Sometime back I received a video on one of my family Whatsapp groups. This was a small documentary about Sanskrit scholars who had settled down in the villages on the banks of the Tamarabarani River in Tirunelveli district in Tamil Nadu a few centuries back. They were fleeing muslim invaders, most likely the Mughals and fled to preserve their culture and way of life. These scholars are today most likely known as the Tamil Brahmins who are my ancestors. When I saw this video, I was instantly taken back to a conversation I had with my paternal grandmother a few weeks before she passed away.
We were travelling back to Bangalore from Sringeri, after a wonderful trip to celebrate my cousin’s thread ceremony and we stopped at a place, whose name escapes me now for a break. That was when she told me, possibly in passing, that her ancestors originally came from either or someplace close to Nagpur in Maharashtra and then moved to someplace in Karnataka, where they settled down for a few centuries before finally moving down south to settle on the banks of the Tamarabarani in Tirunelveli district. So when I saw that video, I immediately thought of my ammama and was very sad that she passed away before I really got to know her as an adult. I did some research on this and this is probably true. I also found writings which said that Tamil brahmins probably came down to the south from either coastal Andhra Pradesh from the Godavari basin or coastal Karnataka. This ties in to what my ammama told me.
I was very close to her and I was her favourite, maybe necause I was her first grandchild and was named after her. I am also told I resemble her a lot, both in looks as well as in temperament and in the way we look at things. I have only seen her in the traditional tambram saree called the Madisar and when I wore one at my wedding, pretty much everyone in the room, including my parents and extended family said they felt I looked like her. She loved reading and was interested in history. I really wish we had some more time with her so I could get to know her as a person, speak with her as an adult and learn more about my family.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any written family history, and those who knew the oral history have passed away. This is a very sad thing and I wish I was interested in this a lot earlier, when I could have perhaps gotten to know my own ancestral history a bit more.
While this is not really memories of my grandmother, when I read about things like this, I remember her a at that point in time and have a happy smile the rest of the day.
There’s something special about travelling by train. While I have travelled quite a bit in India, I have not travelled by train outside of India, so this blog post will be about train travel within India.
The Indian Railways is the world’s largest railway network by size, with a route length of 95,981 km as of March 2019 and is the word’s eighth largest employer employing about 1.4 million employees as of 2015. It runs more than 20,000 passenger trains daily, on both long-distance and suburban routes, from 7,321 stations across India.
The railways, a product of British colonisation has been in India since 16 April 1853 when the first passenger train ran between Bori Bunder and Thane between downtown and the suburban Mumbai of today. Today Bori Bunder is the majestic Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus or CSMT, which locals still fondly call VT Station or Victoria Terminus in honour of the Empress of India, Queen Victoria.
As of 31 March 2019, the Indian Railways has electrified 50% of the route kilometers and 46% of the total running track. The first line to be electrified was between what is today the CSMT station and Kurla station in Mumbai’s suburban rail network way back in 1925.
The longest train route on the Indian Railways is the Dibrugarh to Kanyakumari Vivek express which covers India lengthwise from Dibrugarh in the north-east in the state of Assam to India’s mainland tip of Kanyakumari in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The train covers a distance of about 4,282 kms in approximately 80 hours or roughly three and a half days, traversing eight Indian states. It crosses the states of Assam, Bihar, Nagaland, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu & Kerala. Another long distance train which also covers a distance of 4282 km is the Dibrugarh to Okha Weekly Border Service which travels across the breadth of India, from the East from Dibrugarh in Assam to India’s western borders, ending at Okha in the western state of Gujarat. Both these trains are currently tied for the 24th longest running trains in the world. The longest running train in the world today is the train that runs from Moscow in Russia to Pyongyang in North Korea. This train travels a distance of 10,267 km and if you travel from Moscow to Pyongyang, you will take approximately 206 hours or about 8.5 days!
Another interesting train on the Indian Railways route is the Navyug Express, a weekly train which runs from Mangalore Central in the south Indian state of Karnataka to the holy city of Katra which houses the very revered Mata Vaishno Devi shrine in the northern Union Territory of Jammu & Kashmir. This train takes about 68 hrs to cover a distance of 3,685 km and in this process covers about 14 states and union territories of India, viz. Jammu & Kashmir, Punjab , Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Puducherry(Mahe), Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala & Karnataka.
What I find most fascinating is that parts of India I never thought possible to connect have been connected by train and this connection is an end-to-end connection. For example the train which plies the route from Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan to Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu. Both are not big metro cities and the fact that there exists a demand for a fully airconditioned train, the Humsafar Express between these two cities is a measure of how popular and engraved the Indian Railways in the psyche of the Indian traveller.
