Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories Read online

  Edited by

  Ruskin Bond

  INDIAN RAILWAY STORIES

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Dedication

  A Traveller’s Tale

  INTRODUCTION

  Soot Gets in Your Eyes

  Ruskin Bond

  I : STORIES BEFORE INDEPENDENCE

  Around the World in Eighty Days

  Jules Verne

  The Man Who Would Be King

  Rudyard Kipling

  By Cow-Catcher and Trolley

  Anonymous

  The Bold ‘Prentice

  Rudyard Kipling

  Snow-Leopard

  Flora Annie Steel

  The By-gone Days

  Anonymous

  The Coolie

  Anonymous

  The Luck of John Fernandez

  J.W. Best

  II : STORIES AFTER INDEPENDENCE

  Loyalty

  Jim Corbett

  Mano Majra Station

  Khushwant Singh

  The Woman on Platform 8

  Ruskin Bond

  The Intimate Demon

  Manoj Das

  A Stranded Railroad Car

  Intizar Husain

  Barin Bhowmik’s Ailment

  Satyajit Ray

  Balbir Arora Goes Metric

  Bill Aitken

  Railway Reverie

  R.K. Laxman

  The Cherry Choo-Choo

  Victor Banerjee

  99 UP

  Manojit Mitra

  Footnotes

  The Intimate Demon

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE PENGUIN BOOK OF INDIAN RAILWAY STORIES

  Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, in 1934, and grew up in Jamnagar (Gujarat), Dehradun and Shimla. In the course of a writing career spanning thirty-five years, he has written over a hundred short stories, essays, novels and more than thirty books for children. Three collections of the short stories, The Night Train at Deoli Time Stops at Shamli and Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra have been published by Penguin India. He has also edited an anthology, The Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories.

  The Room on the Roof was his first novel, written when he was seventeen, and it received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Vagrants in the Valley was also written in his teens and picks up from where The Room on the Roof leaves off. These two novellas were published in one volume by Penguin India in 1993 as was a much-acclaimed collection of his non-fiction writing, Rain in the Mountains.

  Ruskin Bond received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India for 1992, for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra.

  ALSO BY RUSKIN BOND

  Fiction

  The Room on the Roof & Vagrants in the Valley

  The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories

  Time Stops at Shamli and Other Stories

  Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra

  Strangers in the Night: Two Novellas

  A Season of Ghosts

  When Darkness Falls and Other Stories

  A Flight of Pigeons

  Delhi Is Not Far

  A Face in the Dark and Other Stories

  Non-Fiction

  Rain in the Mountains

  Scenes from a Writer’s Life

  The Lamp is Lit

  The Little Book of Comfort

  Landour Days

  Anthologies

  Collected Fiction (1955–1996)

  The Best of Ruskin Bond

  Friends in Small Places

  Indian Ghost Stories (ed.)

  Classic Indian Love Stories and Lyrics (ed.)

  FOR ALL MY FAMILY

  Plenty of room on this train!

  A Traveller’s Tale

  There’s a North Indian line, whose most cherished design

  Is to cut all expenses uncommonly fine.

  It once was my fate on this railway to wait

  An hour and a half for a train that was late.

  The one consolation I found at the station

  Was engaging the staff in a long conversation.

  And making him shirk in the meantime his work

  Of pointsman and signalman, porter and clerk.

  He carried a fragment of greasy old rag,

  Which had once been a green or perhaps a red flag.

  ‘Why don’t they supply a new flag?’ said I.

  He answered me ‘Sahib, ye-Scotch line to hai.’

  I did not forget, the next time I met

  The Agent, to tell him this story, you bet.

  He said, when I came to the end of the same,

  ‘I’m thinking ye’ll have remembered his name.’

  When I said that I had, ‘Man,’ he said, but I’m glad.

  Ram Prasad, was it? Thank you. I’ll fine Ram Prasad.

  How dare the man wag a dirty old rag

  When he knows he’s expected to find his own flag?’

