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

by Bishwanath Ghosh

drove steam locomotives and who would have stories to tell from that era.

The panic-stricken family then took her to a village called Lasuria, where priests at the local Hanuman temple are known to cure victims of snake-bite by chanting mantras.

The priest, who was convinced that she had been taken over by the spirit of a snake, used his powers and entered into a public conversation with the spirit.

(Khelan, the repentant husband, promptly makes a public promise that he would never touch alcohol or nonvegetarian food again.)

‘Two meals? Okay. Coach number? S6? Okay. Seat numbers? 41 and 42? Okay. Please stay in your seats. The food will reach you.’

I feel that Hari (God) is watching every work that we do for Harijans.

The power that brings lakhs of people together will one day lift the veil over falsehood. As long as we do not falter, it is as good as taking a dip in the Ganga.

This quality of yours reflects in your letters every now and then, and no wonder you are always concerned about the well-being of all of us.

He talked about pumps and injectors and pressure gauges, all of which was Greek to me, but the eagerness with which he was explaining made him very endearing.

I asked him how the place looked like back then—whichever point his memory could go back to. To my surprise, it went back to the days of the Second World War. ‘There was a war going on against Germans, and military specials would keep coming to the railway station. We were small then. Those days, no one could loiter around the station. There were British officers all over the place and they were very strict. We would always hear them saying, “Buck up! Buck up!” Their women were very kind. Whenever they saw Indian children, they would stuff their palms with chocolates,’ he said.

Mathura Prasad remembered the date he joined the railways, 1 February 1964, on a monthly salary of forty rupees. He said even though salaries were low those days, it was more than compensated by ‘sachchai’ and ‘imaandaari’—truthfulness and honesty.

Looking closely at Mathura Prasad’s withering face, one would believe he had led a hard life due to ...

(hamlet).

Whenever a beggar or a poor man showed up, the shopkeeper would roll a piece of paper into a cone and hand him a generous quantity of phutaaney.

He has got two first-class passes, one for himself and one for an attendant. So he keeps going to places of pilgrimage, sometime to Banaras, sometimes to Dwarka, sometimes to Mathura. He can afford to. He

The thing is, everybody wants to live a good life these days. As a result, they spend more than what they earn and then run into huge debts.

The other day, a railway employee was walking back home when he found a snake. He was so drunk that he caught the snake and said, “Tonight this snake will sleep with me.” Next morning, he was found dead on his bed. He had died due to snake-bite.

Amandeep’s description of Manju was more titillating than informative, and I asked him if there was any chance of her coming over now so that we could have a chat.

You won’t believe how fascinated I was by the whole thing. I told him I also wanted to become a journalist. He asked me, “Beta, are you serious?” I told him yes. He wrote a letter to the owner and asked me to go and see him.’

‘I took English tuitions for ten years. I was crazy about mastering the language. Even when I got married, in 1990, I would go for the tuitions on my bicycle every morning at six. Even during the winters,’

‘He went to Bombay to try his luck in films. He even managed to get a break in a film, and I am told he spent fifty lakh rupees from his own pocket on the making of that film. But when the film was released, he discovered that he had only five minutes of role in it. Moreover, it flopped.

When you take a train, rarely do you realise that it takes an army of several hundred engineers and technicians to keep its engine in running condition.

But what I enjoyed most was the ride to these yards—passing through kilometres of open space whose monotony was broken, every now and then, by the oldfashioned, single-storey quarters of the railway employees. They might be living in an island where there are no malls or supermarkets, but all of them have a tiny garden and an ample backyard. More importantly, they all breathe clean air.

it was going to Bombay, the city where one went to pursue starry dreams and where such dreams, more often than not, came true provided you knew how to make a cocktail out of luck and labour.

If you have been a regular traveller between, say, Bombay and Chennai during the era when air travel wasn’t so cheap, the longish break at Guntakal junction is bound to be part of your personal folklore.

