[Reader-list] The stories not pursued at Vijaywada Railway Station

[Meera Pillai]

The Stories Not Written

Connected with my research at Vijayawada Railway
Station is also the tale of the stories I don't know
enough about, and which I cannot tell in any detail. 
The stories that highlighted the fairly constrained
limits of my zone of comfort when I did not pursue
them. 

- The story of the woman in her mid-twenties who sat
for long hours on  Platform No. 6, day after day.  She
sat on one of the pentagonal granite benches that
surrounded  the metal struts that held up the roof of
the station, a forbiddingly deep and inward expression
on her face.  She sat there, seeming to do nothing,
occasionally eating a meal from the packages sold on
the platform that someone bought for her, the
newspaper parcel lined with the beedi leaf plate on
her lap.  She was always fairly well-dressed. Her
salwar kameezes in rich colours like red and green
heightened her dusky colour and the elegant angles of
her face, and rarely drew attention to their faint
griminess.  The field workers who worked every day at
the railway station said that she spent the bulk of
her time sitting on Platform 6.  She would not answer
questions about herself, and even they, who were
familiar with her for a few years now, did not know
her name.  She had tried to beat up one field worker
who had suggested that she might like to come to the
shelter for a change.  She looked well-groomed, and
they told me that in the evenings, she would go to the
taps on the comparatively deserted platform 10 to
bathe. The field workers said that she would
occasionally talk to men, but would get furious if a
woman tried to speak to her.  Even without this piece
of information, this lady gave the sense of a very
dignified self-possession, a very self-conscious
withdrawal that made it seem intrusive to puncture it.
 That apart, I also lacked the courage.

- I also lacked the courage to come face to face with
Kalki Baba, a middle aged man who typically spent
almost all his time on platforms 9 and 10.  Not fully
operational, and used only by freight trains to the
extent they are used at all, these platforms are a
haven for those who are at once on the fringe and
integrally involved in the life of Vijayawada railway
station.  On the fringe because they are not part of
any official plan or activity chalked out for the
railway station, integral because unlike the
passengers and the trains for whom the railway station
was built to service, who come and go, these folks are
part of the permanent texture of the place.  I saw
Kalki Baba at a distance, almost naked except for an
almost negligible loin cloth.  Of medium build, he
sported a greying beard.  He walked up and down the
platform, his body oiled, his hands stroking the oil
into his limbs.  I was told that he never wore more
than his loin cloth, and the comparatively deserted
platforms 9 and 10 gave him the space to be dressed
the way he preferred.  Apparently he did little, and
the young boys who lived in the railway station, some
as young as 10, shared the food that they bought with
their earnings with him.

-The little girl who shied away like a startled wild
animal when one of the field workers in the station
tried to speak to her.  When she saw how comfortable
her companion, a slightly older girl, was, talking to
the male fieldworker, however, she darted back behind
her companion, using her as a shield and throwing
glances at us over her shoulder, responding to our
casual conversation with nods and shakes of the head,
and tugging at her friend's skirt to leave when the
conversation lasted beyond a couple of minutes.  She
looked about seven or eight, was probably around ten
years old, and heartbreakingly beautiful.  I saw her
several times at the railway station, often with her
friend, her feet flying as she darted across the
footbridges or platforms.  The only other time I was a
witness to a conversation with her, I was with a
female  fieldworker.  The child spoke to her, but the
reason was probably not only related to gender, but
also that she was stoned on "solution" - her eyes
completely spaced, as if she had no connection with
anything in the universe.  She told us that she used
two bottles a day, and then left us listlessly to lie
down, her limbs folding awkwardly like a newborn
calf's on one of the corridors on the first floor of
the station.  The field worker also told me that the
girl children frequently engaged in sex work, charging
fifty rupees at a time.

- There was the railway policeman's widow sitting on
Platform One, slightly out of kilter with the world
around her.  Apparently with no one in the world after
the death of her husband, she came to the railway
station, sat there through the day while its complex
life swirled around her.  The cops were kind to her as
she sat there, causing no disturbance, just having a
place to go to during the day.

It turned out that the railway station was a public
utility space in ways not conceived of at all by
planners or architects and railway officials.  It
affords space, shelter, food and companionship to
those not travelling to and fro on the 130 odd trains
that pass through the station everyday, but who just
happen to be at vastly different stations on that
other, more unpredictable journey, life, as compared
to the more conventional travellers.


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