When I’d started writing this series, I hadn’t imagined that I’d be at Part VI by the time I actually came to the part that seems to symbolize the title. To be honest, “Road out of Tehatta” doesn’t really mean the highway that leads to Krishnanagar. It means a lot more than that, as would be obvious from the previous parts. And this part is by no means the last. Yet I’m writing this, so it must have something to do with the title right. Right. A lot with the title.
You see, Mersault takes the bus back to Algiers with a sense of having to get back to work. The bus I took back home, on the other hand, was one that took me away from work. It took me away from the free life of hardship and glory to the comfortable one that I had been used to for all my life. It also took me away from the simplicity of life in Tehatta – where everything existed in a binary of survival and work – to the far more complex existence that was, and is, Kolkata. The city, or the megapolis as I call it, included my research, my social life (including my girlfriend) and a good amount of other things that I didn’t have to worry about in Tehatta. I was moving towards a complicated comfort.
Not that I regretted any of it. Moving towards home is a theme that has been romanticized by many poets, not least by one of my favourites, Amy MacDonald in her “Road to Home”. Timeless classics like Caledonia speak of coming home from faraway places, a feeling not very different from what I felt while heading back towards the city.
In fact, in a way I felt I was moving back up the ladder of civilization. Before you begin thinking that I’m disparaging Tehatta for being uncivilized, I’m not. I’m simply saying that life there is not so complicated. In my scheme of things, my college would be located in a village, amid lush green fields and little else. Then I would come to Tehatta proper, a town that had the ambitions to become something much greater. Then came Krishnanagar, and other cities like Ranaghat and Barasat, which were cities or polis. They were large bustling beasts, but none could compare with the highly complex queen, Kolkata. Kolkata, no matter where you lived in West Bengal, was the core of everything, the megapolis.
Most people living in the megapolis harbor a singular dichotomy between the city and the village. This is why they try to take kash-flowers and place them in fancy earthen pots in the middle of a bustling city. Sure, the same is done in villages. But in villages, such flowers can be found in the vicinity. They don’t have to be artificially implanted in a setting that long forgot what nature truly looks like. Again, they head into the villages for picnics during winters. Here they post lovely stories about the heritage of Bengal, her unique culture and the way centuries have passed with little change. Oblivious to how governments, policies and even seasonal changes constantly keep village folk on the edge of their beds (and beds they are, not charpoys), these city folks speak of the timelessness of the villages, harbouring all that is good in society, against the corrupting influences of the city.
Such people are whimsical idiots. But once I was one such idiot, believing that the village was just a polar opposite. I have never been particularly interested in villages for their timelessness, to be honest, but I was still part of the mold. And I remained part of the mold as long as the journeys I took involved air-conditioned coaches with pre-fab meals and desperate attempts to connect to the internet so I could reach facebook or whatever the fuck I wanted to access.
These journeys to and from Tehatta however, were different. For one, I wasn’t simply travelling between two well-known destinations. Rather, I was moving from a small place, to a bigger one, to a still bigger one. So I had to understand each place and make it serve my ends. This was especially important because time was vital. People heading to the villages can stop and admire the fields all around them if there is a jam on the highway. I found little to admire in lush green fields, and anyhow seen too many such fields to be particularly impressed by them during jams. More to the point, I probably had the next day, and the one after that, already planned out and a delay meant I would be reaching the city late. If I did so, I’d end up on a different train, and everything else would be delayed.
This was so especially because the journey from was somewhat different from the journey to. For one, I usually returned with some of my colleagues. These colleagues weren’t fixed, since they also went to different places at different times, and would join me according to their itinerary. What I actually got was a revolving cast of people, each with their own preferences and ideas about how the hidden forces behind the transportation system worked. At first, I saw them as beacons of knowledge in a vast desert of danger – danger to timings and physical energy reserves that is.
As time went on though, I soon realized that some folks’ conception of time was a bit too rigid for me. I needed some amount of comfort. This was the reason why I had chosen to stay in Tehatta for part of the week. So hanging onto overhead rods in a bus chock full of folks, or getting knocked about by vendors and passengers on a busy train while holding onto the clothes-holder shaped overhead supports, was just not my cup of tea. Naturally, the details of the journey back evolved along with my ideas (and those of my co-travellers).
