My completion of third grade at primary school was a kind of graduation. For I had to change schools then, as the school I studied - St Francis Anglo Indian School on Trichy Road, Coimbatore - phased out the boys and became a girls-only school. In honor of the last outgoing batch of boys, there was a small ceremony at the school assembly. This is where I got a special mention by the headmistress.
I wanted to become a driver of a steam locomotive.
But I gave up on that dream, and I wonder why.
I used to take a steam-locomotive-lugged passenger train to school. The ride lasted about 15 minutes from Podanur to Coimbatore. On my way back from school I boarded the train from its starting point - Coimbatore. Had ample opportunity to gawk at the giant, awe-inspiring machine with its menacing looks and honk, its belly full of burning fire.
The loud hissing and chugging did not help (the menacing looks) either. But it has managed to remain endearing to children and adults. I always wondered how such a bulk of scrap could move at all! And move it did, so wonderfully, for it was a sight to watch the piston and levers in motion. It was easily a combination of poetry and magic on rails. It has captured the imagination of young and the old alike.
Sir Neville Cardus wrote thus in one of his essays on the game of Cricket:
“Has any true Englishman ever resisted the temptation, while travelling on the railway, to look through the carriage window whenever the train has been passing a cricket field? The train rushes round a curve just as the bowler is about to bowl; in a flash we are swept out of sight of the game, and never can we know what happened to that ball!”
Whenever I read this, I imagine the opposite view. Had I been the bowler, I would have certainly stopped to gape at the train that, I imagined, was drawn by a steam locomotive (as it must have been in Sir Neville Cardus’s times) as it disappeared around the bend.
As much as the passenger enjoys the country side from the carriage, an onlooker enjoys the view of the curling train across the country side. There is certainly something of awe in a train itself, but I would say that this is multiplied in effect when the train is lead by a steam loco.
So obsessed with its grace was I, that I used to drop anything I was doing to run out of the house to take a look at the occasional passing train near my house — for each time the meter gauge train passed the Podanur railway gate crossing, the locomotives were sure to hoot on approach, giving me enough time to get to a vantage point. I have faint memories of getting into a steam locomotive at the Podanur loco shed as a very young child, when Kicha mama lifted me up so that I could reach and tug at the wire that activated the horn — an achievement that makes me proud even today.
Sometimes deep into the night, you could hear a distant locomotive’s plaintive whistle. This evoked the same emotions in me as it might have with W. Wordsworth when he heard the Solitary Reaper sing:
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
But the sound was also strangely so reassuring to me as a child who might wake up in the middle of the night, that everything was fine with the world. That sound of a train passing kept the scary monsters and nightmares at bay.
Perhaps the steam loco brings warm memories of the good times — my mirthful days being young and unbridled; where the world always presented a wonderful kaleidoscope of opportunities and possibilities; where imagination ran free and I woke up everyday to something new and novel.
Memories...
... that are the only remnants of a terrible coming of age, it seems.
On my way back from school, I was usually present early at the railway station to watch the shunting locomotive attach itself to the train. Reluctantly boarded the carriage when it was time to go — yearned all my primary school-going days to ride the locomotive, but couldn’t gather the courage to ask the crew if I could hop on.
Story of my life!
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