In Folds Of Smile

Sometime around midnight, the train compartment we were travelling in could have caught fire.

Sparks were flying from beneath the bogie as the train continued moving at full speed. Someone had spotted them near the wheels and raised an alarm. The faster the train moved, people feared, the greater the danger became.

Within minutes, a compartment full of sleeping passengers was awake.

Lights were switched on. Suitcases were pulled out. People began rushing through the internal doors into the neighboring bogies, carrying whatever they could manage. Someone was trying to alert the ticket examiner and the driver, but this was the late 1990s—before every hand held a mobile phone and help could be reached with a few taps.

I was 8 or 9 years old, half asleep and wearing a red sweater knitted by my grandmother.

It was just my mother and me, sometime in December travelling to nani ghar (grandmother’s house) during my winter vacation after my half-yearly examinations. We were sharing our cubicle with a man and an elderly woman from his family. My mother had spoken to them during the journey about our recent move to Hyderabad and how we were trying to adapt.

When the alarm was raised, my mother’s first instinct was to get me out of the compartment that could catch fire. She took me into the neighbouring bogie, found a place near someone’s berth and made me sit down.

“Whatever happens, don’t move from here,” she said. “I’m going back to get our luggage. I’ll come and find you.”

I nodded.

Then she disappeared into the crowd, returning to the bogie everyone else was trying to escape.

I was an obedient child—especially when the instruction sounded this serious. Unfortunately, the passenger whose berth I had been placed near was not interested in sheltering an unfamiliar child.

“This isn’t your seat,” he said. “Where is your mother? Go away from here.”

A train compartment was potentially about to catch fire, but uncle’s immediate concern was that an unauthorised child had entered his seat allocation.

So I stood up. But I did not leave. I remained beside the same cubicle even as frightened passengers pushed past me with suitcases, blankets and children. Half-asleep passengers who did not understand the emergency began complaining, assuming that people with RAC (Reservation Against Cancellation) tickets were trying to occupy their seats.

I stood there quietly, frightened and confused, but determined not to move from the place where my mother had left me.

Amid the chaos, the man who had been sharing our original cubicle spotted me.

“You’re here? Your mother has been looking for you everywhere. Come, I’ll take you to her.”

“No,” I said. “My mother told me not to move.”

“But she’s searching for you.”

“She told me to stay here.”

He looked at me and realised there would be no negotiating with a child who had received direct instructions.

“Okay,” he said. “You wait here. I’ll bring your mother.”

A little later, my mother appeared. She was panicking and crying.

“Why did you move?”

“I didn’t move,” I protested. “You didn’t come.”

Anyways, once she had found me, my mother carried me back towards our original compartment. By then, it was almost completely empty. But the train was still moving.

The ticket examiner and railway technicians had reached our bogie and were trying to identify the source of the sparks while the train continued racing through the night. They opened the doors, leaned out and looked beneath the moving coach, trying to assess how serious the problem was.

They told us that we could remain seated while they worked.

Only four passengers were left in our section: my mother, me, the elderly woman who felt unable to move, and the man travelling with her, who was frustrated because she had refused to leave.

The man looked at me and tried to offer reassurance. “It will be okay.”

I was surprisingly calm. “Can I sleep again?” I asked.

“No, you cannot sleep. Just sit here.”

Apparently, imminent danger was less powerful than my bedtime.

Around us, the technicians continued working inside the moving train. I did not understand what they were doing or how they planned to prevent the sparks from turning into a fire. My mother, visibly anxious, was praying with one arm wrapped tightly around me, while I tried to stay awake. Eventually, the train began to slow down.

When it finally stopped, I looked through the window and saw a group of devotees dressed entirely in black chanting mantras loudly.

Until then, I had never associated black clothing with prayer. Religious occasions, in my young mind, belonged to brighter colours, so the sight puzzled me.

My mother told me they were Ayyappa Swami devotees. I knew nothing about Ayyappa Swami or the pilgrimage then—and, honestly, I still don’t know enough to explain its traditions today.

What I remember is my mother looking outside with complete conviction and believing that Ayyappa Swami had saved us.

That was perhaps my first brush with the idea of divine intervention.

Not inside a temple or through a story told at home, but through the window of a train compartment that had almost caught fire, on a cold December night, while I sat beside my praying mother in a red sweater knitted by my grandmother.

Maybe that was also where my spiritual imagination and faith began—the part of me that looks at an extraordinary escape and wonders whether God had something to do with it.

Years later, Ra.One offered my imagination cinematic validation. G.One—played by Shah Rukh Khan—rescues a runaway train, there is Ganesh imagery involved, and naturally my brain connected the two events. If Shah Rukh Khan and Lord Ganesh could work together to save a train in a film, why couldn’t Ayyappa Swami have helped save mine?

Delusional? Perhaps. Imaginative? Absolutely.

That night should have made me afraid of trains.

It didn’t. I continued to love them.

For most of my childhood, trains meant going to nani ghar in Jamshedpur. When we lived in Karnataka, the journey required two trains—we would travel to Bhubaneswar, change trains there and then continue to Jamshedpur. After we moved to Hyderabad, the journey became more direct.

There were candies, meals shared from paper plates and comics bought especially for the journey. Chacha Chaudhary was my favourite comic book, and no train journey felt complete without him. After all, his brain worked faster than a computer.

Train journeys have their own rhythm.

Suitcases secured with chains beneath the berths. Tea sellers passed through the aisles. Children negotiated for the window seat. Someone opened a tiffin box and offered everyone food. Someone else watched your luggage while you stepped away. Strangers became temporary neighbours and friends.

