A wanderer in the backyard.
A wanderer
Category: Odds and Ends
Summer Train
As the day wears on, the railway stations in India get progressively crowded, chaotic, and squalid, but in my memory, there is a brief window of time in the early morning, just as the dawn is breaking, around 5 a.m., perhaps slightly earlier, till 7:30 a.m. or so, when the station platforms are simple and serene.
The homeless used to sleep all in huddled masses of three or four bodies here and there on the concrete floor, their threadworn saris or lungis a poor substitute for blankets. The platform’s aluminum roof is their shelter for the night from the elements. Their dogs sleep at their feet. The sweepers in blue and khaki municipality uniforms sweep around them, and sprinkle water on the ground to keep the dust from flying around. Soon the rooster crows, and the many bird songs, bells and chants from the temples, and the Bismillah from the mosques are mixed with the whiplash noise of the train engines cranking, and the cacophony of rickshaws, taxis, bicycles, scooters, motorcycles and buses.
The station vendors unpack their goods for sale for the day: plastic toys, newspapers, magazines, books, playing cards, cigarette lighters, fly swatters, etc. The coffee and tea stalls open. The aromas of breakfast items are all mixed: the steamed and the fried: the sweet aroma of hot milk tea; the strong dusky scent of hot decoction milk coffee; pazham pori, idli, dosa, uppumaa, uzhunnu vada, parippu vada, cutlets, parathas, omelets, boiled eggs, chocolates, candies, cool drinks and fruits.
The British East India Company laid the foundations for the Great Indian Peninsular Railways Company, or what is now known as the nationalized Indian Railways. In the late 1840s, British textile manufacturers in England needed a way to bring cotton from the interiors of India to the Bombay harbor, and thence to Manchester for textile production. Three main lines ran across the country towards the major ports of Bombay in the west, Calcutta in the east, and Madras in the south.
By 1890, almost all regions of India, including the princely states, had their own railway systems. Since 1947 and independence, Indian Railways has become the main artery feeding the transportation needs of Indians across the subcontinent. At present, the Indian Railways network covers more than 40, 000 miles through its 7,500 stations across the country, and is one of the world’s largest railway networks. Daily, across the nation, Indian Railways transports nearly 25 million passengers, a significant percentage of whom are suburban commuters traveling between their homes and workplaces.
We used to travel a lot by train when I was growing up. If you board the 5 a.m. Venad Express in Trivandrum you could be eating breakfast and playing with your cousins in Tripunithura by 10 or 11 in the morning. If you want, you could go to sleep on the wooden bench in the second-class compartment. Or you could look out the window at the world whizzing past. Or you could observe your fellow travelers as you follow your train of thoughts.
Local, national and international politics used to be a big topic of discussion in train rides in India. George Bush, Bill Clinton, Gorbachev, Putin, Margaret Thatcher, Saddam Hussein, Che Guevara, Ataturk, George Washington, Indira Gandhi, Congress party, Communist party, local leaders, political scandals – the list is endless. With daily commuters, there is also office gossip. There is plenty of voluble character assassination, and open airing of intrigues worthy of modest crime fiction.
Because of the anonymity offered by a fast-moving train in transit for hours on end, some passengers behave recklessly aboard Indian trains. Young men dangle from the compartment doors tempting fate. Others give free rein to their promiscuous selves. Twenty some years ago, my mother and I were going to Trichur once from Trivandrum, when a beautiful young nun boarded our compartment. She was wearing her Catholic nun’s habit, and she sat across from us. She had a thin bony face with big eyes, and bits of black curly hair escaped from her black nun’s veil. One or two stations later, a slightly older man boarded the train and walked into our compartment. He was looking for the nun, and they made eye contact as if by a pact. He was slightly overweight and had a glistening face and sat with his legs apart in an indecent way.
The man sat next to mother and me, facing the nun. The rest of the journey, for about three hours, the nun and the man flirted with each other, rubbing each other’s hands, and touching cheeks and lips. It was incredible. My mother, ordinarily a peaceful woman, was startled and angry; I rarely see her angry.
