I’d been told it was a good idea to get to Burhanpur Station an hour early to be on the safe side, so when I eventually turned in, I set my alarm for ten past three in the morning. I needn’t have bothered—a knock on my door woke me, and I opened it to a young man in a military jacket, his face almost entirely obscured by a head scarf, who identified himself as an auto rickshaw driver booked for me by the hotel desk. The hotel had no hot water, so I woke myself up with a jet of cold water and at four o’clock checked out and stepped into the darkness outside. We loaded my luggage into the three-wheeler auto and zoomed off down silent streets, past new blocks of flats, fully built, half built, and according to the many colorful billboards, coming soon. I saw these signs all over India, each one boasting a new building with a gym, pool, and all the mod conveniences, which reflected the economic boom.
It was cool before the sun rose. I had barely slept from the anticipation of my journey, so the cooler air was a welcome help in keeping me awake. Around us, I saw silhouettes of cows sleeping under awnings and pigs huddled together.
We pulled up outside the station, where a few people sat around in groups and others slept on the ground, blankets pulled up to cover them entirely, which made them look unsettlingly like they were in body bags. Inside, a brightly lit red sign told me the train was an hour late. So much for careful planning.
I had ample time to look around the station from which my first journey to Kolkata had begun. Even though it seemed much the same as I remembered it, some things had changed. I recalled the platform benches were made with wooden slats, including the one I slept on that first night. Now the seats were of polished granite within a wooden frame. Also, while Ganesh Talai seemed much filthier now than when I was little, back then the Burhanpur station had been dirty and full of litter but now was very clean. On the wall there was a poster of a police officer nabbing a man spitting on the platform.
Looking across to the opposite platform, I felt sure it was the one that I’d boarded from, trying to find Guddu. I simply must have traveled south initially, even if I somehow came back through Burhanpur for the northern route. My head swam with all the possible permutations.
A chai man plying his trade on the other platform noticed me looking over and caught my attention. With little else to do, I waved to him that, yes, I’d welcome a cup. He gestured at me to stay where I was, then jumped down and crossed the tracks, balancing my cup on his metal tray. Just as he’d clambered back onto his platform, a freight train came thundering through the station—an awesome, frightening spectacle. In Australia, trains tend to slow down at stations, but here massive trains hurtled through at regular intervals, shaking the platform. The chai man lived with these trains and judged his timing expertly, but how much harder it would be to make those judgments if you were distracted by grief or guilt.
I couldn’t help imagining what would happen if you made a mistake. Was that what had happened to Guddu?
Despite the confusion about which platform I’d boarded from and whether I’d stayed aboard a single train, I still have clear, if disjointed, images in my head of the train journey itself. Clambering aboard and looking for Guddu, then curling up on one of the seats and going back to sleep. Wakening to bright daylight in an empty carriage, hurtling along. I have some memory of the train stopping at least at one point along its route, with no one around, and of always being unable to open any of the doors to the outside. I was confused and frightened, and I suppose it’s not surprising I didn’t keep good track of time. It must have felt an eternity to a child of that age.
• • •
By small degrees daylight came, and people were still arriving at the platform in dribs and drabs—apparently the train’s late arrival was predictable. Some were wrapped up as if the temperature was below freezing—in such a hot place, the dawn cool could be uncomfortable for the locals. They hefted all manner of suitcases, bags and bundles, and domestic appliances taped up tightly in cardboard cartons. As the light strengthened I saw the big water tower behind the station, which had helped me identify Burhanpur from the sky. I was lucky it hadn’t been knocked down or moved, or I wouldn’t have recognized the place.
The Kolkata Mail slipped into the station as dawn arrived. It had already traveled five hundred kilometers in eight hours northeast from Mumbai, on the Arabian Sea. I stood at the point at which my assigned carriage was to draw up and, sure enough, a conductor consulted his list before ushering me onto the carriage, where I found my allocated seat. I didn’t plan on doing things quite as hard as I had the first time around—I’d booked a first-class compartment, which I’ll admit I hoped would be like the Orient Express as per Agatha Christie, but it fell a little short. There were no luxury carriages on this train, or staff in starched white uniforms with gold buttons offering gin and tonics on silver trays. The configuration of the carriages was very similar to the low-class one I’d boarded as a child: sets of single seats facing each other at the window, and across the aisle a sort of open compartment of facing bench seats, which could be used for sleeping. The appointments in this class were better, of course, but the worn maroon leather seats were still quite hard. Fortunately, I wouldn’t have to sit for the whole journey. My ticket also bought me one of the bench bunks across the aisle, and at least for the time being, I had the area to myself.
It’s another mystery that my recollection of my first journey is of my carriage being empty from the first time I woke until its arrival in Kolkata. An empty train carriage in India is unheard of, yet I am certain that mine was. Surely if someone boarded, even a conductor, I would have asked for help. There may have been people traveling in the adjacent carriages, of course, and I wouldn’t have known—I didn’t see or hear anyone else. I had remained sitting in my empty carriage, waiting for someone to open a door. Was the carriage locked up and being hauled off for repair? Did I somehow end up on a work train, not meant for passengers and not a scheduled service at all? If so, why would it have gone all the way to Kolkata?
