The Train To Pakistan, 2004

Continued from PartI

The special train no. 4001 (Delhi-Attari) will depart from Delhi Jn. on every Wednesday and Sunday at9.00 p.m. to reach Attari at 4.40 a.m. the next day of its departure. In return direction the special trainno. 4002 will run from Attari station from 15.1.2004 on every Thursday and Monday at 8.05 p.m. to reach DelhiJn. at 3.35 a.m. the next day of its departure.

The 4607Attari-Lahore Samjhota Express will depart from Attari at 1.30 p.m. on every Thursday and Mondayfrom 15-1-2004. In the return direction the 4608 Lahore-Attari Samjhota Express will depart from Lahore at8.00 a.m. on every Thursday and Monday from 15-1-2004 to and reach Attari at 12.30 p.m.

The Attari special Express train will have four second sleeper class, ten general second class and twobrake vans coaches and the Samjhota Express will have one second sleeper, seven general second class and twoluggage van coaches.  

--Indian Railway (IR) and Pakistani Railway (PR) joint announcement, recalled from memory, apparently non-fiction.

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Midnight 14th/15th April'04
PROLOGUE
Do you love trains too? I can never sleep on them. When I was young, andgrowing up in this ye olde relic of the Raj railway (Eastern Railway) town of Jamalpur, we would manageto ride on foot-plates. Memorising time-tables was the equivalent of an addictive video game for us then.My dear friend Deepak Banerjee can, till today, have long and insightful arguments about the subjectas well as about our respective ancestors--and their sexual mores--with me, and we both enjoy them as much aswe do our Old Monk and fresh lime. 

There is more than one route by train from Delhi to Amritsar. 

SENTIMENTS
The old Frontier Mail, which used to go all the way from the Frontier, now way inside Pakistan, to Bombay,now renamed Golden Temple Express, crosses the Yamuna River at Delhi, heads for Saharanpur/Jagadhri throughWestern U.P., crosses the Yamuna again at, where else, Yamuna Nagar, then joins the Calcutta-MoradabadNorthern line to re-connect at Ambala. Other trains break off from Delhi to go via Rohtak, Jind, Dhuri, toconnect back at Ludhiana. All of Indian Punjab has this spider's web of train tracks and good roads whichmakes for fascinating rail-spotting and route planning. 

The pre-Partition optional route through Bhatinda-Faridkot and Firozpur loses its old connection at theinternational border on to Amritsar via Khem Karan thanks to the Hussainiwala chicken-neck of Pakistansticking into India. The fastest route, rail and road, which we are swishing on, is alongthe old Grand Trunk Road/Sher Shah Suri Marg axis. The Delhi-Attari/Wagah train is not permitted bybilateral treaty to stop anywhere in Punjab, so after a technical halt at Ambala (Haryana), it is non-stop forthe next 300 kms or so along one of the busiest tracks in the country. 

Domestic civil aviation never really took off in Indian Punjab in spite of there being more than a dozenairports available. On the other hand, Amritsar has far more flight connections to countries "phoren"--asdiverse as Afghanistan, Central Asia, Persian Gulf and UK/Europe--than domestic. 

RECENT PAST

The rail tracks on this route are of the new high-speed "long welded" kind, so there ishardly any of the usual clackety-clack for minutes at a time, except when approaching or departing waystations. Delhi-Panipat-Karnal-Kurukshetra-ShahbadMarkanda-Ambala-Rajpura-Sirhind-Ludhiana-Jullundur-Beas-Amritsar is about six hours by the fast fullyair-con Shatabdi Express. But the more down to earth international train we are on has open windows withhigher drag, configured with basic second class sleeper and general carriages, so we shall take about eighthours including the extra hour or so for the last bit, Amritsar to Attari.  

There was an interesting article recently about how an over one century old bridge on this route wasbeing repaired. With wooden beams used for scantling and keeping the bricks in position after grouting. 

