A ride in the engine

It rumbles down the tracks of steel, gasping and wheezing an overpowering metallic breath as it decelerates behind me. It is an old engine, a one-eyed behemoth towering over me from so close, a good bit higher than the mental image one acquires from distant sightings. I was standing right beside the tracks, walking carefully along the stones when this monster came crawling to a stop directly above me, just before the signalpost.

It is late afternoon, and Pune city is busily returning from work across the curving silhouette of the bridge leading to the Blue Diamond hotel. Distant horns and smoke from the jhuggi cooking-fires register dimly on the consciousness. A few others are walking beside the tracks on the other side, across the ten or more lines that lead into Pune station. The grass has faded along the well-trodden path where it meanders next to the parallel symmetry of the shunting cables running along the tracks.

I can see the engine driver through the window above me. On impulse, I hail him and he turns to look at me - thick black spectacles on an unshaven visage - he beckons me up the ladder into the cabin. There are two men in the coach, one standing in front of a large lever and other controls, while the other, whom I had accosted, doesn't seem to be doing anything. The man at the helm is the driver and the other an assistant driver, as I soon found out. You entered the engine driver's hierarchy as assistant driver, and went through Goods driver, Junior driver (lesser passenger trains/locals), to eventually become a Senior driver, and only then were you entrusted with the mail and the express trains.

It is an electric engine about thirty years old - Hitachi model WCM-4. Originally designed for high performance traffic, it has seen many years of service hauling express trains, but now that it is old and spare parts unavailable, it has been relegated to goods train duty. On the windscreen hand-painted letters proclaim "80 Kph", but the speedometer goes up to 160. Superfasts like the Shatabdi express have more powerful engines like the WAM-4. Yes, most of these engines are now built in India - except for the generators, which are often British, though he can't vouch for the AC engines like the WAM-4. Here it is all DC; even this bulb. 1500 Volts of it, along those overhead lines. Oh no, heaven forbid, the bulb is only 110V, and the motors are all 750V.

"Come, let me show you the engine room," offers the driver. We go through a small door into a narrow corridor smelling like electric heating elements being used after a long time. Large machines with grey cowling hum behind green-painted meshes. Altogether the six "regenerative" motor-generators produce 3600 hp. Here, this is the high-tension room, which he does not open. This is a bank of resistors - intense heat radiating from behind more green meshing. More motor cabinets and then we pass through another door onto the rear cabin, identical to the front, with a full complement of controls. We stand here a few minutes, soaking in the wondrous symmetry between front and rear, and then we walk back through the narrow aisle, the machines brooding over us and crowding us from all sides and the naked bulb glinting dimly where a trickle of paint has congealed into a bead of motion. We stoop across the low door and are back in the cabin again.

The signal has turned green in the meanwhile, so our driver releases the brakes and we shudder forward, Wadia College to our right, crossing a tile lettered "193," (the kilometrage to Bombay). Moving cautiously at 20 Km/h, we pass under the pedestrian bridge and rumble through Pune station on the second line, between the main platform and platform 2. The light is red but there is this tiny orange lamp below the main light, which modifies the red to mean "proceed with great caution." The next one is the same. Two in a row means we are headed for a shunt, where the train rattles and jolts across the tracks into the station yard. We stop a little distance from a traffic underpass watching from our elevated perch while city life in its different dimension passes underneath. We will be here for a while since half the train will be detached. The guard will move from his rearmost coach to the new guard coach, already in position in the middle of the train.

The drivers are quite friendly. I am welcome to remain on the engine with them - well, I have no plans - maybe I will go along for a few stations. They are quite pleased, although I am sure this is strictly forbidden in the rule book that they take their drivership examination from. Along with the majority of rules unleavened by individual initiative, this is a rule that is not taken seriously. IDEA: Such are the ways in which laws are transformed into impotent phrases under societal neglect. A few rules, and it is easy to see why each is important; a thousand petty instructions and it becomes impossible to distinguish he necessary from the convenient, and the whole edifice appears unsound.

I decide to write the diary while sitting in the assistant driver's seat. "No, no, no problem at all," he says, palms held forward - "please sit down and write, by all means". He will in any case be nipping down to get dinner from his house nearby. The driver also gets off and chats with friends from the nearby cabin, through whose second story window you can see the huge levers that operate the shunts through intricate mechanical systems of rods and hinges.