Initially, I used to book the hazarduari back to Kolkata, ensuring that I reached the station by 7pm, when it arrived. I intended to take a quick rest at my camp before heading out to catch an evening bus. Things quickly backfired though, and I found myself rushing to Howlia to get a bus that would take me to the station in time. And I barely made it in the end.
Thereafter, I junked the idea of taking a quick rest and instead decided to head back home just after finishing college. Initially, this meant catching the Bama-Khyapa, or one of a number of special buses that had a reputation for getting you to Krishnanagar fast. Almost all of these were of the Karimpur variant, and depending on the time, you had to catch the bus, irrespective of the crowding involved. On some days, such crowding was excessive and it was a mighty pain to dance to the bus’s tune in a cramped setting.
In fact, the very first time I headed back from Tehatta, I learned what crowding can do to you. I had to submit my salary documents to Krishnanagar in order to initiate my salary payments, and had been allowed to leave the college somewhat early by the OIC. I took a toto to the bus stand (PWD it was I think) and caught a bus to Krishnanagar. Back then I used to carry two bags – my old backpack and a bag in which I carried clothing and other necessities of survival. On this occasion, the bus was super-crowded, with the conductor assuring me that a seat would be found for me sometime, at some stop. Being rather credulous, I boarded and managed to place the backpack in the overhead holder. But there was no place to keep my clothes bag. For one whole hour, I was forced to hold onto the bag as it slid under me, surviving curses from my hand and anyone who wished to move up or down the aisle.
Such experiences were repeated later as well. As I learned though, asking people where they would disembark and keeping your bag as light as possible were among the few things you could do to make your life a little easier. Also, you could try and catch buses that would not coincide with the school closing periods. That could be earlier than the school timings or later, depending on how much work you had on that particular day. Much much later, I also learned that you could catch the Palashipara buses from Jitpur more itself, and get a much better chance of landing a seat just after embarking. Eventually, I settled for the Chandana, a yellow and green beauty that allowed me to avoid the school rush and also ensure that I reached in time for the train.
Coming to the train, I realized that getting the Hazarduari after catching a train with my colleagues meant waiting at the station for anywhere between 1 and half to 2 hours. This was clearly not an optimal way of doing things. To push things up from the sub-optimal, I began catching local trains. They were marginally cheaper (a lot cheaper in fact, but at those prices, everything does seem marginal). Trouble was, you could catch a train at 4:26pm and then one at 6:32pm. Between them was the Lalgola Passenger, which was a royal pain to be in. For one, the train pulled in chock full of people who stayed on and made you navigate the aisles with the expertise of a gymnast. Getting a seat on the Lalgola was akin to winning a state lottery, and naturally, people like me were seldom even on the drawing list.
As time went on, I also realized that the 4:26 had the same problems. For one, it attracted horribly large crowds, and getting on them was a veritable battle of champions. People who wished to climb up had to stand on either side like gladiators entering the ring, as those already on the train got down. Then there would be the stragglers, who (barring children and women) would be dragged down and tossed away. Now the real battle began. The most athletic pranced into the coach and rushed to catch the best seats (and reserve as many as possible). Next came the second rung – people like me who were young, could do a fair bit of wrestling but didn’t have the skill needed to be at the top. We pushed in after them and rushed to take the middle seats. The remainder – the old, the infirm and anyone who had chosen to stand anywhere except the exact place where the coach doors stopped – had to clamber in at the end and get the “fourth seat”, ie the one where half your ass is on the seat and the rest is dangling dangerously off the edge.
The 4:26 was the clearest example of this. On days when the masters of the race were in the hunt and were on my side, I would get a rather decent seat. On days when they weren’t and I had made it to the station well in time, I would get a decent seat. On days when neither checked out, I would be sitting on the fourth, wondering when one person would leave and I would get to move up. Not that that always checked out. You see, Indian trains don’t have a charter of manners. So, people getting on after you would “reserve” seats one through three and when one got off, you still remained on the fourth. I’ve done my fair bit of fighting to civilize these idiots, but in a country where you get to ride a train legally by paying just 43% of your actual fare (as declared by the railways themselves), how much change can you expect?
Anyhow I realized that even with all these problems, the 6:32 was a far better option. On more than one occasion I could get a window seat even without being a pro local train boarder. Even when I did not, the cooler climes of the evening and the generally more laid-back attitude of fellow travelers made it a far more pleasant journey. This was, in terms of trains, the ideal to be aimed for.
