Priti Talkies

The train, huffing like a tired animal, slowly came to a halt. The cradling motion of the coach vanished and so did my sleep. Crouched on one elbow, I opened my dreamy eyes to a familiar sight. My father, all shaved and dressed, was sitting on the front berth reading the morning papers and sipping his sugarless tea. This constituted his daily morning ritual and he followed it religiously – irrespective of situation or circumstance. It never surprised me to see him ever so relaxed and at home on trains. He was, after all, an official of the Indian Railways - making trains his natural second home. I sat up and gazed out of the glass window, expecting nothing new from the view. To me, every station looked the same, every platform identical and the “chai wallas” AV perfected clones of each other. Though the train had stopped and other passengers were busy alighting, I knew it wasn’t time to get off. An unwritten tradition of the service (undoubtedly a residue of the colonial past