As the train started to inch away from the platform, I shivered, remembering how this moment had begun the process of my getting hopelessly lost. But I was here to set something right by confronting the fear I’d had and the circumstances back then, and by traveling the distance again as a more comprehending, capable adult. I was also returning to Kolkata to see again the places where I’d survived on the streets, and to visit Mrs. Sood and the others at Nava Jeevan, the place where my fortunes had taken a dramatic turn. As the train picked up speed and cleared the Burhanpur platform, I looked around the carriage and wondered what personal journeys my fellow passengers were making.
When I was a child, air travel in India was reserved for only the most important people: politicians, business moguls and their families, or Bollywood film stars. The railways were the veins of the country—circulating goods, people, and money. Trains brought glimpses of the more affluent city life to our backwater town in the middle of rural India. It’s not surprising that we spent a lot of time hanging around railway stations watching people come and go, making whatever money we could by selling things to passengers— as Guddu did with the toothbrush and toothpaste packs that got him arrested—or begging for whatever they might give us. The railways were our only connection with the rest of the country— the rest of the world as we knew it—and for most people that’s probably still the case.
The trains aren’t terribly fast, though. When Swarnima and I booked the Kolkata Mail, I learned that it averaged fifty to sixty kilometers an hour. My Indian college friends had overestimated typical train speeds somewhat, which was lucky, as it made my original search field larger than it ought to have been, based on my faulty recollection of a half-day trip. Had they known how slow the trains were, it might have taken me longer to get around to searching farther afield. I settled back in my seat, with nearly thirty hours of travel ahead of me.
At first most of my fellow passengers kept to their cabin bunks, catching up on sleep. But eventually people coul
d be heard moving around and murmuring, before curtains were drawn back to reveal traveling families waking up and facing the day.
We had traveled for just over an hour when I experienced a poignant moment. If it was this northeastern route I had been on as a child, I would have passed through my hometown, Khandwa. I knew we were headed there, of course, but rolling into town just as it was coming to life for the day’s activity inevitably made me wonder if I’d been on this train as a sleeping five-year-old. Had I awakened there, I might well have had the opportunity to get off the train and simply go home, presuming Guddu had met some friends or found something he needed to do. I could have climbed into my own bed, disappointed I hadn’t got to stay away with my brother for longer. And then none of the things that followed—my experiences on the streets in Kolkata, my rescue, and my adoption— would have occurred. I would not be Australian. You would not be reading my story. Instead, I possibly slept through a two-minute stop at Khandwa, not far from where my mother and sister were probably asleep themselves, and was transported away from what would have been a very different life, the one I was born into.
As thoughts like these trailed through my mind, the day got under way and the sounds on the train became louder. Each voice had to be pitched to overcome the rumbling and clattering of the train on the tracks. Everybody seemed to have a mobile phone, all blaring with ringtones of popular songs from Hindi films, and there was constant conversation. In the background was what sounded like a compilation CD of many different styles of contemporary Hindi music, including jazz and even what seemed to be Hindi yodeling. Wallahs began their regular trips up and down the carriage, selling food and drink with a sort of chant: “Chai, chai, brek-fist, brek-fist, om-lit, om-lit.”
Stretching my legs on a little walk, I found the pantry car, where cooks stripped to the waist fried huge quantities of chickpea and lentil snacks in boiling oil, as well as mountains of sliced potato in vast vats. The vats and pots rested on bricks and were heated by enormous jets of gas, and the cooks tended them with long wooden paddles—it was amazing to watch them do all this on a bumpy train.
There weren’t any carriages on the Kolkata Mail like the one I’d been trapped in, with barred windows and the rows of hard wooden benches. You also couldn’t walk between the carriages on that train—the doors only opened onto the platform. It seemed more and more likely that on my first trip, I’d been in some sort of carriage that wasn’t in use—the bustle and noise of an Indian train are inescapable, and the chance that the carriage would otherwise have remained empty was nil.
As we traveled northeast, the landscape out the window was as I remembered it—flat, dusty, and seemingly endless—although this time I was composed enough to see some of the texture and details of the place: expanses of cotton and wheat fields, irrigated crops and chili plants with so many chilis on them they looked red from a distance, as well as the usual cows, goats, donkeys, horses, pigs, and dogs. Combine harvesters worked side by side with bullocks and carts, and farmers harvested by hand, building piles of hay. There were villages of tiny brick-and-plaster houses painted in pastel colors like pale pink, lime green, and faded sky blue, with old roofs of terra-cotta tiles that looked like they could fall off at any moment. We also passed through tiny railway stations painted in the brick red, yellow, and white patterns of Indian Railways. I must have seen a few of these when I hurtled along those decades ago; I must have been begging for the train to stop at one. I wondered whether anyone in these fields looked up at a passing train and saw a small face at the window looking out with fright.
I thought about Kolkata, and found that I was more anxious than nervous. Even though parts of it would be full of memories, it would also be like visiting a place for the first time. I was lost in Calcutta, but I was returning to Kolkata. Both of us had changed, and I was looking forward to seeing how much.