SourceThis is the closest I could find which corresponds to my memory of a coupe from the 70s
I have numerous memories of travelling by train. In my childhood, most summer holidays would be spent in Bangalore with my paternal grandparents and at some point when my maternal grandparents moved to Chennai, we would first travel to Chennai, spend a couple of weeks there and then take an overnight train to Bangalore to spend the rest of the holidays with my other set of grandparents.
I don’t have much memory of my first train travel, but have some fuzzy flashes. This was way back in the seventies and I must have been around three years old. I was travelling with my parents and my sister who must have been a toddler at that point to New Delhi. I do remember travelling in a coupe compartment. A coupe is first class compartment at a time when there was probably no air conditioning in the train. Today’s coupes are first class airconditioned compartments. My memory is very fuzzy for this trip, but if I think hard, I have flashes of memory of being in a closed compartment with my parents and sister and can see the scenary flying by.
My biggest memories, however, are of the Udyan Express which is superfast train running between Mumbai’s CSMT and Bangalore’s City stations. The name is because Bangalore is called a Garden City and is famous for all the green spaces in the city, Udyan meaning ‘garden’ in pretty much all Indian languages. The train is probably 30 odd years old and I remember travelling from the time it started. Before this train started, there was no end-to-end service between Mumbai and Bangalore and you had to take trains on the Mumbai-Chennai route and get down in a station called Guntakal and then transfer to another train which took you all the way to Bangalore. I think this route between Guntakal and Bangalore used to be meter gauge while the Mumbai-Chennai route used to be broad gauge.
Once, when we were young adults, my sister and I travelled alone to Bangalore. We took what was a fairly new train then whose name escapes me now. That train used the Konkan Railway route and took a coastal route to get to Bangalore. I have searched quite a bit for the name of this train, but maybe this train has been either discontinued or merged with another train. I remember it being a very scenic route with lots of greenery and we passed many smaller towns and cities, unlike the Udyan Express which used to pass through mostly farmland and barren parts of Maharahtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. If anyone knows what is the name of this train, please put it in the comments below, I would love to know.
I loved travelling in the second class sleeper compartment where the windows would be bitterly fought with my sister. Both would want the window seat and if we were lucky to travel nice travelling companions, we would both get a window seat, otherwise, it would be up to my mother to play referee. The second class sleeper has six seats with three across each side and then across the aisle, two more seats. Most years, we would go ahead of my father who would join us later during the holidays. Also the sleeper class berths meant that the middle berth pulled out from the back rest of the lower berth and this also used to be a point of contention between us. After a few years, I started disliking the middle berth and used to want to sleep in the lower berth and my mum used to take the middle berth with my sister ensconcing herself in the top berth where she could sleep to her heart’s content.
I can’t sleep while travelling, so I was my family’s guard at night. Everytime the train stopped, my sleep would break and I would wake up. Because there was no airconditioning in the sleeper class, we would sleep with the windows open and a steel slatted cover over it. This, because there used to be heavy thefts in this class as the door used to not be locked and anyone can enter the compartment anytime of the day or night. The camadarie that you used to find in those days travelling by the sleeper class can’t be found today. We used to make friends during the 24 hours it would take to get to our destination and there are times when those fleeting friendships used to be continued. This is a time without any smart devices, not even mobile phones, remember and the only way to pass the time during the trip was to talk to people and share stories about your lives. We also didn’t have a lot of access to books and we would purchase a few magazines to read during the journey. Then you hope that your co-passengers would also have some reading material with them which you would then exchange to read. We would also play a lot of card games as well as games like anthakshari or similar games. And then when your destination arrives, you would smile at your new friends, promise to keep in touch and more often than not, slowly glide out of their lives.
My last train trip in India was this year during my India trip where we did back-to-back two trips, both overnight. The first was from Chennai to Thanjavur and the second from Mayiladuthurai to Bengaluru. Both trips were in AC 2 tier and this trip made me realise that I am growing old, I prefer my luxuries, slight as they are. The children were absolutlely fascinated by these short train trips and have been asking me when we can do this again. One train I absolutely want to travel in and in first class no less, is the Rajdhani Express which connects Mumbai to New Delhi. Rajdhani which means capital was meant to be a series of passenger trains which connect state capitals to India’s capital of New Delhi. This series of trains gets the highest priority in the Indian Railways network and is also considered as prestigious and premium, so when this train travels, it is not allowed to stop at any signals, other lesser important trains get shunted to the nearest station to wait and to make way for the Rajdhani to fly past. We were planning a trip this December, but with COVID-19, this is not possible and given how dire things are, I really don’t know when we can travel on the Rajdhani.
