Traversing…

“Toofan Mail, Ek Duniya hai Toofan Mail”

Is an earworm that resides in me since I can remember, and it conjures an image of a train huffing and puffing into a station.  People waving people off and people hugging them who get off.

Then is the local train, like it is the rhythm of the city and gives the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment everyone knows where they are going.

Though the bustling jostling Mumbai locals are bit scary with the sheer volume of human energy that it hosts. What thrills me about the trains is not their size or equipment but the fact that they are moving and they embody a connection between unseen places.

So travelling from Khachiguda to Linganapalli, was a great experience in itself.

On the railway platform is a restlessness and longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of that faraway train that I am awaiting, but the longing is not really in the whistle but in me.“

It began with wonderfully clean station. And people did NOT spit!! Amazing right?  A broad, working escalator, the exotic city of Hyderabad-Secunderabad, and landscape foyers of the railway station. The Andhra railway has really maintained it. It is called MMT I am ashamed to say I have not found what MMT is an abbreviation for.

In the train, people quite so considerate. Like this elderly lady next to me had blocked a seat for son, who did not turn up till two stations went by but other passengers indulged her. Then came a young woman with child and someone actually got up to give her a seat.

As clicked pictures, the lady next to me, the elderly Muslim lady asked me why I was clicking the pictures when I told her, she pointed some interesting points and then told me, “this time you note the things so on your way back you click the pictures.”

To be frank I could care less where I went, it was the journey in itself that was inspiring, meeting people, sharing a bit of their lives, like peeking into another world, another life. At every station a bit Hyderabad got in and said hello.

I think next time round I shall just take this train journey with a camera in tow.