TO STOP TRAIN PULL CHAIN

From my earliest childhood days, when my younger sibling and I were in boarding school in Bangalore, going home for summer and winter holidays meant catching the overnight Madras Mail from Bangalore Cantonment Station, arriving at the crack of dawn in Madras Central, spending the day with our uncle and aunt, and then taking the long, two-night journey to Calcutta by the Howrah Mail to join our parents, and tearfully returning to Bangalore and school post vacation by the same route in reverse. The journey was nearly as long as that opening sentence. To those of the present generation, I am talking about the 60s when Chennai was Madras and Kolkata was Calcutta. As an aside, it is instructive to note that The Telegraph newspaper still stubbornly sticks to Calcutta on its masthead. Bully for it, say I.

During those long train journeys, I had plenty of time to ponder on the meaning of a metallic sign nailed to the laminate surface on top of the window in every compartment. The legend read, in prominent red capital letters, TO STOP TRAIN PULL CHAIN. Underneath the sign in much smaller letters were the words ‘Penalty for improper use Rs.250.’ This was at a time when I would have been travelling on that same route annually during the age of between 9 and 15. I am sure that sign still exists on our trains with a greatly enhanced penalty component. Initially, the exhortation meant nothing to me. It was just something that was in every compartment, like the rusty fan that never worked, and my innocent mind paid no attention to what it was trying to convey. That said, those words were embedded subliminally in my sub-conscious even if its implications eluded me. Incidentally, I was reminded of all this while watching a British crime serial that involved the main characters travelling by train in their green and pleasant land, and the camera zoomed in on that very sign. Only the ‘penalty for improper use’ was expressed in pounds sterling. No surprise there as they were the ones who first built the railways in India.

Back to my contemplation. After a while, still in my teens, I was moved to analysing the import of that statement from the railway authorities. Why would I wish to stop the train, I asked myself, and how would pulling the chain achieve the desired result? What was the intricate mechanism involved? What mystery lay behind yanking that chain in one compartment, resulting in the entire train coming to a juddering halt? The penalty part of it, which was printed in much smaller letters, escaped me completely. The conundrum consumed me as an existential question, a Brechtian dilemma. Not that I knew what existential or Brechtian dilemma meant at the time. At first, I considered the sign as a personal invitation to stop the train, some kind of sporting challenge and in my naivete, as children tend to do, thought the Rs.250 would be given as a reward to anyone who was able to achieve what most people felt was an impossible task. The word penalty did not register. ‘Uncle, Uncle,’ I asked the elderly gentleman sitting across me in the compartment, ‘Can you stop this train by pulling that chain?’ He replied that it should be possible but that he had never come across anyone who had actually tried it. He went on to elaborate that he had read somewhere that one person did pull the chain, just for a lark. The chain broke, the train did not stop and he ended up paying Rs.500 as the cost for replacing the chain.

As is the practice on our trains, the ticket inspector came along to inspect our tickets with his ticket-punching implement. My fellow traveller, the elderly gentleman, with a glint in his eye told the inspector his young friend (meaning me) wanted to know what would happen if he pulled the chain. The taciturn railway official, without saying a word, merely looked daggers at me as if to say, ‘Just try it kiddo, and see what happens.’ I kept mum after that and flatly refused to speak to my senior citizen for spilling the beans and implicating me. Sneaking, we called it in school; just not done. Some hours passed as we chugged along the vast, baked southern countryside, crossing Andhra Pradesh, when my neighbour offered me a boiled sweet. It was a sort of white flag and I decided not to be churlish, stopped sulking and accepted the sweet. Now that normal service had been resumed, in a manner of speaking, I decided to ask my much older friend an ineptly worded question. I must have been 12 years old.

‘Uncle, have you flown by plane before?’

He looked amused by my query. ‘You can’t fly by train, can you? Not by this slow coach, anyhow. Yes, my young friend, I have flown by plane, as you so colourfully put it. Why do you ask?’

‘I was just wondering. Is there a sign somewhere inside the plane saying “To Stop Plane Pull Chain?” Or pull or push a button or something else?’

My nameless uncle guffawed like he had never heard anything so amusing in his life. I got no answer but he proffered another boiled sweet and our relationship was back on an even keel. That boiled sweet represented a peace offering. Kids have this habit of asking silly questions, but how else were we to learn that you cannot stop a large, passenger aircraft in mid-flight.

Things have changed over the decades. Kids are no longer kids. They are more like pint-sized adults. They do not ask silly questions; a lost innocence. They clutch a tablet (not a medicinal pill but the gizmo with a screen) and are totally absorbed in its arcane secrets. Cut to 2025. I was flying from Bangalore to Chennai, a short haul. Sitting next to me was a 10-year-old girl absorbed in her black screen, playing some computer game or the other. I decided to make polite conversation.

‘Hullo young lady, what is your name?’ No answer. She must have been instructed not to speak to strange men. I try again. ‘You seem to be playing some interesting video game. What is it? Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?’ I thought she’d be impressed. Instead, she frowned and went ‘Tsk, tsk’ like Mr. Bean and fell silent again. I thought I should take the hint and proceed no further with this one-way conversation. Just then, the little squirt piped up.

‘Uncle, you won’t understand.’ Gosh, it speaks and what am I? An antediluvian relic? I did not actually use that term as she would not have understood. Instead of which I said, ‘Try me, why don’t you? I might surprise you.’

After another one of those interminable silences that pre-teen, preternatural kids are so expert at nowadays, she turned to me and said superciliously, ‘Uncle, you are so antediluvian. I am playing Little Big Planet Series on my tablet. For your information, in Little Big Planet, kids like me solve puzzles as Sackboy, a humanoid made out of burlap. Harry Potter is so yesterday. Duh!’

After that “duh” there was nothing more to say. She virtually dismissed me from her presence. I buried myself in my Times crossword puzzle. Structures that grow into flowers – 4 letters. Hmm, this needs thinking.

‘BUDS,’ cried the little girl. I didn’t even know she was peering into my folded newspaper. Abashed, I thanked her and wrote as dictated. For the first time, she smiled and offered me a green-coloured jujube candy – her version of my railway uncle’s boiled sweet of several decades ago.

I felt like stopping the plane, but there was no chain to pull. Or button to push. It was going to seem like a long flight despite the short haul, but there was a saving grace. I nailed Large, flightless Australian bird – 3 letters. I quickly wrote down EMU before my precocious companion shouted out the answer. Wordsworth it was, I think, who said The Child is Father of the Man. I now understand exactly what he meant.