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BOOKS
Oh,
He's All Steamed Up!
The sound
and snore and pull and push of a vanished romance on wheels
By Geeta Doctor
Followers of the
Aitken saga by rail, by road, by motorbike will no doubt fall off their
rocking chairs in anticipation of another edition. He's good 'un, he is,
a charming old geezer who gets all shook up in more ways than one, when
he starts thinking of his gals, those marvellous iron ladies of the rail-track
whom he has already celebrated in an earlier book, Explo-ring Indian Railways.
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BRANCH LINE TO ETERNITY
Bill Aitken Penguin
Price:
Rs 295
Pages: 280
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This time round he's more selective. He's chosen
to cosy up to what he clearly imagines are the grande dames of the railway,
the Simone Signorets and Eartha Kitts with their husky, throaty smoke-filled
voices, though he actually calls them Lady Chatterley and Dame Clara Cluck,
thereby revealing a hitherto repressed admiration for the nobs-the steam
engines. Aitken's evocation of the age of steam and its passing on the
subcontinent as the ancient engines are shunted into oblivion is rendered
in an appropriately thundering prose. "I have tried," he tells
us in his foreword, "to catch the mood and flavour of these game
old ladies smoking hard on the run as the steam age drew to a close, as
well as indicate the strange elation that even the most superannuated
of branch line locos release when there is a fire in her belly".
Surely there are some mixed signals here, or do smoking ladies also clutch
their bellies while ululating with strange joy?
It's obviously a man-boy thing, this fascination
for trains. This is what makes Aitken's purposeful rambles through the
most remote stretches of the Indian railway interesting. Despite his frequent
descents into nostalgia, mystic mutters about the meaning of life, autobiographical
appropriation (the railways c'est MOI), he is nothing if not an enthusiast.
His appetite for looking up little- known branch lines is prodigious.
He is forever leaping onto them at all hours of the day and night, often
without reservations, most of the time with meagre monetary resources
and once on, he is a delight. He gives you the sound and snore and the
pull, push and heave of his engines as they climb up an incline into the
Sayadris, the Nilgiris, the Himalayas, or cross the mighty rivers of India,
that he has written about, or take him past remote villages with tiny
railway stations, presided over by solemn station masters to stop at various
junctions, the great crossroads of the Indian railway system, where he
is at his best, noting, filing, describing the engines that might have
reached the end of a line.
At his best, Aitken has a light touch. He does
not reveal the monstrously superior but also enormously diverting tone
of a Paul Theroux, who seems to hate every mortal that crosses his path,
nor the surreptitiously note-taking manner of a Pankaj Mishra, but is
content to let things hang. He does not really ask much of the reader
but to cut loose with him, follow him where he goes, a free spirit, who
still needs to look back in hope that the journey has not been in vain.
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