Something I love doing is watching train videos on YouTube. There are many people who patiently stand on the doorstep and share with the world their train journeys and each time I watch these videos, I am reminded of how much I love train travel. I also think if I was still living in India and younger, would I also be like one of these vloggers?
Travel is such a fascinating thing and you learn so much when you are out of your comfort zone. Train travel on the other hand, is a great equaliser, you meet such a diverse group of people in your travels that like it or not, there is some learning every single trip.
Childhood memories are the dreams that stay with you after you wake up
As I grow older, I start remembering old memories, so I thought I will start putting it down here just as a way to preserve these memories.
As I look back, my first memory is that of my grandmother. I have written about her before and she is someone who has really shaped me. I was the first born grandchild on both sides of the family (maternal and paternal) and was quite pampered until my sister came along a couple of years later.
I miust have been around 3-4 years old and one afternoon was with my mother who was buy vegetables from a vendor on the road outside our building. I now can’t remember why, but while she was busy haggling with the vendor, I quickly darted across the road. Those days not many people owned cars in India but somehow at that very exact time, a car drove on the road and I was probably knocked down. My mum was frantic and someone quickly went up to my home and got my grandmother. There was a doctor’s clinic just opposite our building and just where I was probably knocked down. I was quickly taken to the doctor who advised that the wound which was superficial and just below my left eyebrow be stitched up. My grandmother flatly refused saying what if something happened and my eye got hurt. Even today when my eyebrows are shaped, you can see the faint scar that remained from my accident when I was a toddler. Nothing really happened to me and I was ok within a day or two.
Another memory I have is of my sister. She must have been around 2-3 years old and I was about 4-5 years old. She was and has been incredibly bold as a person. On a Sunday evening, my parents had taken us to Dadar for shopping. This was in Dadar which has this bridge which spans the train stations of the Western and Central railways and the corresponding Dadar stations and which connects what is called Dadar TT (called because a long time ago the trams used to terminate here and so TT stands for Tram Terminus. The trams have gone for a long long time, but even today that circle is called Dadar TT) and Dadar BB (I didn’t know why Dadar BB was called that until I did a Google search. It seems that since the western line which it lies on was part of the Bombay & Baroda & Central India (BB&CI) Railway, hence the BB. You learn something new every day).
This incident happened either on the bridge or just after we crossed the bridge to the western side. The road and market was quite crowded and my parents had a tight grip on us. But while walking, we suddenly realised that my sister was missing. My parents went crazy looking for her and starting looking frantically. After a while they saw a police chowky (a police box which is usually there in crowded locales so that the police from the local police station can do crowd control and keep an eye) and went to ask the policeman stationed there if he could help. He promised to check and told us to come back to him in a while. After searching unsuccessfully for another 10-15 minutes, we went back to the chowky to see my sister there waiting for us!
What happened was she suddenly found herself alone in the crowd and wanted to use her brain. She went to the nearest adult she could find and told him that her parents were lost and that if they could help her. She was lucky that the person who found her was a decent man and he took her to the police chowky and handed her over to the beat policeman who knowing my parents were looking for her decided to keep her while waiting for them to come back. My parents were so relieved to find her and found her ingenuity brave that she pretty much got away with slipping from my mother in the first place.
This story has now gone down in my family lore and my parents and grandparents (when they were alive) used to dish it out so many time! I am sure her children have also heard parts, if not this story in its entity. If not, I am going to tell them the next time I meet them.
One more story from my school days. Last week I was speaking with GG and BB and we started talking about sports days in school. BB’s school usually alternates between sports day and cross country running every other year and so I shared some stories about sports days in my school.
In my school, sports day usually happened in the second term, which would be after the winter holidays (you could not schedule anything before that because of the Mumbai monsoon) so it would be sometime in December/January.
Our primary school races are the standard ones and happen without much fanfare. It’s the Secondary school that has all the fun in my opinion. I’ve mentioned before how our houses are allocated and during the main sports day, one half of the stadium is split into four parts – each section for a house. So we generally sit in our house section and not with friends, because that day it’s house loyalty before family and friends.
The sports day would usually be on a Sunday and would start around noon. Once we reached secondary school, we would go on our own and my parents would come by later to pick us up. It’s usually a festive air there with hundreds of school girls screaming and shouting.
There’s fierce competition to see which house comes first and a blackboard in the centre of the field will usually have the current point tally going on. The prize for the best house, in addition to the champions trophy is the honour to lead the march past at the end of the sports day and this would be fought relentlessly.
