As the visitors from the north arrive on pilgrimage tour (like Chaucer’s palmers in The Canterbury Tales) they alight at the eerie, silent railway station in Srivilliputtur where one can hear one’s footsteps echoing back. During the days of the British Raj, the sahib engineers arrived with land survey maps, theodolites, engineering tools and khaki bags much to the surprise of the natives. They were there to lay rail lines to connect the town with the rest of the nation.
One day, as they were pick-axing and toiling under a white-hot summer sun, there came a cowherd with a plaint. He pleaded with folded hands in supplication to English babus not to fix the lines through the town, as the hooting of the steam engine would shock their livestock and that cows would not yield forth milk. The British were more kind to the cows than to men and hence told the workforce to lay the tracks a full five kilometres off the town limits.
Hence began the painful ordeal for the folks of the town. A self-seeking villager brought discomfort for the entire locality. A traveller destined for distant journey ought to hire a jutka, haggle with its driver to reach the station. When the bed and baggage were heavier, then the horse-driver raised his fare.
Far detached from the heart of town, the spot is unmanned, unvisited almost all the day, barring its dutiful staff. Just a train from Chennai, arrived in the foggy mornings and two trains at night. The one at midnight that goes south to neighbouring Kerala, became the favourite carrier for rapacious women smuggling rice bags.
Being a secluded spot, the railway station became the safe transit point for loading rice or any other commodity unlawfully. Tall piles of jaggery in sacks stood on the cement platform diffusing sweet aroma around to everyone in the vicinity. It was a daily night humorous drama to see station cops chasing women smugglers to extract hush money. When the Quilon Mail would arrive too weary, exhausted, the freight-in-charge men would hoot noisy orders to load the jaggery sacks. Harlots would board the train seeking clients wantonly. Almost every traveller was sound-snoring and sleepy as the train itself was. The guard would blow the whistle and wave the flag in all disgust.
As a millipede the mail would wriggle into the dark-cloaked night and the station would return to be a god-forsaken spot. The station-master would then quit calling it a day. The mystical silence, vacant spacious platforms, unoccupied cement couches, red-eyed signal lamps, buzzing of sonorous chicada, pitch-dark night faintly illuminated by twinkling tubelights remain permanently etched in my memory.
On nights such as these one’s senses are jerked by the occasional howls of curs tearing the thick pall of silence. The station’s features, setting, milieu and the orchards beyond in the east, have many a times inspired the pen in my hand. There is a force that pulls one to that milieu every day.