To Bombay

He could see the railway station at a distance and he smiled, the initial enthusiasm had waned and as the dark southern sky lit up with the rays of the sun, he was worried that he would be discovered and they would hunt him down to the station. He had gambled upon the fact that his family would think that he had once again gone off fishing along the river and would return by breakfast time. He was sure that there was a train for Madras in the morning. He had to get onto that train, then they would never be able to find him.

The brown and silver soot covered coaches of the Madras-Travancore Mail stood steaming as he entered the platform. He had decided to not buy a ticket and risk the journey to Madras. He loitered along the platform till it was time and the engine gave a weary shrill and tugged at the coaches. He jumped into the unreserved bogie and found himself a corner near the exit. Screaming and shouting people, one hundred of them speaking a cacophony of Tamil and Malayalam, surrounded him. He tried to merge into the crowd by making small talk with a priest who was vary that someone would run away with his bag and clutched it as if hanging for dear life. The ticket checker came in at Quilon and decided that the no one in his or her sane minds would want to travel ticketless in the crammed bogie and left without a word. Ravindran had heard that if no checker came in after Quilon then no one would ever come till Madras. He had made mental notes of what ever Chandran had told him. The swaying of the train lulled him into sleep and he slowly sank to the floor and dozed fitfully. The next day he reached the rush and sound of Madras. He washed the soot off his face and hands and ate a wada for a paisa and then walked along the filthy platform in search of the train to Bombay. The Bombay that Chandran spoke so much about, the yellow and black cars that one could hire for the whole day and the Gateway of India where men held hands of fair Parsi women. Where one could occasionally see a few white pale men walk away to the seedy hotels with young boys. Who returned a few hours later with a few twenty rupee notes and a swagger. Chandran had boasted that he worked in a tyre company that gave him two meals and a hundred rupees every month and a place to stay. In Bombay he said that there were people who would give you a full five rupees if they were happy.

Ravindran smiled as he thought of the fortune that awaited him, Chandran was a mere dropout, he was a matriculate and that did have a lot of weight. He asked a few people about the train to Bombay. He had never traveled this far and in his mind there were stories of people who lost their belongings and then having to beg and steal to survive. He had read about the communal riots that had taken place in Madras that year, sane people had killed each other. His village too had Muslims and they always were welcome to come and have the Onam feast and he also loved the payasam they served during Eid.

The Madras Mail to Bombay was a tired train with rusted bogies that competed with the regimental brown and red of the Indian Railways. Ravindran decided again to push his luck and not buy a ticket, he knew that if caught he would have to spend the night in some lockup but his two hundred rupees were important to him to save. He did not know how long it would take for him to get a job in Bombay and until then he had to survive. Chandran would not be able to feed him everyday. Even if he did, some day Ravindran would have to repay the debt. He feebly entered the unreserved compartment. The heat of Madras threw a stench out of the loo and it hit the nostrils in a blast of ammonia from a thousand piss streams across the steel hole. Ravindran wiped his face and clutched his bag closer as he tried to accommodate himself between two men who resembled tough ring fighters.
Several hours into the journey, Ravindran had settled into the languorous pass time of watching the same men play cards. He tired to make sense of the game and started asking simple friendly questions to the friendlier of the two Mudaliar brothers. Vadararaja was the one he adopted and soon enough he was involved in the ebb and flow of the game. Vadararaja took a liking to the fair skinned Malayali boy and asked him at Renigunta whether he was running away from home. A shy “yes” from Ravindran evoked guffaws and then a somber warning about Bombay. He then told Ravindran that in case he wanted any help in Bombay from the police or the people, to get in touch with him. Ravindran impressed Vadararaja by the scrawl in English and then settled to a meal of Sambar and rice, sponsored by the elder Somashiva Mudliar. The journey from there on was pleasant.

When the night got unbearable, Ravindran went and stood near the door, the plume from the smoke stack rose into the sky and pasted everyone with a fine coat of coal dust. His clothes were now streaked with black and gray. He imagined himself in Bombay and a couple of times dozed off. He then took to reading the names of the tiny stations that passed along the way, Cuddapah, Adoni, Raichur, Mantralayam Road, Yadgir, Wadi, Hotgi, Solapur. He occasionally would buy a tea to keep awake. The climate got colder as the train blazed across the peninsula towards the hills of Sahyadhri.