When I moved to the Cantonment several years ago, the first thing I noticed was that about four times a day, I heard a long toot. Upon investigation I discovered it was the sound of a train, either passing through the Cantt Station or announcing departure. It was a cosy sound, reminding me of “The Railway Children”, that wonderful book about a family that lives near a railway station and, amongst other things, befriends an Old Gentleman who takes the 9.15 train every day. The train tooting its horn was my personal Old Gentleman, and it was a reassuring, old-fashioned presence in lives otherwise very modern and mechanized.
The train and the Railways has an intense nostalgia for me, and the recent passing of yet another one of the old guard reminded me of it. I am amongst what a friend and I jokingly call the Railway Grandchildren—a generation of young adults whose grandparents used to work for the Railways. Back in the day everyone lived in Mayo Gardens, that green-jaffry enclosed, tree-lush housing colony on Sunderdas Road. From all accounts life as a railway brat sounds halcyon. Everyone seemed to know each other and when marriages happened one just went from one’s house to the one three doors down. Everyone went to see Peter Sellers films at the community centre, cycled around freely and there was of course the splendid Railway Golf Club with its wonderful, huge pool full of crisp tubewell water. The houses were big and simple, set in huge lawns full of mango and jaamun trees—to this day my mother finds the idea of buying jaamun strange, because when she was young all you had to do was shake one’s tree. The stories are idyllic because it seems to have been a special kind of world, one that is lost to us now. We can’t conceive a world that innocent, belonging as we do now to a meaner, unscrupulous kind of time. Gone are the days of the men (I’m not sure how many women worked for the Railways, although I’m certain there must have been several)who sat the civil service examination and wrote essays on Keats and decided to work for the government. Many educated young men from good families worked for the government in that generation; I like to think it was the momentum of Partition and the drive to make this brave new world work that motivated them. What is remarkable is that motivation lasted their entire careers, seeing these young men tramp across the country inspecting railway tracks, moving with burgeoning families from city to posted city. At one time my grandparents’ house was a converted barracks, with all the rooms set side-by-side in a line; one of my aunts went to a boarding school because that was where she could best prepare for her Senior Cambridge exam.And there has never been, the family narrative, a sense of pious sacrifice or resentment. It was one’s life, and my grandparents never considered their time with the railways anything but what it was: a commitment to a job, and their priority was to fulfill their duty with integrity.
When the wars happened these men, our grandfathers, didn’t enlist, but spent days and weeks and months making sure the railway functioned as best as it could. It is common knowledge that in times of war railways are of paramount importance for the transport of supplies and troops, and these men were on their feet in rain or shine, personally present to supervise what needed to be supervised. Their efforts weren’t without their own tribulations—there were broken limbs and heart attacks, but everyone pulled their weight. Nobody was sent away to a safer city; all the railway families had a trench dug in their huge lawns and retreated to it when the sirens sounded. Everyone was in it together.
The level of honesty and ethics in the Railways was incredibly high, and the standard applied to everyone. My grandfather was once on an inspection tour and found a station master with an unbuttoned collar. He was fired on the spot. Of course later on the man was given a stern reprimand and kept on, but back then it was unacceptable to represent one’s institution in any other way but one’s best. You simply were not allowed to be loafing around scratching your nethers and chatting on the nearest available telephone, and the men running the show set that kind of example.
Those days have passed, and the train no longer toots four times a day. We often drive over the railway lines near our house, and the phatak is always open. I miss the trains and I miss the comfort of knowing there was a time when men and women were good and decent and did their jobs with dedication and took pride in their work. Of course there are people like that today too, but it is truly a most wonderful thing when an entire institution represents those values. To me the train has come to symbolize something dependable and unfussy. There are no airs and graces of First Class cabins on aeroplanes on a First Class bogey. The landscape goes by fast enough to thrill, but not so fast that you can’t wave at people you pass. Stopping at stations is a lesson in the amazingly diverse cities and landscape Pakistan has. The Railways now is in shambles, and the man heading it doesn’t inspire much hope of regaining some of those glory days. But what you can do is take the train someday, and listen to the clank of the wheels on the rails and chat with the people sharing your berth. You can do that on a train, because trains are unpretentious and honest—a lot like the beloved, much-missed grandfathers and grandmothers who were the Railway people.
The writer is a feminist based in Lahore.
m.malikhussain@gmail.com