When I was young, we used to go to Calcutta every summer vacation. From Bombay. Second class sleeper coach.
The smell and sound of trains always settled me into finally believing that I was on a new journey to the unknown again. Unknown because every year the paradigms of the same places moved from where they were, the last. Some of the old relatives, so alive with their voices, laughter and love would suddenly be staring at you from frames on the walls, the next time I arrived. Younger and in sepia tone. People who never existed in my world would suddenly be crawling on the floor out of no where, with new names and newer relationships. Places we visited constantly danced the renewal-dilapidation dance. Rivulets in the village withered, people grew older, weaker and sadder as I kept losing the sense of wonder with the corruption of growing up.
Over time, the coal engines got replaced by diesel ones. And the diesel ones by electric. And then we stopped needing even the electric ones because I grew up. Going to Calcutta was no more a vacation thing. We went if and when there was time. Took flights which took lesser than it took a taxi ride from Santacruz to Town.
And in the process I lost the smell of vacation and cacophony of trains and stations.
The sweat in the sweltering heat. Black under nails by the middle of the journey. Shy girls in the opposite seats. My folks fighting helpless battles with day travelers between Raipur and Jabalpur about reserved seats. Dimming yellow lights when the train waited at a signal any longer than 10 minutes. Spilling egg curries on broad aluminum plates. The sense of adventure, filling water bottles at stations. Finding out the names of those shy girls from the torn charts pasted outside. And finally the knotted, uncombable hair by the time you could glimpse the truant Howrah bridge on twists and turns of the last mile.
I have lost more than I have gained. And I lose some everyday. My innocence. And the images, scents and sounds from my childhood.
Yesterday something brought some of it back like a flash. It was as if the index card of a whole lost folder. A cow under a tree.
I remember it was one of my childhood summers aboard a Calcutta bound train. Post lunch, people preferred to sleep and wake up to cooler evenings than stay awake and swim in their sweat. The train had been stationery for over an hour. Hot, dry arid farmlands stretched to the horizons. No house, no road, no human being in the vicinity. Air danced near the blistering ground. The fans had slowed down to almost speed zero. My shirt was wet. My limbs caked with wet dust. My mind infinitesimally wishing for the nudge of the train’s start.
Till I saw the cow. Simple, tired, the cow sat under a tree chewing cud. Endlessly. I began first with wonderment. How much can they chew. Then I connected with deeper details. I felt one with the cow. I felt one with the place. The shade under the tree. The fact that by evening the cow will be home, some hundreds of kilometers away from me. We will never meet again. Yet here we are, connected in the now. I’m watching her and she, perhaps, watching me. Someone on the side two-seat berth had a leather jacketed transistor that played All India Radio. Announcers those days were as melodious as the songs they played.
The train moved. The cow kept chewing. I stretched as much as I could to see her as long as I could. I lost her in sight. But found her inside. After so many years, yesterday, at a signal in Bombay. In an auto rickshaw, on my way to a promotions meeting of my film, as I waited for the signal to turn green. Very hot. Very late. Very irritated.
A cow sat nearby under a tree, chewing cud. Suddenly time ground to a halt, waiting for me to recognise the big lost folder. Complete with images, loves, smiles, smells and sounds.
I collected every bit I could and the signal turned green. Like in the train I again kept watching the cow as long as I could.
But this time around, I know how precious is this folder! My Summer images.
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