Catching the Ranikhet Express

In Search of a Narrative

My girlhood had been spent in Naini Tal, in a world typical of a north Indian colonial hill station. This world consisted of elite Anglicized boarding schools, modern hotels, horse-riding, yachting, polo tournaments and picnics. It belonged to a culture that was a fluffy pancake tossed out of a western kitchen and patted down on one that was rooted in age-old pahari traditions and the folklore of a mountainous terrain that for centuries had allowed for subsistence culture alone. Though I had schooled here, I had not really known the Kumaon hills at all. Yet, growing in me was a need to understand something apart from the pristine beauty of these hills or my own youthful memories in a boarding school. Oddly enough, it was an illness fifteen years ago, and subsequent convalescence that spurred me to seek out an excuse to be up in the hills again. To smell the sweet crisp mountain air again and to discover them anew. But i needed a reason to be there, an excuse to spend time in the hills. I was a researcher in search of a story, a writer seeking narrative--but what could it be--I did not know enough about the hills really. In my formative years, local Kumaoni history and folklore weren’t part of school curricula as that of far-off Europe such as the Crusades, Renaissance and the British Industrial Revolution were.So what did I really know about Kumaon? 

I quickly realized I would have to look beyond the worlds that I had inhabited thus far and bypass all that I had been previously familiar with. I would have to also ignore the colonial traditions that had been slow to wear off in the first few decades after India’s independence and look for what had long lain beneath. This involved observing the underpinnings in the life of the ubiquitous pahari seen at every other bend of the hill road. Wearing a black topi and a black jacket, a black umbrella tucked under his arm, and a saffron and rice tilak encrusted on his forehead, he could be spotted sitting on his haunches smoking a bidi, or on a bench at a chai shop. All I knew was that he was part of the industrious workforce of the U.P. plains, meeting his family’s needs by sending money orders back home. Almost till the 1980’s, every government office in Uttar Pradesh had a Kumaoni clerk, every dhabha, a Kumaoni chotu and every hostel, guest house, institution or office, a guard called Bahadur as the Nepalis who came to the plains via the routes of Kali Kumaon were called. Little more was then known.

Catching the Ranikhet Express from Old Delhi Station, as I had once caught the Kathgodam Express from Lucknow, with a steam engine decorated with painted ‘Homeward Bounds’ made by school boarders, I plummeted straight to the last railhead of Kathgodam. The train has always been an overnighter, broad gauge or narrow gauge, since the early years of colonial rule when it stopped at Lal Kuan. You fell asleep in the summer heat and dust of the plains only to wake up to spy that compelling sight of the mountains in the distance in the morning. In a short story I had once written called ‘Coming Home’, I had described just such a train journey:

It was early morning by the time the train drew in. Before dawn broke he would be at the window. He would gaze out of the heavy iron bars of the old first-class compartment, ready to catch the first rays of light as they pushed back the charcoal of the night sky. The smell of soot hit his nostrils and flecks got into his eyes, but he fluttered his eyelids and thrust his face as far out as he could to feel the fine fresh wind blowing against him. He would look closely at the landscape to see if he could spot distant hills, afraid the train might have been cheating on him and all the while pulling in the opposite direction……….

At Kathgodam, a choice awaited me; buses and taxis plying to Naini Tal, Bhim Tal, Almora, Kausani, Pithoragarh….where was I headed? And who could my travelling companion be? Someone I could spar with or unburden my fledgling thoughts upon?