The Kingdom of Railway Tracks.

By Amit Sen Gupta

If railway stations are like a microcosm, an enclosed cosmos, a world within a world, a destination which is eternally ephemeral, a journey which has just begun, a journey more crucial than the destination, a song on a radio, the smell of tea boiled hard in mud kulhars, the green flag of the guard with his exquisite small room, the smell of coal earlier, now diesel and iron and rust and shit and piss on the tracks, the windows which keep falling, the sound of bridges like a mechanical tonga multiplied with a thousand houses, the night train of mystery through blinking little huts and sudden bridges and the smell of mustard flowers, Freud's dream sequence, the absence of longing and its arrival when the train stops in an 'outer' destiny where no one wants to get down because it's a strange place and an unknown place, and a strange fear stalks you, and the temptation of the unknown grabs your subconscious; if railway stations tell the truth of the city-states or village landscapes which open up outside its enclosures, its journey through the railway tracks into and outside the suburbs of big cities are a pointer to the stink which we carry our souls as planners and architects and designers and administrators and journalists and photographers and civil society activists and die-hard Indian railway fans, which I am and will remain forever. Any journey, any destination, and the story is the visual narrative of minus sub-humanity, below the most abject dehumanisations of living realities, the quagmires of filth and dirt, the open air shitting, the women moving their faces away, the plastic bottle along, long expanses of absolute degradation of life-conditions, physical conditions, the half-brick house opening to a vast slush with one million mosquitoes and pigs, thousands of Indians waking up to the stench of absolute decay, brushing their teeth with their fingers, with tooth powder, while the radio blares the songs of early morning resurrections and ads selling the consumer industries good faith, the nightmare of daily life, showcased in this dawn of arrival and departure, the slow realisation of life's value, and worthlessness, and abject despair, the sheer stink of this excreta which floats with the pigs and the nullahs just outside the kitchen where the children ease themselves, as bare in the winters as in the summer, the naked and the alive, in these dingy suburban existentialism of life's division of labour, dignity, pluralism, democracy, the defeated humanity of the golden city, chasing a dream as little as the dream, a hygienic dream as it was in the villages back home, where the next outburst of starvation or suicides or drought or hunger or flood chases them, especially those who have neither land nor bread nor a pucca house. They have only their hands and their legs and their big hearts and they buy a general compartment ticket and they enter this labyrinth of sub-human synthesis, alienated and in awe, but hard working nevertheless, outside the nuances of the nation-states, diplomatic protocols, non-alignment, globalisation, cricket victories and losses, per capital income, the gross domestic product, FDI and stock scams, their eyes shining with hope when they close it to let a dream pass by. The day begins… the nullah and the backwaters are flush with slush … beyond and outside the remixed song of the sexy India, the latest touristy sex spot, the sex capital, the farm house romp, the model cottage industry, the page three daily night show of voyeurisms, all the beautiful people, food, fashion and fun; and here, outside, on the suburbs of the big metros, next to the railway tracks of coming and going, beyond the beauty and the glitz of the glitterati, in patched and thatched and hatched polythene, blue tarpaulin and aluminium tenements, protected by asbestos and bricks and bottles and garbage, shitting on the tracks their daily morning prayers of nationalism and redemption.