Public flirtation happens all the time in India–a country filled with men and women with exhibitionist tendencies—particularly, in trains and buses. I think what bothered my mother was the fact that this woman was wearing a nun’s habit while flirting with a sickening man. Was it some sort of kinky role-playing, I have since wondered.
Another equally disturbing appearance of the id, while on a train, happened to me once when I was traveling from Grand Forks, North Dakota to Montreal, Quebec. In the early 1990s, when I was in graduate school, I used to spend my Christmases with my aunt and family in Montreal. Instead of flying, I loved taking the train ride across the country. It is a very long trip, takes days and days. It is a beautiful ride. I think I was doing what Gandhi did in India when he first returned from South Africa; I was seeing America by train, like in that gorgeous Steve Goodman song “City of New Orleans.”
Anyway, Amtrak has a stop in Chicago, and I was sitting with this old Polish woman, who had been talking to me the entire time since she boarded the train. She was in her 80s, and she kept saying really awful things about the African-American conductor and stewards working in the train; in fact, about the entire black population of Chicago. I tried to tell her politely that her comments could be interpreted as being racist. I told her that I was an immigrant studying in the U.S., and that I didn’t subscribe to her verbal assault on the black population in Chicago.
But the woman was unstoppable, and kept up her rant. Unlike trains in India, where you can go sit somewhere else if the person next to you has lost her mind, in Amtrak, you are stuck in your seat. I kept praying for the woman to fall asleep or lose her voice. But neither happened. After a while, I got up and went and sat in the dining car.
When the racist Polish woman in Chicago talked endlessly to me, I longed for the cow that was my traveling companion years ago in India once on a train. In 1988, one of my professors, Dr. Jamila Begum, and I had gone to Baroda to attend a conference at the MS University. You take the Rajadhani Express from Trivandrum, Kerala and it takes you to Baroda, Gujarat in three days.
We were in a non A/C sleeper car, a step up from the general compartment with sleeping berths and all. The train had been delayed several times and it was the afternoon of the third day, and we had crossed the border and entered Gujarat. I was watching the riverbanks in the distance as the train slowly chugged along the Narmada River, when it came to an unscheduled stop.
It was literally the middle of nowhere. The non A/C sleeper car was empty except for Dr. Begum and me. We were feeling nice and comfortable; a cool light breeze came in through the window, and we could still see the river stretching away to our right.
Suddenly we heard a commotion at the compartment door. A huge cow was struggling to climb in. I went to the door to check. There she was, the cow. She had managed to climb in. She had a beautiful yellow garland around her neck, and a red dot on her forehead. She was completely white, except for her beautiful black eyes and slightly pinkish nose. Her owner, a farmer with a big colorful turban, climbed in after her.
It was clear that he had not purchased a ticket for himself, or the cow, for the non A/C sleeper car. He had been pasturing in the fields to our left, and was probably tired and wanted to take the cow home in the quickest way possible. Since I did not know Gujarati, I could not ask him the whole story. He avoided my eyes; he knew he was in a fancy sleeper car. Dr. Begum and I thought, what the heck, a cow. A cow in our compartment!
But she was a good cow. She just sat down by the door, chewing some grass, while her owner hunched down near her, both of them avoiding us, the other humans, and gazing out of the open door at the fields rolling past us. The cow was non-destructive, clean and gentle on the train. They got off, about an hour later, at the next scheduled stop.
[first published in Lock Haven Express, 2014]
Como se dice Hair Dryer?
In 2006, a bunch of us faculty members went to Spain for an international workshop. We were in Madrid and we were in Ronda: two beautiful cities where we met faculty and students in our sister schools there. While we were traveling in these places, my friend Nic Nicole Burkholder and I shared a room. Everybody speaks English in Spain, mostly. We were told that definitely everyone spoke English in the hotels where we would be staying. And it was true, the staff at the hotel in Madrid where we stayed all spoke perfect business English. And then we got to Ronda where we stayed at this gorgeous moorish looking hotel. So Nic and I went up to our room. Nic went into the bathroom and immediately ran out with a concerned look on her face.
There is no hair dryer here, Nic told me.
