Chai, Chai: Travels in Places Where You Stop But Never Get Off

by Bishwanath Ghosh

The story here is that the railways are not just a means of transport, but the circulatory system of India. No railways, no India. We all know that, don’t we?

Gorakhpur–Trivandrum Express, connects the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean.

five-hundred- years-old Grand Trunk Road—the lifeline of India, the highway of the

I tried imagining how the place must have looked when Sher Shah Suri, the Bihar-born Afghan warrior–administrator who had displaced Mughal emperor Humayun from his throne for fifteen long years, was laying it in the sixteenth century.

In states like Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh,

Deen Dayal Upadhyay, who is revered by the Bharatiya Janata Party just as Mahatma Gandhi is revered by the Congress party, was found murdered in the railway yard of Mughal Sarai

Even the simplest of lives must have a routine. Or maybe, it is the routine that makes lives simple.

It is a different matter that Laxmibai did not fight for India because there was no India then. But

might not recognise everybody, but everybody recognises me Such is my destiny that I am always on the road.

rhymes even when translated: Your life is all about biscuits and cake, Our life is all about steering and brake.

I could have spent the rest of my day there, if only someone had brought me a charpoy and a book and maybe the lunch that farmers eat when they are out on the fields. I have always been curious about a farmer’s meal, but I think I know what he eats: five or six rotis with a little daal and a peeled, full-sized onion. Or maybe just the rotis and the onion, when he is very poor. When you are toiling in the fields from dawn to dusk, you earn a meal instead of being entitled to it,

‘Thirty-two years, not fifteen,’ I reminded him, unable to hold myself back because I too shared the pride. We both belonged to the Sholay generation.

But Dhyanchand, in spite of the larger-than-life statue in Jhansi, is neither relevant nor remembered in present-day, cricket-crazy India.

It not only tells you how these stars became successful but also has addresses

“Rule no. 1: The boss is always right. Rule no.

2: When in doubt, refer to rule no. 1.”

Jahangir Mahal was no less precious than the Taj Mahal,

The plaque placed right after the entrance informed that there used to be fifty-five temples several centuries ago, ‘but now around twenty-five stand in varying stages of preservation.’

In the early-morning silence, the countless figures on its walls almost spoke.

Within a matter of seconds I had half a dozen world-class pictures

showing me posing against world-renowned depictions of sex.

It was the young gardener again.

‘When you enter the home of God, you should get rid of all worldly distractions—that’s the message of the Khajuraho temples.’

‘Lust converts to love, love converts to devotion, devotion converts to spirituality, spirituality converts

to super conscio...

‘Don’t look at them in a dirty way. They are works of art.’ One of the men said in mock shock, ‘Magar yeh to ghode ko chep raha hai!’—But he is doing the horse! The woman mock-punched him and they moved on.

That was some food for thought.

Needless to say, I stopped at the samosa shop and had a couple of pieces: I had been overcome by the collective greed of the crowd.

Promising myself that I would not be tempted by roadside food for the rest of the evening, I resumed my walk.

Happiness Hair Works.

On an evening like this, the middle-class Indian family

either makes pakodas at home or gets them packed from the trusted neighbourhood vendor. I was pretty much sure that one such vendor would be around down the road, or else it would be an insult to a town which was still so Indian in character.

They were all asking for

magodas, that is pakodas made out of moong daal, the ideal accompaniment with tea on an evening such as this.

There are people like me who indulge in street food not only because they like it but also, somewhere in their subconscious, to take revenge on parents and elders who had kept them away from it during childhood by scaring them with words like...

If you went by his soiled clothes, you could mistake him for a beggar and never touch a thing he has dipped his fingers into. But if you went by the devotion of his customers, he was an artist who was too engrossed in his work to notice the batter and the oil staining his shirt.

I asked him to be generous with the mint chutney when he handed me a plate of magodas.

Eventually, they both agreed that technology was doing great things to their lives and they moved on after paying a collective bill of fourteen rupees.

Had she been around, it would have made immense sense to sit in one of the curtained cubicles, where one could savour the deadly cocktail of a curvaceous body and a corrupt mind.

The caption said, ‘MD at 36.’ Everything else in

the hall belonged to the era when only grey-haired elderly men were fit to be MDs, or managing directors, when career was a path that took its own mysterious course and not a ladder that had to be climbed with aggression.

While having my first drink, I found the man on the poster to be mocking me. He was drinking Signature whisky, so was I. He was thirty-six, so was I. But he was an MD, who was being poured a drink by a smiling stewardess on the plane, while I was an ordinar...

was nice to me only because he ex...

After I started on my second drink, I began to pity him: what a wretched life he led, plane-hopping from one place to another to meet business targets. Was he really savouring the drink he was advertising, conside...

Drinking behind a curtain perhaps gave the occupants a sense of exclusivity and importance.

And over here, the curtain also served another purpose: every now and then, one of the occupants would pull it in to wipe his oily fingers.

With a quarter-bottle of whisky and some bread and omelette, I threw a one-man party in a town that derives its name from inta (bricks) and rassi (rope)—the two things that used to be traded in Itarsi.

Right now it was fascination that was powering me as I made my way through a multitude of sleeping people and several dogs and a few cows to buy a platform ticket.

Soon the familiar voice of the woman announced that the train from Amritsar to Nanded would be arriving shortly, and within a matter of minutes, a trolley appeared from nowhere: one man began to furiously roll out small balls of dough, while another put some oil to boil on one burner and on another burner started reheating the chholey.

In the morning, Jeevan Lal, who had taken over from the previous evening’s caretaker, brought me tea and a breakfast of poha and jalebis. I asked him if he knew any engine driver—someone who