 30 kilometres outside Rangoon. And here he was stretching and reminding me that we must get on - to Calcutta, the big city where money was waiting to be made. He had horrenduous business sense and felt he could make his fortune in the potato and onions business.

Life was strange and continues to be so in India. You serve in the Army, put in your best years, come back with a proud uniform but once you have strung it up, life is suddenly not so good. The pension after 23 years in the Army is not enough to keep you, your wife or children. Kawle's wife and children had drifted off to another man in his village. A grocer. Kawle's father was well to do and gave him money and said 'son you must start off again and do something worthwhile this time'. So Kawle came to my father, who had very few ideas left by this time and passed him on to me. I was a wanderer and unwittingly on a thoughtless moment had tied my destiny to poor Dutta Kawle.

The problem was simple: I had all the time in the world, I was young, whereas Kawle was in his fifties and obviously in a hurry to make something 'worthwhile' out of his life. I was absolutely the wrong man for him. I felt an enormous burden of guilt hanging over me, like the backpack Kawle must have worn on his long way from Imphal to Rangoon. I did my best to rush, but nature takes its own time and it was a while before I go could behind a bush. By that time, the sun was up and the road - Grand Trunk it was - was busy with trucks and local buses. We hitched a ride on the back of a truck carrying refrigerators packed in corrugated paper boxes. The boxes kept crashing against us and by afternoon we were exhausted. We got off at a dhaba (a wayside eating place traditionally run by Punjabis), ate, Kawle paid, and we stretched out on the comfortable string beds called charpoys.

It was dark when we awoke and nowhere near the big city. Kawle had disappeared. I smoked and thought about becoming something. The road stretched everywhere. I could travel back home, go up north west to Delhi or carry on towards Calcutta. The heavy thinking made me feel light headed after a while. What enormous freedom, I thought. The subcontinent was mine. It was a gigantic whim. I could chose wherever I wanted to go and become whatever I wanted to be. If I was caught up it was because I had some stupid agenda of my own. I looked up my mental diary and noted that the most important thing I had to do in Calcutta was to meet a friend who would be playing at Tollygunj Club on Saturday and needed me as bass guitarist. I felt I could handle rythm. Today was Friday and would it worth it breaking my back getting to Calcutta within the next 24 hours? Kawle returned, completely drunk. He had an uncanny sense of finding the nearest source of alcohol. Years of military training, no doubt.

I asked him whether we should proceed towards Calcutta. He told me that he would do as I ordered. He had followed my father to Rangoon and did not see any harm in following me to Calcutta. I reminded him that unlike his Burma sojourn this one was voluntary. He said in life nothing is voluntary. That was drifting into philosophy. It just did not mix with the environment where the only lights were those of uncertain hurricane lamps flickering inside the dhaba. I took a long stumbling walk through the fields, smoked quite a few cigarettes, then had an early dinner and fell asleep again on the wonderful charpoys. All night I had flatulence and nightmares. It was all part of timeless travel.

Part III: Thugs and Dust

Part I of Narrative