This was not an issue for me, as I have no hair or very little hair. But Nic has long beautiful thick hair. And it takes some work to dry it in the early mornings before our busy work day started.
Let me call the front desk and ask for a hair dryer, Nic said.
I had changed into my pyjamas and was getting ready for bed. Okay, I said.
So pretty soon I heard Nic on the phone happily asking the person at the other end–“Could we get a hair dryer for our room?” or something along those lines.
There was a brief silence and then Nic turned around to me and said, “He doesn’t speak English.”
Nic put down the phone. She was dejected. She really wanted a hair dryer.
So since I was from Texas, I said, no problem, let me go get you a hair dryer from the front desk. I am sure they will give us one.
In Texas, where I had lived before moving to Pennsylvania, I had heard demotic Spanish all around me. I did not know the Spanish word for “hair dryer” or “hair.” But I thought to myself, how hard can it be to get a hair dryer? I knew the verb “querer” in Spanish meant “to want.”
Tell them what we want, what we really really want.
So, still in my pyjamas, I went downstairs to the reception to ask for a hair dryer. I was expecting to come right back up with a hair dryer.
The man at the reception desk downstairs was about 80 years old. He was a small diminutive old man with thinning white hair and sparkly eyes even at 10 o’clock at night.
I began my demotic Spanish.
“Por favor, senor, yo quiero hair dryer,” I said. (which I thought meant “I want a hair dryer.” )
“Ah, senora,” the old man said with a bow. “Qué?”
Clearly, the man had no idea what I had just said. And I did not know the Spanish word for “hair dryer.”
So I tried again. This time, I pointed to my hair, ran my palm over my head in a sweeping motion, and said, “Quiero hair dryer, por favor.”
The man lifted one finger as if to indicate “just a minute” and went to a room behind the front desk.
I was feeling pretty good. It was so simple. He was going to come back with a hair dryer.
The man came out. He had cupped both of his hands together . With a big smile, he opened his hands on the desk in front of me. About a dozen small bottles of shampoo and conditioners–the hotel size– fell out on the desk. He stood back with a beatific smile on his face.
“No, no, no, senor,” I said. “No shampoo. No conditioner.””
“No shampoo?” the old man asked. His smile was gone. He looked worried.
“No shampoo,” I said. “Quiero Hair dryer.”
I said very slowly and loudly clearly enunciating the word in English.” H-a-i-r D-r-y-e-r, por favor.”
The old man stared blankly at me.
So I thought I would try something else. I bunched my thumb, index and middle finger together and pushed it into my hair. I was trying to signify a machine. I said, again, very slowly, “See? Hair dryer.”
The man again indicated with one finger that he would be right back. I prayed that he would not come back with a gun.
He came back with a handful of small shower caps this time.
I began to laugh uncontrollably at this point. But I thought to myself, well, I am here and I am not going back without a hair dryer tonight.
Then I suddenly remembered that at UTD, where I used to teach, after the custodial people mopped the floor, they used to put a yellow sign that said, “piso mojado” in Spanish on one side and “wet floor” on the other side. As a linguist, I knew that in Spanish, the modifiers followed the nouns, instead of the other way around as in English. So I knew that “mojado” meant “wet” and “piso” meant “floor.” I knew I had one final shot at getting a hair dryer.
“Por favor, senor,” I began again, “Quiero la machina por mojado–” and here I pointed to my hair. I was making things up.
I did not know the Spanish word for “hair.” I prayed that the old man would put two and two together and understand that I was referring to a machine for wet hair.
I was right. The old man broke out with the most wonderful smile.
“El secador de pelo, senora!” the man exclaimed in total happiness.
“Yes, yes, Si, si, senor,” I said. I hoped that meant a hair dryer.
He again showed me “one minute” with his finger and went to his antechamber.
This time he did come out with a hair dryer.
“El secador, senora,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. He put down a hair dryer in front of me tenderly like a mother putting down her baby.
I was overjoyed. I thanked the old man profusely. I walked back up to our room victoriously and handed Nic the hair dryer. Here is your hair dryer, I said.
So, I might know nothing of Spanish, but I will always remember that “el secador de pelo” means a hair dryer.
The Red Earth 