THE JOURNEY
2300, 14th April, 2004
A three-tier sleeper carriage has 76 berths. Each "compartment" has a group ofeight berths, two along the side running fore-and-aft and three each in the middle aligned facing eachother. Raghu and I are lucky enough to bag the side seats in our 8-some, and he is fast asleep on theupper berth. 

Of the other six berths, two are occupied by an elderly Ismaili couple from Lahore, returning after vestingrelatives in Mumbai. They have been in the business of bridal wear in Lahore for decades now, but to hear themspeak, it would appear as though they have not moved out of Bandra (East). Sweet and contented, bird-likelady; sharp pointed-beard gentleman smoking Marlboro Lights. 

Across them are four Hindus from a larger contingent bearing eternal allegiance to the Sheikh Sarai/PanchsheelColony Laughter Club, headed for the third Cricket Test at Pindi like us: two elderly gentlemen and amiddle-aged couple. The elderly men are being referred to as "Swami" by the others, but that onlymeans that they get their whisky served, and in turn keep offering some to the Ismaili gent, who keepsdeclining till his wife falls asleep, whereupon he astounds all of us with his speed and capacity. 

In the compartment on one side are eight young people from a loud and noisy extended Muslimfamily from Delhi going to Pakistan to meet up with family but travelling on cricket visas. The youngmen are all in extremely tight trousers with body hugging tee-shirts and the young ladies are not ofthe shy retiring type at all either. They are providing the rest of us with antakshri entertainmentwhich goes haywire more every now than then. 

The compartment on the other side has Bunty, Shunty, Tinkoo and Pinky getting rapidly wasted in dark andefficient silence, and some other random people who have been sleeping ever since they boarded.

This is one contented train whistling North. Even the variety of cops who pass through every now andthen smile indulgently. I stroll around the vestibuled train: plenty of space available. 

0100, 15th April, 2004

Mushtaq is a Punjabi Pakistani journalist with an Urdu newspaper and a worldview,returning after a few weeks in India as part of a sponsored group. We have made polite conversation, but thenretreated into our own worlds. He is from Multan and seems to smoke a lot.  He is sitting quietly on hiswindow seat as I walk across to point out the 24x7 industrial area for Ludhiana, Dhandari Kalan, where Ihave worked in the past at the Inland Container Depot.  

Suddenly, with that metal-on-metal sound and oscillating sway signalling a rapid drop in speed so belovedto those of us who grew up with gentler steam but fell in love with the abruptness of newer technologies,the diesel train slows down outside Ludhiana. This is where Mushtaq's father had migrated from decades ago,and he is visibly emotional as the train grinds to a sudden halt bang on the main platform, where itsays Ludhiana in English, Hindi, Gurumukhi and Urdu, black lettering on yellow board illuminated by evenyellower sodium vapour lamps. 

The policemen on duty seem to be prepared for this, as they have cleared the area of the usualnight-vendors and accompanying railway noises. It is simply ghostly as official type people watch thistrain and the few souls awake inside watch them back in return. Nobody knows why we have stopped and by nowother people are making waking-up noises all across the train. 

A three-star Punjab Police Inspector ambles past with his walkie-talkie on high static and low RFcontrol, supplemented by a retinue of followers. I signal him with an amount of respect I am unawarethat I can summon, identify myself as an Indian from Delhi, and ask him in my best Queen's English if aPakistani on board who has ancestors from Ludhiana can just step on the platform for a few seconds. Somethinghappens to this tough cop, and Mushtaq gets his few moments in life of connecting back. His subsequentemotions are too private to be reproduced here. Spring high-tide water marks in life are made of thesefleeting moments that we can grab through coincidence and other good people.Mushtaq's grandfather was one ofthe few male members of his family to get out alive during the 1947 bloodbaths. He has heard tales that someof the rest converted and stayed back. 

0100-0430 15th April, 2004
Some of the most affluent parts of India on display, the vibrancy and wealth bothagricultural and industrial, pass us by in the course of the night on this route. Smells vary a lothere, from clear wet mud to trees to molasses to drains to sugar factories to fields to chemicals to fuel dumpvapours to dust to city pollution. 