  A. G. Shirreff

  (1917)

  Soot Gets in Your Eyes

  MY ANTHOLOGY OF GHOST STORIES for Penguin India, roundly condemned by several critics, almost immediately went into a second edition. And so I feel cocky enough to indulge myself in compiling an anthology on another favourite subject, the Indian railway.

  But what is a nature writer doing, putting together a collection of train stories? Who is this upstart Bond, who has been meandering along like a bullock-cart all these years, and now sets himself up as a railway enthusiast? Just what are his credentials?

  Few know that my maternal grandfather, William Clerke, was Assistant Station-master at Karachi in the 1920s, or that my uncle, Fred Clark (they spelt their names differently), was Station Superintendent at Delhi Main during World War II. Occasionally, during school holidays, I would stay with Uncle Fred in his bungalow near the station. He had a wind-up gramophone and a large collection of the records of his favourite band, Spike Jones and his City Slickers. This was the noisiest, most irreverent little orchestra in the world, and it deliberately set out to murder any popular tune that took its fancy. Thus, ‘Sleepy Lagoon’ became ‘Sloppy Laggon’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ became ‘Romeow and Julie-cat’. Uncle Fred liked it because it was the only band that made enough noise to be heard above the shunting of engines, the whistle of passing trains, and the constant clamour from the railway yards. Some of the instruments used by the band had, in fact, been improvised out of scrap metal picked up in locomotive sheds. As music it was horrific, but I was to remain a Spike Jones fan all my life.

  The bungalow had a little garden. But the plants and flowers were usually covered with a fine layer of soot from passing steam engines. So much for the romance of railways! No, railway stations and goods yards never were and never will be the haunt of nature lovers.

  A few years ago I travelled by a slow passenger train from Dehradun to Bombay: two days and two nights over the dusty plains of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. My ‘nature notebook’ was not idle, and although the proposed essay proved abortive, I kept the rough notes for a piece that was to be called ‘Wild Life on a Railway Journey’:

  1) Myna-bird gets into the compartment at Hardwar and, ticketless, gets out again at Roorkee.

  2) Fat, obviously well-fed cockroach lurks in washroom basin.

  3) I feed platform dogs and freelance crows with Northern Railway thali lunch.

  4) Frogs along the west coast—a continuous chanting from the fields as the train rushes by. You can hear them quite clearly above the sound of the train.

  5) By the time we
reach Bombay, six hours late, washbasin cockroaches have multiplied and look as though they are ready to eat the passengers.

  * * *

  To be honest, I am not a great railway traveller. I am a poor traveller altogether, being prone to any water-borne infection, unfamiliar food, skin eruptions caused by bugs lurking in the upholstery, suffocation from cigarette and engine smoke, and vertigo from riding in escalators. I am also prone to have things stolen from me. The train stopped at Baroda in the early hours, and a lean hand shot through the window, removing my watch from under my pillow, along with my spectacles, which could have been of no use to anyone, my lens-strength being –7 in one eye and +5 in the other. I had to appear in a Bombay court the next day (having been dragged there to face charges for writing an allegedly obscene short story), and I appeared wearing editor Vinod Mehta’s glasses, which were only half the strength of mine. I looked so owlish and helpless that the judge must have felt sorry for me, for the case eventually took a turn in my favour.

  But I love railway platforms. I spent a great deal of time on them when I was a boy, waiting for connecting trains to Kalka or Saharanpur or Barrackpore or Rajkot. The odd incident stayed in my memory and when, in my late teens I started writing short stories, those memories became stories such as ‘The Night Train at Deoli,’ ‘The Woman on Platform 8,’ ‘The Tunnel,’ and ‘The Eyes Have It.’ And when I wasn’t sitting on platform benches watching the world and his wife go by, I was browsing at those station bookstalls which were such an institution forty to fifty years ago.

  Over a hundred years ago, the Railway booksellers were among the pioneers of publishing in, India.