The house I was allocated to, Shenaz or the Green House used to always win the championship and we used to lead the March past each year. I can only remember one year we did not. I must have been in grade 5 then and was the first time in the Secondary bleacher when this happened. What happened was unprecedented in the history of the school. Three houses were joint first and since three houses can’t march together, they had to toss and Godafried or the Red House won the toss! I can still see the red house captain coming excitedly to the stands to the house teacher and shouting that they were going to lead the march past while our captain walked by crying. We were second in the march past that year.
In the last few years in school, I used to get pulled into the march past contingent. We used to march wrongly while practicing thinking we will be kicked out, but no such luck for us! Being in the march past meant that we had to wait all the way till the sports day ended and could not sneak out earlier.
But it also meant a month or so of missing the last few periods in school going for march past practise in the garden behind the school. As I type this, I can hear the commands in head and the one arm length we had to stand behind each other. We used to wear a strip of ribbon in the house colour on the sides of our white shorts (we were one of those rare schools at that time who had to wear white shorts for PE and sports) and a cap in the house colour.
I just checked my school website and Shernaz is still continuing to rule, they are still overall champions, though some of the uniforms we used to play in has changed over the years. The march past is no longer in shorts, but in black long pants and they wear a house tee shirt over it, while we used to wear our school uniform shirt. The cap still remains and the school head girls and captains and vice captains all wear black long pants and a blazer (with the captains and vice captains also wearing the house cap). During the the I was in school, they all used to only wear their usual school uniform. And we also have a school band now! That looks so much fun, wish that was there when we were studying too.
The march past would be like in major sporting events. The head would be the school head girl carrying the school flag with her deputies behind her followed by the junior head girl and her deputies. Then we would have the first contingent which would have one girl (usually a small grade 5 girl) carrying the house name, followed by the house captain with the house flag and her deputies behind her. Behind them would be 30 girls marching in three columns. This would be followed by the house which came second and then the third house and the last house bringing up the rear. We would make one circuit of the stadium and the guest of honour would get the salute after which would be the prize distribution ceremony including that for the best march past contingent (which I can’t remember us ever winning). We would go home late evening, tired but happy with the day. The next day would be a holiday from school which was very warmly welcomed by all.
As with other school memories, this post brought many smiles to me as I went back decades to relive my school days. For more stories about my school, click here and here
Do memories become stronger as you grow old? I wonder about this because these days I have been thinking about my childhood a lot. So here’s another memory for your reading pleasure plus for me to browse when I am old and probably senile.
A small background before I start – when I was young, I remember my dad telling me that our area was designed to be an educational hub when the city of Bombay was being expanded. So if you draw a circle of around 2 km diameter around my home, you will find many educational institutions like schools, colleges and even higher educational institutions. This includes my dad’s alma mater as well as the school me and my sister went to.
This memory is around the time I was about three years old. Since we had many schools in our vicinity, it’s quite usual to see students on their way to school in the mornings. Growing up, there were many people around my age group (give or take five years) in my building and when I was around three years old, they were all in school too. My mum was handling me and my sister who was a toddler around that time. We also had a fulltime mum’s helper named Maria who would come in the mornings and go back in the evenings and her main job was to help my mum look after two young children and play with me. Maria stayed with us for about two years and then left as she was getting married. By then I started formal school and my sister was also slightly older so my mum was able to manage without a helper.
When I used to see my friends go to school and also see all the children going to school from our home, I also decided that I wanted to go to school. However, the school my mum had decided for me would only take me in for Kindergarten 1 at the age of four which was still a year away. I have spoken more about the discussions and arguments my mum and grandmother had in deciding the school I would attend in a previous post.
I started throwing mega tantrums about going to school and used to create a ruckus at home because I wanted to go to school. Exasperated, my parents decided to send me to a school which was literally next door. This school would allow me to get into Kindergarten 1 or Junior KG as it was known in Bombay then. So I started going to school and was thrilled. I think I started school after the formal term had started because I don’t remember wearing the school’s uniform and used to wear my normal clothes to school. Most days, it used to be either my mum or Maria who would take me to school around 8:30 – 9 am and bring me back around lunchtime.
I must have been a model student there because the teacher who used teach me remembered me right around the time I was in college and would ask my mum about me when she met her on the streets. I used to be so touched when my mum used to tell me about her encounters with the teacher. Someone who in her career has taught thousands of students who pass through her class still remembers this one girl who was so determined to go to school, even though she was there in her class for less than a year. I actually have no memories about this teacher and don’t remember her name or even face.