They are as curious about me, as I am about everything here. They can't quite fathom my status. A professor, recently returned from America, in brown shorts and sneakers, boarding the train from a gap in a hovel - what kind of creature is this? I am visiting TCS on Mangaldass Road? Oh who hasn't heard of the Tata's. I work with computers - how impressive!! There are four colleges in Pune offering BSc in Computer Science - and he names them. Wadia, Ferguson, SB, and another one he forgets. Computers are definitely a craze in India today, and classes and courses in computers are burgeoning. Perhaps he knows someone who recently went through the College Admissions process, which in India, can be quite a life and death matter.

The coaches have been shunted now and we start moving again, passing quickly past Shivajinagar station. A local train has just left and a number of people are crossing the tracks. The assistant driver tells me how these "trespassers" cause "too much tension," and I agree, seeing how long the braking distance is. A milkman stops just short of our track, his brass milk container shining in the twilight. The driver blows the horn and it jolts me, reverberating all over the small cabin, but the milkman stays exactly where he is: his position has been honed over many trespasses, and he is sure of his bounds. The engine driver knows that he knows, and so does everyone else, but it is a ritual, this blowing of the horn, talisman of an uncertain camaraderie.

The sun is quite low now and you can see some lights here and there in the distance. Khadki is the next station, and I ask to be let off there. No problem, they say - they will be going through the yard anyhow....

The shunt into Khadki yard is heralded by the same red light with its orange sidekick, and we turn left over the shunts, crawling along at 10 kph. The assistant driver explains, for the third time, and with increasing gusto at each retelling, how the train has no steering wheel or handle to maneuver during turns, swaying with his torso to simulate the turning of a scooter handlebar. It does seem rather eerie, this turning without steering - a sense of helplessness and religious dependence on remote powers.

Suddenly, my reverie is cut short. There has been a serious mistake - one that could have caused an accident. The line we have been shunted onto has a low carriage standing ahead of us and we can barely make it out in the approaching gloom. The driver stops the train well before any danger but the error cannot be denied.

Apparently the cabin has also realized the mistake; there is a man in khaki waiting beside the tracks with a many-sided lantern. He jumps into the cabin even as the train is slowing down. He asks the driver to back up the train and looks back, leaning out of the door. This is a delicate affair, since the train is quite long, and there is no communication between the engine and guard, making it essentially a blind run.

We move VERY slowly, back under the pedestrian bridge that no one uses, past the road crossing where the piled-up traffic wonders patiently why we are backing out, and finally past the shunt and back on the main line. All the time, everyone is leaning out and looking backwards. Here another man with a lantern waves us forward as soon as they have shifted the shunts appropriately. We move slowly, on to the empty track, overriding the bright red signal under the immediate authority of the swinging lantern ahead of us. The traffic at Khadki crossing is a little restive by now but this is a land that is used to waiting so no one really minds.

"Isn't this a serious irregularity?" I ask the engine driver.

"Of course it's a serious offence. If I filed a written report some cabinman would almost surely be suspended," he says. "But you know, we are all railwaymen, and after all there was no accident anyhow... in the long run, sab adjust ho jayega - everything will even out."

The word adjust and the related notions are omnipresent in the India. There is something deeply Indian about this, almost spiritual, the faith that things will find a balance, that a little inconsistency here and there is quite normal. Without it, life would certainly be unbearable in a country of such stark inconsistencies.

I ask the driver if he knows how the mistake occurred, and would it not be wise to investigate it so that it does not happen again - Galti hui kaise? But he simply nods and moves across to peer out the other door, looking back along the length of the train.

Evening has fallen. It is Khadki, time for me to go. A streetlight with a yellow bulb illuminates the faces of the bicyclists waiting for the gates to open. A few men are sitting on the far platform under the bridge, smoking bidis like fireflies. The train slows and I step down gingerly from the engine deck, the light from the cabin illuminating me for a moment. Immediately I am engulfed in the Deccan night, and stand on the uneven stones of the railway tracks as they wave back at me from the bright windows of the engine. I watch them go a long way, a point of yellow light slipping under the overbridge, past the platform, onward to its lonely vigil across the ghats.

The gate opens and life surges through, honking and jostling across the tracks. It is just another summer night in Pune.