Amid Darkness

Sixty years is a relatively long time for a country’s independence, especially for a nation which has its heritage that is another 3000 years old. It is that India which witnessed two parallel steel tracks around the same time when industrialization was sweeping Britain during 1850s. In fact, Indian Railways has celebrated its 150 years about a couple of years ago with pomp and show. But my recent trip to Bolpur has changed all that — the journey took me to a dark age when mortal humans did not taste electricity.

It all started one Saturday evening when I took the 3071 Howrah-Jamaplur Express from the originating station. The train, with its composition of two AC coaches besides eight sleeper class coaches, links Calcutta with Jamalpur, a Bihar town known for its huge railway workshop. In its 478km journey every night it touches hundreds of towns and villages a part of the country known for its rural backwardness.

It was a chilly December night last year I boarded the compartment, a general second-class coach yet to get its seats cushioned as promised by Lalu Prasad during his ambitious budget plan in February. To my utter surprise, not a single light was there in the coach preoccupied by 13 persons altogether. It was 9.20pm, 25 minutes before the scheduled departure of the express, known for its impeccable punctuality to reach Bolpur by 12 midnight. I thought that the lights had not been switched on, as it’s a regular practice at Howrah, one of the busiest stations in the country. But to our dismay, even just before the train about to roll out of platform # 12, not a single technician came to switch the lights on. Moreover, the on-duty RPF and GRP personnel, who I approached for the problem, did not bother to look at it. The guard was also not an exception.

Hence started one of the "darkest chapters" of my numerous train journeys. No sooner had the industrial belt of Dankuni had been crossed by the train than we were taken to a world of blackout. When I was a child, I heard daily passengers on the Barasat-Hasnabad section of the Sealdah division used to carry filament bulbs in bags to fit them onto the empty holders of the Ichhamati Fast Passenger. The train was the finest on the route launched by A.B.A Ghani Khan Choudhary, the legendary railway minister, in the mid 1980s. The train, though a fast passenger, soon lost its glory, and by 1990/91, it was all shambles. Hundreds of commuters used to take the train in the morning to Calcutta and after a day’s work forked out bulbs from their bags to play cards over munching nuts! Their travail ended with taking out the bulbs from the holders using handkerchiefs! I have heard, and later seen also, how meticulously a passenger removed the bulb from its holder to leave his fellow passengers, especially those who were not commuters, to travel in darkness the entire evening.

That chilly December night, I was also thinking of a bulb, but to no avail!