Night had begun to descend as I had these thoughts, and by the time I’d folded the seat down and unpacked the Indian Railways linen from its paper covering, it was dark. I lay down on my bunk and found I could still see out the window to watch the lit-up temples, bicycle lights, and house lights flash by as the train rolled on.
With the train’s bumping and swaying, an unexpected sense of well-being came over me. I felt at ease lying there, bouncing along in my bunk amid the chatter of people speaking in languages that sounded familiar but which I didn’t understand. During the day, I’d had a chat with a curious little boy from the next open compartment. He was about ten years old and keen to try out his school English with “What’s your name?” and “Where are you from?” He seemed to be able to tell that I was not from India despite my looks—maybe it was my clothes, or that I didn’t join in conversations in Hindi or Bengali. When I told him I was from Australia, he mentioned Shane Warne. After talking about cricket for a bit, he asked me, “Are you married?” When I said I wasn’t, he told me how disappointed he was for me. “Who are your family?” he asked next, and I found myself hesitating. “My family lives in Tasmania, but I also have family here, in Khandwa, in Madhya Pradesh,” I said at last. That seemed to satisfy him, and I realized that it had also begun to satisfy me.
Late in the morning of the next day, we began the approach to Kolkata. From the vantage point of the train, I could watch how the tracks we were on merged with many others, so there came to be numerous sets of rails in parallel running into Howrah Station. I might have traveled these lines as a boy, but who knows? I might not have managed to get on any that came out to this western edge of the city. There seemed to be an impossible number of lines, which could take a person in every possible direction. I was seeing the evidence that I’d never stood a chance of finding my way back.
The train seemed to speed up now, passing through level crossings where trucks and cars and auto rickshaws waited, with everyone blasting their horns. It wasn’t long before we were deep in one of the world’s biggest cities, along with somewhere between fifteen and twenty million other people. It was 12:20 p.m., exactly thirty hours after my departure from Burhanpur, when the train coasted into the massive, red-brick Howrah Railway Station, which gave me tingles of recognition as we inched up to the platform and stopped.
I had returned.
When I got off the train, I took a minute or two to simply stand in the middle of the busy station concourse and let the crowd rush by me, just as I did back then. This time people surged around me, as they would any adult standing in their way, whereas the last time I had stood here, pleading for help, I don’t think they even saw me. On one hand, I believed that among all those people there wasn’t one willing to take the time to help a lost child. On the other, I wondered whether any other reaction was possible—in a crowd this size, everyone was anonymous, invisible. Why would one upset kid be of any particular interest amid all the activity of the place? And if anyone stopped, how much patience would they have had for being mumbled at in Hindi about a place they’d never heard of?
The station building itself was hauntingly familiar. I’d begged in it, slept in and around it, and spent those weeks making futile train trips to try to get out of it. It had been my home at a most traumatic time of my life. But now it was just a train station, albeit a very big one, and busier than any I’d ever seen. There wasn’t much to gain from hanging around when I didn’t have to.
I didn’t notice any homeless children inside—perhaps they were more likely to be moved these days—but I did see a couple of small groups once I walked outside the building into the brutally strong sun. They had that unmistakable look about them: grubby from street living and somehow simultaneously idle and alive to opportunities, such as begging or stealing from someone passing close by. Could I have ever found myself part of a gang, or had I been too wary or naïve?
It’s hard to imagine I could have survived the streets on my own for much longer than I did. I would have become one of these kids, or dead.
I found a taxi. Before long, I was heading to the hotel my travel agent had
booked, which turned out to be quite upmarket, with Indian and Western food, bars, a gym, and an infinity pool. I went for a swim: at the pool you could lounge around on recliner chairs on the pool deck or swim over to the infinity edge and look out at Kolkata, many floors down and extending as far as the eye could see, with its smog, traffic, chaos, and poverty.
One of the main reasons I’d come to Kolkata was to meet someone who’d played an absolutely central part in my life. Once I had learned that Mrs. Saroj Sood was not only still alive but still working for ISSA, I’d made arrangements to visit her in her office. I linked up with my Bengali translator and took a taxi through the mad traffic, dust, and stink of untreated sewage.
The ISSA office was in a run-down Victorian building in Kolkata’s Park Street quarter, an area with many restaurants and bars and the Flurys tearoom, which people visit for the famous cucumber sandwiches and cake. Amid all this high life and refinement, it’s a center of salvation.
I passed through an outer office, where staff at desks worked through large stacks of papers. Then I saw her, scrutinizing a computer monitor and surrounded by official-looking files in the cramped inner office, an old air conditioner stuck hazardously onto the wall above her—Mrs. Sood. The place looked exactly as it had twenty-five years before.
Mrs. Sood’s eyes widened when I walked in and introduced myself. We shook hands and then embraced. She was now in her eighties, but she said she remembered me well from when I was a child, despite the number of children who had passed through her care since then. “I remember your mischievous grin. Your face has not changed,” she told me in her excellent English, smiling widely. We had last seen each other in Hobart a few years after my adoption, when she had arrived to escort another adoptee.
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