Years later, after completing Class 10, I travelled to Delhi with my cousin Aman.

Our compartment was filled with policemen travelling in civilian clothes. They were carrying guns—large ones, small ones, pistols—and naturally, we were fascinated.

I asked the obvious question.

“Can I hold one?”

“No,” one of them replied immediately.

Apparently, government-issued weapons could not be passed around for the benefit of a very curious teenager.

My mother had initially been nervous about us travelling among a group of unknown men. Once she learned they were policemen, she relaxed.

We had accidentally acquired an armed security detail.

Not every fellow passenger was quite as chatty or friendly, of course. Some remained firmly strangers and protected their lower berths with greater dedication than the policemen protected their guns.

On the return journey, Aman was asleep when I noticed a man crying late at night.

I couldn’t sleep because someone was snoring, and I was naturally curious, so I asked him why.

This is the risk of crying near an extrovert—privacy is no longer guaranteed.

He told me he had gone through a breakup. He had planned to marry her and was travelling to convince her—and possibly her mother—to reconsider.

At fourteen or fifteen, having never been in a relationship myself, I found the whole thing fascinating, so I listened.

He bought me Lay’s chips and fruit cake for company. Before we parted, I asked him to invite me to the wedding if they got back together.

I never found out if they did.

On another train journey, a group of passengers asked my mother whether I worked in television.

“She looks so familiar,” they said. “Has she acted in any serial?”

Apparently, I was too expressive to be an ordinary child.

My mother had to explain that I was not a child actor. I was simply dramatic for free.

Was I friendly? Yes.

Was I curious? Absolutely.

Was I also slightly nosy? Deeply.

My parents spent much of my childhood explaining that I could not follow everyone who invited me to play, accept food from every friendly stranger or ask people why they were crying. They were trying to prevent my kidnapping. I was trying to understand the world.

I am much better as an adult. I now give people several minutes before asking for their complete life story.

My engineering college excursion gave me an entirely different kind of train memory.

We had entire coaches reserved for our group. I no longer remember how many—only that it felt as though half the train belonged to us.

We boarded from either Hyderabad or Warangal; that detail has blurred with time. What I remember is the journey that followed: Delhi, Amritsar, Kullu-Manali and, eventually, back to Hyderabad.

The train itself became part of the excursion.

We moved between berths as though they were rooms in one enormous, slightly chaotic house. There were games, songs, shared food, endless conversations and very little sleep. Someone was always laughing. Someone was always looking for someone else. Privacy temporarily ceased to exist—and none of us seemed to miss it. By the time we returned home, the hours spent inside those coaches had become as memorable as the places we had visited.

More recently, I was travelling alone to Bengaluru to meet my friends before a road trip. I had a side berth and after a while I was bored. A group of youngsters in the next cubicle were playing PUBG—four girls and two boys who seemed to be having considerably more fun than I was.

The bored and curious person in me wanted to join them, so I asked, “Do you mind if I play too?” I also needed to know how they had managed to find functioning internet on an Indian train. “We have a dongle,” they explained. “We’ll share the Wi-Fi with you.”

Sharing Wi-Fi with a stranger may be one of the purest expressions of trust in modern society.

And just like that, seven strangers spent most of the night playing together.

We exchanged Instagram handles, and when I told them it was my first time arriving in Bengaluru alone, they helped me find the parking area where my friends were waiting.

At some point, we collectively decided that everyone needed to sleep—less a responsible decision, more a forced ceasefire.

All it had taken was one question.

Maybe that is what I have always loved about trains.

On a flight, we sit facing forward, protect our space and wait to arrive. On a train, life keeps spilling across the seats.

Those of us who grew up travelling by train may remember the fierce negotiations over the window seat. The stations whose names we tried to read before they disappeared. The tea sellers walking through the aisles. The meals packed from home and opened carefully on our laps. The comics bought especially for the journey. The middle berths that came down at night and transformed the compartment into a temporary dormitory.

And outside the window, there were green fields that seemed to go on forever.

We watched trees, villages, rivers and railway crossings rush past us. Sometimes we waved at children we would never meet. Sometimes they waved back. With no phone demanding our attention, we could spend hours simply looking outside and wondering about the lives passing by.

These days, the soundtrack to a train journey is often, “The network is gone again.” We stare at our phones, refresh the same screen and hold them at increasingly hopeful angles—as though the signal might be hiding somewhere near the upper berth.

Back then, there was time to be bored.

And perhaps boredom gave us something valuable. It made us look up. It made us talk to the people sitting across from us, wander through the coach in search of our friends, share food with strangers and turn a long journey into a story.

Travel today is something we try to optimise. We compare prices, choose the shortest route and celebrate saving a few hours. I do it too—these days, given the choice, I will probably take a flight.

Flights take us to places. Trains gave us time to arrive.

I hope Gen Z—and the generations after them—experience this too. I hope they sometimes choose the slower journey, look up from their screens and watch the green fields stretch beyond the horizon. I hope they discover that a stranger can become a friend for a day, that an entire train coach can feel like one large house, and that reaching the destination does not always have to be the best part of travelling.

Perhaps that is why my imaginary wedding still involves booking an entire train coach and dancing in the aisles.

It would not be the most efficient way to travel. But then, the best train journeys were never really about efficiency. They were about the shared meals, the unexpected interactions and the stories exchanged between stations.

We arrived at different stations. But for a while, we helped one another get there.