The Cauliflower Lady

What does it take for a thousand ships to sail for you? If you have read the story of Helen of Troy, the beautiful wife of Menelaus the Greek, you know about the thousand ships that sailed to win her back. The Trojan horse is a piece of legend that we all have read or heard about. Another question. What does it take for a passenger train drawn by a steam engine to stop for you, in the middle of the beautiful hills of Jharkhand? Read on.

The Peanut Express was winding its way through the beautiful hills. Some parts of Jharkhand are so beautiful that you would think that a local artist was inspired by the rolling hills of Scotland and painted a masterpiece on a canvas with a delightful smattering of colors. Then, he threw in a herd of cows and goats for good measure. I was looking out the window and enjoying the scenery. When the train went across a small clearing, and I was beginning to admire the next hillock, I saw a woman with a basket of cauliflowers on her head, hastily making her way for the train. To my surprise, the train slowed down, and came to a grinding halt. A train belonging to the mighty Indian Railways, had stopped in the middle of nowhere. For a cauliflower lady.

To say the least, I was curious. Once the lady was aboard, I struck up a conversation with her. She was about fifty and had half a head of gray hair. She was wearing a lot of silver, so much that one would think that she preferred to keep her family silver with her all the time, unlike the rest of us, who like to keep it in the china cabinet.  She had a few missing teeth and it looked like she kept her local paan (betel leaf) shop in good business. I had never seen a more beautiful tribal woman before.

Her basket was full of small cauliflowers, probably grown with the help of cow manure. In those days, I was quite taken with the advances in agriculture, and wanted to give her some unsolicited advice on how a little bit of urea or potash would help her grow cauliflowers twice the size she had. Much later, hanging out with the hippies in America, I realised that people would have lined up to buy those small  cauliflowers, blessed by the rear end of a cow, since organic is the word that has defined agricultural produce in the last decade.

She told me about the cows and the goats she had. About the cauliflowers that were the tastiest in the whole district. And that she was headed for the local haat (country market), where she hoped to get a good price for them. I was itching to ask the question, and so, I finally did. Why do you think the train stopped for you in the middle of nowhere, miles from any station in either direction?

She smiled. Pata nahin babu. Ham to haat utha dete hain. Aur terain rook jata hai. (I don't know babu, I just raise my hand and the train stops).

I did not see her buying a ticket and obviously, she didn't pay anything to the ticket checker. So, money was definitely not the reason. So, what was it? When I reached Ramgarh, I could not control myself any more. So, I walked over to the ticket checker and asked him why the train had to be stopped in the middle of nowhere for a cauliflower lady. Of course, I told him I was not complaining about it, I was just curious. 

"Kya karein Sir." He said, "Injun driver ki Biwi hai. Becharey ko shaam ko ghar jaana hai ki nahin?". (What can I do Sir. She is married to the engine driver, the poor man has to go back home tonight.)

I had my answer. If you are carrying a basket of cauliflowers on your head in the middle of nowhere, and want the Peanut Express to stop for you, you don't have to be the beautiful Helen of Troy. You just need to be married to the engine driver.

The Peanut Express

Many years ago, I took a train from nowhere to nowhere.

No, really. It was an amazing journey. I was traveling to a place called Ranchi in the state of Jharkhand (It used to be Bihar back then). I took the night train from Calcutta and that being the month of May, when the orange sun turns red, I was hoping to get some cool mountain air in Ranchi. There is this place called Muri Junction, about sixty kilometers from Ranchi, where the plains end and the mountains start. In those days, they would stop the train for an hour and change the engine, as if they were feeding the mules before the tough trek began. Sometimes, the mules would refuse to budge and there would be a two hour delay. Then, they would stop the overnight train and let the other trains pass, since those would be the ones on time. After a while, an hour would turn into a few hours, and sometimes, half a day. This was one such half a day.

A fellow passenger asked me what I was going to do in Ranchi. When he heard that I was simply escaping Calcutta for the hills, he suggested that I try a quieter place called Hazaribagh. Apparently, I could just hop on to a passenger train from Muri and go to a place called Ramgarh, though not the same one where Gabbar Singh once lived and (presumably) died. This was a different Ramgarh, but I could take a bus from there to Hazaribagh, which according to him was cool enough to shelter a thousand tigers at this time of the year. It just happened to be a coincidence that the passenger train was on the next track and ready to go. I was not known to be an impulsive creature. In fact, if I ever faced the dilemma of Mr. Indiana Jones, on whether I should jump off a cliff to escape a group of marauding cannibals, I would have probably opened my book on negotiations and patiently read Chapter 12 on Negotiating as if your life depends on it.

But this, was a different day.

The Muri-Barkakana Passenger, as it was officially known, became my ride to the city where a thousand tigers were waiting for me. As I found out later, it was popularly known as the Moongphali Express, or The Peanut Express, since the floors were seldom swept and were full of peanut shells. But this train changed my entire perspective on life, and how to live it. By writing this blog, I am simply paying tribute to the many nameless passengers I travelled with on that fateful day, when,  like the Buddha, I attained my own Nirvana.

Bihar was an extremely poor state with a complete lack of governance. The southern part of it, where I was travelling was the neglected stepchild. Yet, when the engine hooted, a lot of people I was travelling with clapped with joy. I found much later that Italians applaud when airplanes land. Apparently, they too are a very happy group of people. After a while, I realized that I had lucked out. I was actually traveling on a train pulled by a steam-engine. It is every schoolboy's fantasy to ride on a steam engine, I actually got to ride on one that would get phased out in a few years. And my fellow passengers were totally oblivious to how spoilt they were. 

My fellow passengers could actually be described by the phrase "motley crowd" very well. There were a few well dressed people, probably government employees in this part of the world. Then, there were a bunch of people who looked like miners that had just finished the night shift, since they were all covered in dust and soot. There were farmers, with their vegetable baskets. And yes, there was a guy carrying a small goat. You simply could not travel on a train in Bihar in those days, and not see the guy with the goat. He just had to be there. There was a cauliflower lady, about whom, I will write a separate post some other day. And there was a ticket checker, who did not check any tickets.

In that three hour journey on that day, I came as close to seeing a boatload of happy people (no pun intended) as I have ever seen in my life. These were poor people back then, and unless there has been a real estate boom in the backwaters of Jharkhand since, they must be poor people now. Since then, I have travelled halfway across the world, met people from many cultures, seen the stock market go up and down many times, seen a few booms and busts and become a more sombre human being, as far as looking at life goes. I have tried to search for happiness amongst things around me, but I don't remember seeing such a happy group of people ever again.

In my Blog, I will try to write about those people on the peanut express and why I think they were so happy that day.  I will also write about the things that make me happy or sad or the various shades of gray in between.

Today's India is intimidating. There are no tigers left for Jim Corbett to shoot, and the  people responsible, are probably scarier than anything Mr. Corbett would sign up to shoot. The gray mountains of  Ruskin Bond are dug up for iron and steel that can be shipped to China for the cheap bicycle in my neighborhood store. R.K. Narayan's Malgudi has a few high-rise buildings now and I hear the local MP is pitching for a three lane bypass to the six-lane highway, where the archaeologist, Dr. Bandhopadhyaya, dug up the Roman statue. And, Mr. Khushwant Singh is writing about what it means to be old, in an India, that is getting old.

Stay tuned, I will be here, sharing my thoughts of the India that I love and miss. More later...