Spice of Life: Chugging back in time to connect with bygone era

Cleaning up a long-neglected closet can be a rewarding experience in more ways than one. Closets harbour treasure troves of memories besides the dust and the cobwebs spun by the quintessential hard-working spider. My labour of a monotonous Sunday evening saw me cleaning up a closet in our living room, which no one had apparently touched in more than two decades. Amid plumes of dust and the violent sneezing and coughing, I hit upon the yellowing pages of a book whose title page had long been lost in the vagaries of time. I discovered that it was the Indian Bradshaw, 1956, the integrated railway timetable for India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

My mother, now in her late seventies, looked curious. She was, almost immediately, immersed in the yellowed and crumbling pages. Soon enough, she found the page where the train schedule for the Haripur to Taxila rail line (in present-day North West Frontier Province, Pakistan) was printed. I could see her eyes well up with tears as she read the name of her birthplace, Kot Najibullah, a small station on this route. She recounted how her father, working in the Indian postal department, used to travel to Haripur every morning by the 8am passenger train.

The erstwhile Frontier Mail, which ran from Peshawar, in present day Pakistan to Mumbai, on the Indian west coast, was the train that brought back my late Nana Ji from Pakistan into India across the Radcliffe Line after he had been separated from his family, back during the days of the unfortunate partition of our country in 1947. It occupied a pride of place among the trains that connected Northwest Pakistan to Mumbai.

I flipped through the pages and hit upon the schedule of trains from Delhi to Jaipur, which was a meter-gauge track at that time. There it was! The Pink City Express! The luxury train was much sought after back then. I distinctly remember the specially designed exterior and interior of the train, which reflected Rajput architecture and was coloured I different hues of pink. I had travelled on this train when I was 11, awestruck as much by the beautifully crafted interiors as the speed of the train and the serpentine view it provided when traversing the bends of the rail track.

These days, the power of the internet and easy accessibility of the device called smartphone, has virtually pushed the Indian Bradshaw into oblivion. But these epitomes of the modern era just cannot recreate the memories associated with the yellowing pages of the Indian Bradshaw. One closet might indeed reveal an ocean of memories and much more!

The writer is a Jalandhar-based psychiatrist and can be reached at gulbaharsidhu@rediffmail.com.