If that failed, there was the 7:22pm train. This was an even less crowded train, since there was wide consensus that people with families should not get home later than 9 in the night. On this train, fighting for window seats was far less, and unless you wanted to actually get hold of the window seat in the direction of the train, you wouldn’t have to fight at all. People lazed around and looked detached from the goings on around them, as if resigned to the berating their wives would inevitably give them for getting home late. Or maybe they didn’t have wives, and instead were casually wondering if they had enough stocks of alcohol in order to imagine the company they might have had if they had checked all the social boxes up to that point of their lives. Or they were like me, who were wondering whether the train would move fast enough for me to get to the metro station in time for the 9:55 metro out of Dum Dum.
Now there is a huge debate over whether it is ideal to return home by train or bus. There were no train lines running to Tehatta, and one bus at least was part of the entire journey of each one of us. But beyond Krishnanagar, the debate intensified. I had found that catching a bus allowed you to relax and enjoy a far more airy journey, even if it didn’t save a lot of time. On the other hand, the proponents of buses constantly complained that buses were riskier, wasted more time and were less comfortable compared to trains. Their arguments regarding time I accept, but the rest ?
I mean, compared to the hard-plastic seats of the trains, you’d be far better off even on the narrow seats of the average long-distance bus. And if you were lucky to catch a government bus, you’d have a large single seat to share with your co-passengers. Unless you were traveling with someone the girth of me (no comments please), you’d have plenty of space even if you were travelling on the middle seat. Also, the buses had seats all facing in the direction of the bus, and on average, the windows were larger than those on the trains. So it was a far more comfortable journey in terms of ambient temperature, even if you spent a substantial part standing.
How did I realize all this ? Courtesy of another subset of my colleagues. These were the people who lived closer to Tehatta than I did, and found it more convenient to travel by bus than train because trains would usually force them to catch another toto or bus to reach home. Over time, I realized that once you got a seat on the bus, there would be –
a. No one standing in front of you
b. No one asking you to give more space
c. A window near you, even if you weren’t on the window seat
d. Emptier aisles due to longer distances between stops
e. Lesser babies (I have a personal dislike of screaming babies on public transport).
Exceptions existed, and more than once I had to take a bus at 6 in the evening, hanging onto the second step and waiting desperately for Phulia to arrive so I could get some space to stand. Then again, there were days when parents encouraged kids to puke so they could have seats. Urggghh!
But within six months of joining Tehatta, I had moved from the Hazarduari to local trains and then to buses. Starting out with some variant of the Gouranga from Pantha Tirtha, I would reach Kolkata within 4 hours. Combined with the one-hour bus ride to Krishnanagar (Pantha Tirtha lies on Krishnanagar’s stretch of the National Highway), this made for a full five hours of travel. Could I save half to one hour using the train? Yes, but why should I ? I’d rather prefer to come home at 9 than at 8:30, because, you know, I don’t have a wife yet.
Eventually, things got into a rhythm. I learned that there was one special bus that ran from Mayapur to Kolkata, carrying all sorts of devout and almost bald people. This bus stopped at Pantha Tirtha but you really had to run in order to catch it. And catch it we did, including the times when you had to throw the cash into the toto driver’s hand and run to the bus before it left.
And then there was of course, the legendary direct bus. I’d been told that such a bus existed, but I hadn’t believed such rumours. Until I saw it myself. A CTC bus (now CSTC), this ran from Karimpur to Kolkata, with a half hour stop at Pantha Tirtha. Once you caught it and got a seat (usually not before Krishnanagar), a Rs. 100 ticket would get you directly to Baguiati. In other words, the multi-stage five hour journey was melded into a single one, and you didn’t have to worry about getting seats again and again. Also, since each change of vehicle introduced another element of delay and uncertainty, this bus was the most direct and time-saving solution I could find, even though it didn’t save a lot of time over the trains on the days when the trains ran on time.
But this essay isn’t simply a long story about how I got from one vehicle to another. That would be immensely boring, and also would tell only half the story. Hence, I would leave out the running over the tracks to catch the train or toto, the endless waiting when trains came late and the smart tricks I learned for getting seats on trains and buses (beyond the ones I’ve mentioned). Instead, let’s talk of what the journey meant to me.