  Take A.H. Wheeler & Co. In the 1880s they started the Indian Railway Library, which saw the first publication of Kipling’s early story collections—Plain Tales from the Hills, Wee Willie Winkle, Under the Deodars, Soldiers Three—all stories he had written while working for The Pioneer of Allahabad or The Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore. And what Wheelers was to the north, Higginbothams was to the south.

  Kipling was fascinated by the Indian railways, and his in-depth study of the railway headquarters and colony at Jamalpur (E.I. Railway) in City of Dreadful Night is a tour-de-force of early investigative journalism. It was considered to be rather too long for inclusion here. The railways are ever-present in his fiction, and although some might cavil at ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ being included in a collection of train stories, that opening scene at Marwar Junction sets the tone and impetus for one of his finest stories. His description of a railway journey in Kim is just as relevant today as it was at the turn of the century:

  As the 3.25 south-bound roared in, the sleepers sprang to life, and the station filled with clamour and shouting, cries of water and sweetmeat vendors, shouts of policemen, and shrill yells of women gathering up their baskets, their families, and their husbands . . . .

  Elsewhere he wrote, ‘Romance brought up the nine-fifteen,’ but it was really commerce that led to that historic occasion in 1853 when India’s first railway train steamed off in an atmosphere of great excitement from Bombay to Thana, a distance of 34 miles. Within ten years the Great Indian Peninsular Railway had opened up the cotton-growing areas of the Deccan plateau. Soon the country was criss-crossed by an extensive network of railway lines, bringing north to south and east to west, enabling the mass of Indian people to discover the length, breadth and diversity of the land for the first time. In pursuing their commercial interests so effectively, the British rulers had created unity out of diversity and sown the seeds of nationhood.

  Mark Twain, in A Tramp Abroad, refers to the ‘perennially ravishing show of Indian railway stations.’ There are more than 7,000 of them today, and every one has its own unique atmosphere. The teeming and varied life of the station and its environs has fascinated writers from Jules Verne in the 1870s to Khushwant Singh, Satyajit Ray and other modern writers in more recent times. Here are stories covering almost every period of railway history: chosen not because they are history (which would be to go for dullness) but because they are good stories or entertaining diversions. Jim Corbett’s ‘Loyalty’ tells you something about the man himself, his early days with the railways, and his abiding love for India. ‘The Luck of John Fernandez,’ taken from a 1932 issue of the Indian State Railways Magazine, gives us glimpses into the life of an engine-driver, as does ‘The Bold Prentice’. Unusual encounters on train journeys are to be found in ‘Barin Bhowmik’s Ailment’ by Satyajit Ray, ‘A Stranded Railroad Car’ by Intizar Husain and the contribution of Manoj Das. Intizar Husain is an Urdu writer living in Pakistan, but as his fine story is set in undivided India it sits well in this collection. Manoj Das received a Sahitya Akademi award for his Oriya writing but he is now equally well-known to English language readers. Bill Aitken makes the grade from Janta class back-pack to the Palace on Wheels. Bill and I were both born in May 1934, in the Year of the Dog, but while Bill became a travelling railway dog, I became a platform dog, although we are both quite good at guard duty. R.K. Laxman, the celebrated cartoonist, gives us a glimpse of his talents as a fiction writer. And the extract from A Train to Pakistan, Khushwant Singh’s famous novel of the partition of India, tells a powerful and tragic story built around a train journey carrying refugees from the communal holocaust. Manojit Mitra’s charming story is about a film star who fails to turn up.

  The stories in this collection have been divided into two sections—Stories Before Independence and Stories After Independence. This has been done for the convenience of the observant reader who would be alive to the changing styles, and attitudes of writers from the two periods.

  * * *

  I started out by saying that nature and the railways had little or no meeting ground. But occasionally there is an exception. As a schoolboy I went to stay with a friend of Uncle Fred’s, a station-master at Kalka, where the mountain railway to Simla commences. He had his bungalow on a bare hillside about a mile from the station.

