:: Kishwar Desai

Royally sidetracked

Kishwar Desai

Augest.01 : Dear Mamata Banerjee, goddess of Hawai chappals and the simple home spun cotton sari. O! Deity-minister of Indian Railways, with your shining coconut oil-soaked locks and the fierce ability to say ta-ta to many nano moments in our country’s life… O! Wonderful, bountiful, kind and marvellous Bengali, conjurer of Kolkata bandhs, how I wish you would turn your benign fancies towards distant Punjab, far away from the Utpal Dutt Railway Station and Howrah Bridge. What will it take, O! supreme ruler of the railways, to pull your attention towards the woes of the Punjabi traveller… How can we ever interest you in our plight? What offerings of mishti doi and rosogullas can ever convince you that the hardy Punjabis are as needy and desirous of comfort as are no doubt the more delicate and intellectual Bengalis? Just because we have fought invading armies and live a rough and ready existence as agriculturists does it mean we should be left to the mercy of erratic railway systems and pervasive inefficiency?

O! Mamata, I really wish you had been with us this week when we stood for hours on a filthy station in Jalandhar waiting for the Swarn Shatabdi. The so-called celebration of the Golden Centenary of Indian Railways was so late that even the announcers at the railway station had forgotten it was ever meant to arrive. Their silence was even more golden than the Shatabdi was ever meant to be.

O! Mamata, I wish your pristine Hawai chappal-clad feet would one day wander into Jalandhar station which is a morass of every accumulated bit of garbage that human beings have been known to produce. Not only that, there are only two ways to get there — one is through a bazar so crowded that you often lose track of where your head is in relationship to the rest of your body. The other, under a bridge, is through a broken road, but was drowned in the one day that it rained in Jalandhar.

Once inside the railway station, it reeks of freshly deposited urine and other wastes that I am too polite to mention. O! Mamata, I wish you could come and inhale the delicate aromas. You may smell some of that in Parliament — but nothing like the flavour you experience in Jalandhar.

And then, O! Mamata, if only you could lift your delicate ankles over the staircase that joins platforms 1 and 2: the sheer challenge of it has disabled many — but then fortunately they can join the large number of beggars who roam free and unfettered in the area. The better way is, of course, to just hop down and cross the railway tracks as most people do regardless of approaching trains. Does anyone stop them? No, O! Mamata — because this is a free country and you, more than anyone else, appreciate the freedom of choice we have, to choose whatever path we want for our development. And then, if you actually manage to reach the other side of the station alive, O! Mamata, you discover the one shining, brand new, sleek example of modern architecture — a sturdy example of progressive thinking, an island of beauty in a sea of filth. It is a gleaming marble monument to which lists of passengers are attached. Yes, O! Mamata — what a terrific example of pure genius it is, words fail me. People come from miles around to gaze upon this one gleaming structure in a uniformly dirty environment. In a station which requires basic cleanliness, seats, toilets — your ministry has imaginatively constructed a large six-foot-high edifice on which they hang (get this, O! Mamata, this is so clever!) from paper clips the lists of passengers travelling on the trains that pass through Jalandhar. I think I object mostly to the fact that the paper clips were rusty, O! Mamata. Shame! They should have been cast in platinum to match the sheen of the rest of the monument.

But do the trains actually pass through the station? This week, O! Mamata, we were told the Golden Centenary was going to be on time. But O! Mamata, it came at least 99 years too late. Exhausted and barely breathing, when we climbed onto the Golden Centenary, we discovered that the gentle aromatic whiff of freshly passed urine had entered the executive class cabins as well. It was a perfume that accompanied us all the way to Delhi. And then, O! Mamata, the toilets themselves, with their filthy sinks and other unmentionables. I think your wonderfully iconic Hawai chappals definitely need to tread this way.

And then O! Mamata the menu! What imagination! What a marvel of expertise — in this day of the enlightened calorie conscious — you have hired the one person who is marvellously free from any such bias or prejudice. You have to be complimented on this — how did you find this person or organisation? It must have taken many hours of hard work — and much advertising in the media. How else did you ferret out the individual/s who could combine in one meal an oil-soaked kachori, a mithai, a chocolate and dried fruit? Fantastic! The combined calories of that one tea-time "snack" would have boggled the imagination of the most devoted foodie. Most of us went into sugar shock, after which we were served a Chinese meal with yoghurt and pickles to calm us down. O! Mamata, please do drift this way as the Golden Centenary is worth a visit.

And then O! Mamata — have you visited the New Delhi Railway Station at night? O dear, Mamata, the worst fiends of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) would look like angels with halos compared to the peculiar set of people you encounter here. That is, if you can ever manage to find your way out of the station. O! Mamata — unlike the Jalandhar railway station which had bright and cheerful signs all pointing in the wrong direction — at the New Delhi Railway Station, we found none when we got off the train.

As we stumbled from pothole to pothole, knocking into luggage and people, harassed by taxi drivers and touts — we finally emerged into a narrow alley, one part of which was blocked off so that we all had to be squeezed against each other. O! Mamata, I know you love the aam aadmi, but I have to say this entire experience that you have created for us is too much. I would like some distance between us aam aadmis and aurats, please.

And then when you finally struggle out, beaten and broken — there is complete darkness! It takes longer to actually leave the station than it takes to travel between Jalandhar and Delhi. O! Mamata, you were so untiring in your efforts to bond with the masses in your recently delivered budget. I now invite you and your Hawai chappals onto a real train, O! Mamata — not just the gravy train to the Lok Sabha. Try it, sometime. Especially the Golden Centenary.

Kishwar Desai’s novel Witness the Night, to be published in January 2010, is on the longlist for the Man Asian Literary Prize, 2009. She can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com