On travelling sleeper class...

Ironically, the more I travel by AC three-tier on our trains, the more I begin to appreciate the pleasures of travelling plain sleeper class. This is although, or maybe precisely because I’ve been travelling quite a bit since December. Which has been eleven train journeys in all, of which only five were completed in sleeper class. And two of these were night journeys from Coimbatore to Chennai and back en route to Calcutta recently. So that makes it nine long distance journeys (eight of these being at least 1500 kilometres long), three of them in sleeper class and the rest by AC three-tier.

Why, what’s wrong with AC three-tier, you ask? It is, well, suffocating. One is so completely cut off from the sights and sounds that one associates with train travel. You can’t look out of the window, and even if you are on a window seat, you have to really wonder how it is on the other side of the tinted glass. Is it sunny or cloudy? Is it cold or warm? Is it really windy or just the train trying to live up to its reputation of being an express? AC travel does not help you with answers to these questions. Nor does it let you enjoy the tadak-tadak of the train, as it rolls along the rails. Mind you, this is the most fundamental aspect, the very essence of train travel, this tadak-tadak sound. It is to a train what aum is to the soul. It is a sound which has to get inside you and touch the very bones to give you the thrill that comes of travelling by train. Equally thrilling is the rumbling of the train as it crosses a bridge. The longer the bridge the more exciting it is. (My favourite is the crossing of the river Krishna just before Vijayawada when one is northward-bound. As a child I loved to peer all the way down at the river-bed with my head pressed to the window, and enjoy the kick I got at the way my head reeled!) Unfortunately, such thrills stop short of an AC coach, which is more or less acoustically sanitised in this matter.

I haven’t even mentioned the countryside yet. Isn’t that the most exciting part of travelling by train? For me, it certainly is. When one sets out from Coimbatore to Mumbai by Kurla Express, the train snakes its way through the Kongu region with its beautiful paddy-fields ringed by coconut palm trees. There are lovely farms with groves of coconut and occasionally, mango. The soil is black – you can see this from the fields that have just been ploughed. At Salem, the route branches off from the Chennai line, and the train chugs away towards Bangalore. The countryside here gives you a sense of isolation, and nature overwhelms the settlements, which grow increasingly few and far between. The stretch up to Hosur is remarkably beautiful, with its undulating terrain and the hint of woods here and there. As the train makes its way into Karnataka, then Andhra, and finally into Maharashtra (where it makes its entry from the Solapur end), the soil grows red, brown, blackish and then brown again while the tiled roofs of houses in the countryside are replaced by thatch, slate (particularly around Gulbarga) and once again, by red tiles. The fields give way to waste land and craggy hills of rock before agricultural land claws its way back up to the tracks. And then there is the beautiful stretch, the ghat section between Lonavala and Karjat, where the large number of tunnels is as great a source of delight as the breathtaking valleys.

Often, when you wake up from your siesta and begin to wonder where your train is, a sense of geography is offered by vendors and the myriad wares that they are presenting for sale. En route to Delhi, bhelpuriwallahs doing the rounds of your coach quietly proclaim the train’s entry into the Telangana– Vidarbha country. Nagpur announces its proximity in oranges being sold in bagfuls. Agra and Mathura are indicated by boxes of petha, the sweet for which the former is especially famous. On the Mumbai route, the Lonavala chikki serves as an easy marker of one’s geographical moorings.

I always feel it is easier to slip on and off for food whenever the train halts if one is travelling sleeper class. Here too, the food on sale on the platform gives you a good idea of where you are. Maharashtra (also northern Karnataka) is vadapav-land. The northern stretch towards Delhi, particularly beyond Jhansi is aloo-puri pradesh. And south of Maharashtra, you know you are in familiar territory when your eyes fall upon hawkers vending idli, dosa and omelette on the railway platform. Further south, particularly from Vijayawada downwards, the cuisine turns more discriminating. Omelette gives way to biryani, thayir satham, lemon rice and even puliyasatham. The larger food stalls in Vijayawada, one must not forget to mention, may offer piping hot pongal or idli-vada, served with excellent sambar-chutney, if you are lucky. Such pleasures may not be yours if you are travelling air-conditioned class. For AC coaches are generally positioned at one or the other extremity of the train, which means that you find yourselves at a far end of the platform, with no food-stall (or bookshop) in sight. You are thus, more or less entirely at the mercy of the pantry car.

With sealed windows and regulated temperature, AC travel is synthetic, artificial. Not infrequently, one may end up with somewhat troublesome co-passengers, who being unfamiliar with the ways of using the linen offered to them, may actually end up using that of their fellow passengers’. Such a misfortune befell me twice recently during my travels.

Travellers in sleeper class, it seems to me, are quite free of the stiffness that one may find among the upmarket passengers of the AC coaches. One of my recent sleeper class journeys was from Delhi to Coimbatore by Kerala Express. For company I had a nun who could speak only Malayalam, two young chaps - Malayalis working for the Arya Vaidya Pharmacy here in Coimbatore, and another couple of Keralites, a 20-year old girl and her older male companion. It was great fun, although I was the only one in the group unable to speak any Malayalam! When I missed a meal on the first afternoon, the nun fed me with tamarind rice and onion pickle. And the next day, believe it or not, we all played snakes and ladders, a game I hadn’t played in years! How singularly entertaining an otherwise silly game can be when played in a group of six on a train!

For all my noisy tomtomming of sleeper class travel I must, at the end of this post, acknowledge the bitter truth that sleeper class coaches are nowadays overrun by roaches and rats. For all his financial wizardry, it appears that the Hon’ble Railway Minister is now up against a challenge that is oxymoronically speaking, both modest and menacing. Perhaps it may help if he were to ensure that trains are thoroughly cleaned and fumigated before they set forth on their long jaunts across the country. At any rate, as a result of the humble rat and the humbler cockroach, my sleeper class journeys turned out to be a terror at nights, with the latter crawling all over me and nightmares of the former biting through my luggage playing on the mind all the time!

So now you know, for all my rants about the pleasures of sleeper class travel, why I travel the way I do!