  The station-master fancied himself a shikari and always carried his gun around, giving me colourful accounts of his exploits in the jungles. There was no jungle near Kalka, and the only wild animal I saw was a jackal. My host felt he ought to shoot something, if only to demonstrate his skill, and aiming at a crow perched on the compound wall, let off both barrels of his gun and despatched the poor crow half way to the Solan Breweries on the next range.

  Minutes later we were being attacked by all the crows in Kalka. About a hundred of them appeared as if from nowhere, and, amidst a deafening cawing, swooped down on us, wings beating furiously. My host’s sola-topee was sent flying as he dived for cover. I protected my head with a book I was carrying and ran indoors. We shut ourselves up in the dining-room, while crows gathered at the skylights and windows, pecking on the glass panes. The crows did not give up their siege until late evening when an assistant station-master, accompanied by a fireman, a trolley-driver and several porters came to our rescue. The Night Mail to Delhi was delayed by over an hour, and my host had a nervous breakdown and went on sick leave for a week. As for me, I grew up to have a healthy respect for all crows. They are true survivors and will probably be around long after the human species has disappeared.

  * * *

  I cannot take leave of the reader without recounting the story of Aunt Mabel and her Persian cat.

  Aunt Mabel took her cat wherever she went—to tea parties, bridge parties, hotels, shops and other people’s houses, much to everyone’s dismay and irritation, for not everyone is a cat-lover, and the Persian variety is inclined to leave a lot of fluff lying around, apart from making forays into kitchens and helping themselves to the fish course. The cat also accompanied Aunt Mabel on long train journeys, but my aunt had an aversion to buying tickets for her pet. She would smuggle the cat into the toilet of her compartment and keep it there whenever we were approaching a station. On one of these journeys, at a whistle-stop somewhere between Bareilly and Lucknow, the cat made her exit from the train via the toilet seat, and was
never seen by us again. When we got to Lucknow, Aunt Mabel sent telegrams and wireless messages to all the station masters on the line, but to no avail. The cat had vanished, much to everyone’s relief. Aunt Mabel was inconsolable and swore she’d never keep another cat. We told her that this was the right attitude to take. Later we heard that a linesman at Hardoi was the proud owner of a strange-looking cat, and that he fed it on the luddoos that were famous in that region.

  Mussoorie

  January 1994

  Ruskin Bond

  I

  STORIES BEFORE INDEPENDENCE

  Around the World in Eighty Days

  Jules Verne

  This was 1875, and it was the dare of the century!

  Phileas Fogg bet his entire fortune that he could cross the 19th century world—with no schedule, no special arrangements, and no air travel—in exactly eighty days. Any delay, any breakdown, and Fogg would lose everything. To complicate matters he is chased by a relentless bounty hunter, Mr Fix, who is convinced Fogg is a fleeing bank robber.

  In the following extract Fogg and his companion Passepartout put their trust in the Great Indian Peninsula Railway . . . .

  * * *

  EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT THE great reversed triangle land, with its base in the north and its apex in the south, which is called India, embraces fourteen hundred thousand square miles, upon which is spread unequally a population of one hundred and eighty millions of souls. The British Crown exercises a real and despotic dominion over the larger portion of this vast country, and has a governor-general stationed at Calcutta, governors at Madras, Bombay, and in Bengal, and a lieutenant-governor at Agra.

  But British India, properly so called, only embraces seven hundred thousand square miles, and a population of from one hundred to one hundred and ten millions of inhabitants. A considerable portion of India is still free from British authority; and there are certain ferocious rajahs in the interior who are absolutely independent. The celebrated East India Company was all-powerful from 1756, when the English first gained a foothold on the spot where now stands the city of Madras, down to the time of the great Sepoy insurrection. It gradually annexed province after province, purchasing them of the native chiefs, whom it seldom paid, and appointed the governor-general and his subordinates, civil and military. But the East India Company has now passed away, leaving the British possessions in India directly under the control of the Crown. The aspect of the country, as well as the manners and distinctions of race, is daily changing.