The satsangis at Beas obviously wake up early, we can see lights on when we pelt pastaround 0315. Likewise, Amritsar is also awake and bustling when we cross at about 0345. It isbreaking dawn at about 0445 in the morning, and most of the train is fast asleep, when we quite suddenlyroll on to Platform 2 of Attari International Station. 

There are these infernal mynahs--who seem to roost in their thousands under the steel roof of thestation--making an end-of-the-world-is-nigh kind of racket. That, and the railway guards walking past thetrain, banging on windows with their night sticks, has all of us out as the IR rake is inspected andreadied to move out to the idle line. 

Where the devil are we? 

All we can see are rows upon rows of unmanned immigration cabins and customs counters, with not a soul onthe station except other passengers. 

0430-0830 15th April, 2004
Pakoda and chole-puri vendors appear, so do flies. The toilet on the North end of the platformgets clogged up fairly rapidly and the fetid odour mixes with the stench of stale food being re-fried. We findanother set of toilets at the Southern end of the platform, available for the business of selectedusers for a small consideration to the railway staff hanging around. 

Bathe and change, motivate the railway stalls to rustle up some very decent omelettes with fresh parathas,and passable tea. Wait for the Customs and Immigration staff to appear. And wait. And fill forms forilliterate travellers. And wait. And fill more forms for more illiterate travellers. There is morebird-shit on this platform than on any other platform in all of Indian Punjab. There are more flies on thisplatform than on any other platform in Punjab and its territories anywhere, including all of England, the BayArea and Seattle/British Columbia. 

0830-2230 15th April, 2004
Work starts. Khaki and blue uniforms abound. At the immigration counter, all of us Indians with cricket visasissued on the 12th of April run into a technical flaw - seems that the operative word with thePakistani visa is that we were supposed to enter Pakistan within three days of issue, date of issue included. But, then, there is the small detail that there was no other train after the 12th. 

We are asked to stand aside. 

The number of people asked to stand aside grows. Worrisome. A while later, consultations with a higherauthority somewhere having taken place obviously, we are told that the Indian authorities at Attari have noproblems letting us go, but if the Pakistanis don't let us in, and keep us at Wagah, then we should not blamethe Indians as the next train back is only after 4 days, on Monday the 19th. 

No, we can not return by road or "foot crossing". The bilateral treaty prohibits changing themode of crossing. Customs is also fairly painless, here again, partly because of our middle-classeducated appearance, partly because all that most of us cricket visa sorts are carrying is clothes and a fewgifts, and mostly because the travellers with goods in commercial quantities that the Customs are reallyafter are easy to spot, thanks to their huge sacks. 

Those are the people who are held back for negotiations. It is very interesting to see these"negotiations", carried out loudly in the open and without any trace of coyness by Customsstaff as well as travellers. The range of goods, being moved in huge sacks, varies including medicalsupplies, syringes, anti-mosquito machines, cheap toys, readymade shirts and trousers, proprietary creams,betel leaves, pineapples, film magazines, paints, sanitary fittings, copy-books, and other stuff we can notsee. 

By about 1330, all deals have been made, latecomers (Indians) who have skipped the Delhi train and arriveddirectly by road have been seamlessly integrated, and all passengers bound for Pakistan moved to theNorth-end of a segregated Platform 3.This is also the side which gets the sun for the rest of theafternoon. 

An Indian Railway inspector moves around amidst the crowd, collecting her pound of flesh for excess baggageat this stage. It is all business and done seamlessly, without receipts in most cases. Two IntelligenceBureau persons take me aside for a chat thinking that I am a Pakistani, and then treat Raghu and me tocoffee when they realise I am not. Raghu is busy making friends and trying vainly to find a television orradio, and he peels off at this point towards some pretty Pakistani young ladies headed back forIslamabad with their wilting mother. 

At about 1430, the Pakistan Railways rake arrives on the now vacated Platform2, to loud cheers from all of us waiting Pakistan-bound passengers on Platform 3, and disgorges whatseems to be a vast sea of women in all colours and men in blue, white and saffron turbans, with a few Nihangsin their finery for effect.