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

by Bishwanath Ghosh

Duties can be taught but not the responsibilities. —Station Manager, Guntakal

My city, once known as the Manchester of the East, has plenty of skeletons as souvenirs from its glorious past—mills built on acres and acres of land that are locked up behind formidable boundary walls.

During the past decade, however, the demandridden press release died a quiet death. No one knows when exactly it died, but it breathed its last one fine morning when people woke up to swanky malls and to the ‘imported’ brands that were out of their reach all this while.

Jawaharlal Nehru would never have imagined that his socialist dream would turn out to be a nightmare for lakhs of workers across the country in less than three decades of his death.

Someone would own the bat, someone would contribute the ball, and someone else would bring the stumps. Pads and gloves were a luxury and largely unnecessary. The umpiring would be done by someone who had done with batting for the day, even though his decisions would often be overruled by the ‘third umpire’—one of the neighbourhood ‘uncles’ closely following the game standing at the gate of his house.

I would have been swept aside by an army of workers rushing out to have lunch. But right now, I could only see powerless ghosts of those workers dancing around me.

Precisely at that point, a strong hand gripped Venkat’s wrist. ‘Seventy rupees? An autorickshaw driver in Guntakal getting seventy rupees?’ the owner of that strong hand cried in amazement.

Presumption and conclusion are two railway stations that are miles apart. Yet there are times when we get down at one while mistaking it for the other. The blunder dawns upon us only after the train has left.

It was clear that the manager who, given his girth and landlordly aggression, was probably the owner as well, considered his guests no better than cattle.

I had things to do, such as go out and talk to people and look for stories, and also visit the naval base, which boasts of an airstrip that is supposed to be one of the longest in the world.

At five hundred rupees for barely an hour, this turned out to be my costliest hotel stay ever.

On one of the walls hung a picture of Sonia Gandhi meeting a group of politicians from Tamil Nadu. The picture was taken in 1992, according to the date recorded by the camera, which meant it was less than a year after she was widowed.

‘Alcohol not allowed.’ Such cautionary signs often mean the opposite. Needless to say, the first thing I did upon checking into the room was to send the boy for whisky and dinner.

drank my whisky, ate parathas and omelette for dinner and fell asleep watching a documentary on the National Geographic Channel about the war in Iraq.

Being almost equidistant from Chennai and Bangalore, Yelagiri is an ideal weekend getaway—a barely-three-hours’ drive from either of the cities.

Climbing down the stairs, however, I was stopped by an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between a monkey and a dog. The monkey was perched on the handrail while the dog had taken position on the stairs. The monkey knew the dog wouldn’t be able even to touch him, yet he stayed put on the handrail, daring the dog to make the first move. The dog stayed where he was, on high alert, waiting for the monkey to take the initiative. Neither took the risk.

The monkey, having won the battle, leaped on to the asbestos roof of a wagon depot whose signboard proudly proclaimed ‘We are marching towards ISO 14000’—an enviable standard in quality control.

A large crowd had gathered on the road: the people were all sombrely looking towards a particular house whose compound was also packed with grave-faced people.

At the restaurant, my companions were two Tamilians who sat on the table next to me. They were having an argument that was so heated that the food on their table was lying ignored for a long time.

As a town, it sustains itself because of the railway junction and because of its proximity to the townships of Thirupathur, famous for sandalwood craft, and Vaniyambadi and Ambur, both famous for tanneries whose products adorn innumerable pairs of feet in Rome and elsewhere in Europe.

For residents of Jolarpettai, these prosperous towns are what Bombay would be to a Bhopali.

Chennai or Bangalore, for them, would be the equiva...

The drive reminded me of going to Chamundi Hills from Mysore: it takes hardly twenty minutes to get there and hundreds drive up every day to pray to goddess Chamundi. Yet no one is under the illusion that he or she is driving up to the level of a hill station, even though you get a bird’s-eye view of royal Mysore from the top, just like Yelagiri now offered a view of Vaniyambadi, the footwear township.

it was more like a leafy neighbourhood of Chennai that had been, by some geological miracle, lifted a few hundred feet off the sea level.

But is that also not an invitation that says, ‘Please come and ruin us, like you did Ooty and Kodaikanal’?

I roamed the platforms for a while and then walked into the station master’s office. He and a guard were bending over a table on which rested files and clipboards stacked with sheets of paper. I introduced myself and told them the purpose of my visit.

I can get drunk on Black Label anytime, anywhere; but the pleasure of digging into the pulp of a wood apple belongs to the innocent era that is never going to return—my childhood days, when vendors waited with their carts outside the school gates selling tangy stuff that was frowned upon by the nuns and parents alike.

considering that one in every six Malayalis sees a poet when he looks into the mirror every morning, the number of words written in celebration of the Bharathapuzha would far, far outnumber those written in tribute to the Ganga.

Considering that it was an alcohol-related trip for him, he could have asked for even eighty or a hundred and I would have paid him.

But this was God’s own country where the autorickshaw drivers are an honest lot, irrespective of the god they follow.

He was the perfect elderly gentleman—Kerala’s version of the Bengali bhadralok—extremely soft-spoken and courteous. It was like your father and his friend visiting you in the hostel.

At that time, some seventyfive years ago, there were more than 3,000 railway employees in this town. There was a loco shed. Smallscale industries grew in the town. Shoranur was famous for cutlery and agricultural implements. But now everything is lost. The loco shed is now in Erode, and Palghat has become a divisional office. The importance of Shoranur has gone down.

At least twenty trains don’t touch Shoranur station any more. It is such a tragedy.’

Mr Sankarankutty blamed ‘influential politicians’ from Tamil Nadu for usurping the important role played by the Shoranur junction and getting them assigned to Erode, a textile town in Tamil Nadu not far from Shoranur.

I was once again overcome by embarrassment that I had actually offered a drink to a retired deputy director of education, that too at 10.30 in the morning.