For one thing, it meant going home. The journey was long, and thinking about going home all this time could be a bit of a bore. So, I had to think of other things, and not ones that I would do when I actually got home. Instead, I would look at the rapidly darkening horizon and the houses beside the highway (or the tracks). What did I think?
I wondered what those people were up to. Most of them would have smaller worlds, ones which did not include much beyond their own homes. I had learned that the farther you went from cities, the more the people became localized, rooted to their homes and localities in ways that would be unimaginable to city folk. In cities, you are constantly on the move. I myself have lived in half a dozen cities, and more houses than I can bother to count. But these people have lived in the same region for generations. Women would marry and move to the husband’s house, and then that would become their permanent place of residence. Women worked much less than men, so these places would grow on them till they became the homes with which they identified themselves. Men on the other hand, would work some distance away from their homes. On rare occasions, these would be large cities like Kolkata, but would more often be the surrounding areas. There they would have networks of relatives and friends who would be interested in specific things. Discussions would revolve around the local, with some amounts of the national and even the international thrown in. But their worlds would be small, tidy and with a finite set of concerns.
Then there were the people idling during the beautiful red evenings. I had been one of them myself during my younger days. I wasn’t usually idling so much as playing something. As the sun’s warmth reduced, we would descend on the grounds and play cricket, badminton and whatnot. We would play and chat and laugh as the evening moved from the light yellow to the inkish black, before heading in and doing such boring things as homework. And think of how we would play again, in school the next day and in the evening, at home.
Maybe the people I saw had such thoughts. I knew for a fact that people in the villages had a far greater love of sports. This was necessary for basic survival, and also because a lot of the jobs they sought – police, ITBP, etc – required a high level of physical fitness. Sometimes I wished I could join them. Surely they would play better than me, and would have some choice slang for my lack of skill. But that would still make my happy, for I would be going back to my days in school.
I also saw people sitting and chatting on rooftops. Sometimes they would be drinking tea, sometimes playing badminton. They were usually girls, but I saw a fair number of boys too. I knew that these people had probably woken up from a refreshing sleep, and were planning on spending a lazy evening before heading in and preparing for the next day. They had their own worlds, and in their worlds, work and play were all close at hand. They were inextricable parts of daily life, not sacrificed to one another on the altars of unemployment or workaholism. Maybe it was not so rosy after all. But when the sun’s fading glow takes you back decades, things do appear rosy from a CTC bus’s window.
Did I feel sorry for myself? I wouldn’t use the word sorry, for it would mean that I wasn’t happy where I was. Yes, I did yearn for the simpler life, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t want to be where I actually was. For I was going home after having worked, worked honestly and well. I don’t know about other people who work, but for me, going home after work is extremely satisfying. It seems to give me a sense of pride and a right to sit on the seat I am on at the moment. I know that even if I didn’t do anything, I could still take the ride if I paid. But I was going back after doing what society expected me to do. I could hold my head high and relax, and know that I was a contributing member of society.
Beyond that, there was also the feeling summarized by Robert Frost in his poem. Yes, I was going home, but it wasn’t exactly round the bend. Instead, there were miles to go, both literally and figuratively. I would pass across various areas – villages, towns, cities – on my way and maybe I’d get down and change my vehicle along the way. I would interact, very briefly and only in passing – but I would interact all the same and when I did, that would also be part of the overall journey. I was doing what had to be done, and whatever the problems and impediments, I would get home after doing my work. Many would baulk at the prospect, but not me. What I was doing was glorious.
All of this begs the question though – did I like the prospect of making the journey ? Considering it from the Kolkata at-home perspective, probably not. There were too many variables on that journey, and even one of them could serious fuck up the whole journey. What had been anticipated as a comfortable reminiscence of existence would turn into a desperate shoving game for an hour or more. What had been anticipated as a journey to an evening cup of tea would become one to a very late dinner. Above all, what had been anticipated as a relaxing journey may well turn into an exhausting one, both mentally and physically.
Yet all considered, I didn’t regret the journey while on the journey. You could say I didn’t have a choice, but I have seen enough people bitching about the journey they make to know that a lot of people would very much prefer if they didn’t have to travel to work at all. For me, travelling to work has always been part of the work itself. Tehatta was no exception, and while I’m happy that the journey is behind me, I can also say that all that time travelling taught me a lot about life – and reminiscing about life – that I would otherwise have learned.