Trains & Acid Rains

JUNE 2002 - Indians and Pakistanis may not be sharing much in common these days, but surely there is a common bonding between the two warring nations where trains are concerned. Both countries have a love-hate relationship with trains and while this is not going to be enough to bring them together, the shared experience – and most often this is a painful process, has certain fusing elements. There is a story about an Indian and a Texan riding a train in Texas. As the train catapults throw the unending Texan landscape, the Texan lights up a cigar, puffs out his chest, takes a loving look at the rolling vista and proclaims, ‘Well that’s Texas for you. You can travel for days and you are still in Texas.’ The Indian ponders for a moment, then shakes his head sadly. ‘We have the same problem with our trains,’ he laments.

Most of us, whose early childhood was ringed with train journeys that were milestones in our lives, pronounced the three divorces on the railways as service degenerated and trains lost all the charm they had. Journeys became tortuous, timings were notorious, no train was capable of leaving or arriving on time, compartments were filthy, run down and it was not possible to plan a safari to the bathroom and return alive. Ticket-less traveling was almost official railway policy, fans didn’t work and all the lights seemed to have permanent jaundice. Officials were absent and trains derailed faster than you could count. Ministers presided over monstrous accidents and while hundreds were killed, no one in position resigned. Things hit rock bottom years ago and the railway budget sounded like an enterprise that had gone belly up many times over and now lay quite, quite dead. The country’s railway stations, once genuinely equipped with creature comforts now represented a Sunday bazaar gone mad, with teeming and largely unwashed humanity streaming down crowded platforms between hundreds of beggars and cart sellers, balancing impossible amounts of loads with tin trucks armed with nuclear-tipped edges missing hundreds of foreheads. It was therefore not unusual to see people throwing in baggage through the doors and heaving their bodies through the windows. That was the scene just about at every railway station most days of the year. More or less, people other than those who had little choice, abandoned the railways.

Last week, as the cool, air-conditioned rail car rocked and rolled from Rawalpindi to Lahore, having left a little after its scheduled departure time – it was 4.31 pm when the train started to move, a minute off its mark – it was time to wonder if a miracle was in progress and trains were going through a period of amazing renaissance. Although the rail car took five and a quarter hours traveling the 176 odd miles between Rawalpindi and Lahore, it was at all times, comfortable, clean and enjoyable. Lost in Amitav Ghosh’s wonderful book, ‘The Glass Palace’, the miles and hours didn’t exactly fly by, but moved along at a pretty decent pace. Long before this enjoyable trip – and one tinged with the nostalgia of many journeys of years long gone, there was a buzz in Pakistan that under Lt.Gen. Qazi, the railways, while still groaning under staggering losses, was staging a miraculous comeback and there were actually people who had reveled in trips from Lahore to Karachi and were tempting others to give it a shot as well. I can only wonder if the same transformation is taking place across the border, beyond the threatening guns, ships and tanks. Admittedly the last thing the khakis can hope to grab in India is going to be the Indian Railways, but is there as enterprising a man as the good Qazi to spearhead an impossible revolution there? Who knows. If such a disaster as the railways here can stage a recovery – there is a long way to go admittedly, can one be blamed for thinking that the sub-continent’s severe problems can also be solved, if not today then at least in the nearby future?

I pondered over the question as we sped through the Punjab – we have one same as the Indians and between the book and gazing through the tinted glass window, Pakistan’s poverty and squalor rolled along, mile after mile, broken only when the train swept through agricultural lands or the three full rivers. By and large, almost all of the 176 miles is a sight to drive despair into the most optimistic heart. Shanty towns, overflowing gutters and sewage darker and blacker than the hearts of those who have abused precious national resources either to pocket it or waste on strategies that have mired both countries deeper into debt and misery. Children ran through the most deplorable cesspools that were their playgrounds, indolent cattle lay prone in ponds that cannot be described, men sat on haunches staring vacantly into space contemplating their meager existence and plastic bags played havoc with everything – like leeches stuck to every branch, every bush, every wire, every fence – and elsewhere, spread like a graying hailstorm of filth. There was not a single gutter for almost 200 miles that was not choked. It was clear that these were the backwaters and essays of civil neglect that now fester like sores everywhere you look on the sub-continent. The failure of both countries to do something tangible and lasting for the good of the maximum number of their subjects, haunts like a bad dream. This is failure of the highest quality and neither people deserve it. If there is one life, this is not the way the good lord intended it to be lived, but what can the disenfranchised do? They really have no voice in the settling of their affairs or in the fulfilling of their most modest dreams. They live out their lives in squalor, patiently absorbing the rhetoric of their chosen - and in Pakistan, many times not chosen leaders, who promise them the moon and give them a kick.

The last month has been an edgy and agonizing month, again both sides of the divide. While our leaders have burnt millions of rupees taking up threatening and menacing positions and played havoc with the thin notion of peace, there is little doubt that we have regressed even further back. The nuclear rooster dance played by both sides is shameful – two monkeys armed with nuclear razors as my friend Ayaz Amir put it so wonderfully, is a poor testimony to the great sages who live on either side and in whose hands our destinies reside uneasily. What worse example of irresponsibility can one find than the one demonstrated by both sides in the charged and heated days of May? We have come this close to a war and while both leaderships maintain that they would not be so irresponsible, who can guarantee that this would indeed remain so? It is heart breaking to learn that 60 million Pakistanis now live below the poverty line but who can call that living? The position in India is probably worse. Our beggars may not be renting pavements to sleep on, but is that the yardstick by which we will judge our lives? It is foolish to expect leaders who have almost always been compromised for their vested interests to do nothing for the common people and it is useless to expect visionary policies to flow from their jaundiced eyes – the only hope between our two countries resides in a full and meaningful exchange between the ordinary people so that the walls of hate can be conquered and common people can start living with peace, dignity and prosperity. Nothing else will ever work.