Coming back to the journey: The train had now picked up speed and hills started appearing on the horizon. But before you could fix your gaze on them, the hills would be gone suddenly and replaced by lush green fields.

He is always inaccessible to his readers and is busy collecting material in a faraway, godforsaken land which you might never visit in your lifetime except through his books.

He is not the one you would like to be face-to-face with: if you see him in real, you could end up looking for flaws in his personality that might take away from the flawlessness of his prose. Gods are best unseen.

In exactly thirty minutes the train approached a station which identified itself as Gooty Junction. If Ootacamund is Ooty, then Guntakal must be Gooty, I reasoned.

In fact, I was beginning to panic. It is not funny when, in a town where you don’t know a soul, hotel after hotel turns you away saying they don’t have rooms.

But then, south India is a different planet, in every way.

In the north, for example, you are unlikely to find stationery shops selling posters of Amitabh Bachchan or Shah Rukh Khan. They sell them on the pavements, but not in proper stationery shops where such posters, considering that cinema is always thought to be distracting and corrupting young minds, would be completely out of sync with the textbooks and notebooks and pens and pencils. But here, they proudly displayed posters of Telugu cine icons such as Mahesh Babu, Chiranjeevi, N.T. Rama Rao, and Arjun—an actor who has been accorded the title of ‘Action King’ by his Tamil fans.

is in Kurnool district, just a few hours from here. It is a second Bombay. Only millionaires live there. If you go there, you won’t feel like coming back. You want to go there? I will take you. Just a few hours’ drive,’ he said.

The nearest airport was Puttaparthi, the home of Sathya Sai Baba, one hundred and twenty kilometres away.

But then I realised that he only wanted to satisfy his curiosity about the kind of money people made in big cities. He would never ask this question to his employer or the people he drives around, but now that we were sharing the table and having a drink together, he decided to take the liberty, especially since we were talking about money.

In that heat, impoverished hawkers sat by the road, selling limestone chips; while shopkeepers sat glumly at the counters of the deserted shops, reading the newspaper and hoping that a customer would show up sooner than later.

I asked to be taken to the dargah of Syed Mastaan Ali Baba.

One of the easiest things in this world is to strike a friendship with a driver in an Indian town. It may not be always easy in the big cities, where they would have, as the saying goes, seen hundreds like you. But in small towns, a friendship can be forged within moments.

But in small towns, a friendship can be forged within moments. All you need to ask is his name and where he hails from and if he is married. You’ll get enough material to write a novella. If you listen to his story patiently and make sympathetic noises wherever required, you’ve earned his loyalty.

If you listen to his story patiently and make sympathetic noises wherever required, y...

The dargah was deserted when we arrived. There was, of course, the small, customary band of alms-seekers at the entrance. I ignored them and we walked through an empty courtyard to the tomb of Syed Mastaan Ali Baba. This was one of the most peaceful places I had ever come across: one could only hear the chirping of birds, perched on the tall trees that shaded the dargah.

From what I learned from him, the dargah was 372 years old, and more Hindus visited it than Muslims—from childless couples to people whose businesses were not doing well.

They come from Cuddapah, Nandyal, Kurnool, Bombay, Hyderabad, Bangalore, even your Chennai,’ he said.

Sleepers are the rectangular concrete plates on which rail tracks are perpendicularly placed—something I did not know till then due to my ignorance.

Guntakal, being a hub of the railways, manufactured sleepers till recently but the factory had now closed down.

‘There is no achievement without goles.’

For long we kept driving into nothingness, to the point that I began to lose my patience and wondered if Venkat was deliberately taking a circuitous route.

held the bottle against the light and took a close look: there were tiny particles floating in it. I had been conned, right inside a temple.

Back in the lodge, I paid Venkat one hundred and fifty rupees and we exchanged phone numbers. He was extremely pleased. I went up to my room and ordered an Andhra meal for lunch.

Andhra meals are famous for their portions: one meal can easily be shared between two gluttons or four diet conscious people.