Blast from the past...literally!

When I was very young, I often had a hard time falling asleep at night, and I used to lie awake long after all the lights in the house had been turned out. All, except one. The coloured low-wattage bulb that seemed to do a better job of casting shadows on the walls and the floor, than to illuminate. In the summer, the sound made by the fan in my room filled the silence of the night, but in winter, there was absolutely nothing to fill the vacuum, save for the occasional barks of the dogs, or the whistle of the night-watchman, or the rumble of trains passing through the small station. Most of the long-distance trains made their stops in Roorkee during the night, and I could tell which train was passing by, if only they had managed to stay on schedule :)

And then there were the sirens of the trains, carrying over miles, accompanied by the unmistakable sound of the wheels on the rails. Sometime there were short bursts, sometimes long and drawn out. Lying there, under the covers on such a winter night, I used to think. Think about many things, talk to myself, let my imagination loose, free to find shapes in the shadows, to make wild conjectures about the odd sound that broke the stillness, hear the low squeak of the mice in the house, and guess where they were hiding, or simply wonder what I would do if one of them decided to climb on top of me!

And in the middle of those chains of thought, of fantasy, the sound of the horn of a train was always exciting, bringing with it visions of places I'd been to, and yet more fantasies about places that lay unexplored by me. It evoked the sense of excitement that a lone explorer in the woods experiences as he hikes up the hill, wondering what the view would be like from the top. I used to imagine myself sitting at the window of such a train, as it went scything through the darkness with the light on its engine. I could feel the wind on my face, as I looked out into the night, seeing practically nothing but assorted shapes of darkness and the odd light in a hut or a dhaaba on the highway running next to the tracks. I dreamed that I was going away to some destination that I had found on the railway time-table. Some place I had never been to, but the kind of place whose name sounded nice when you said it aloud. Some place away from home. Far away. And yet, it wasn't the thrill of reaching that place that used to send a chill down my spine. It was simply the excitement of the traveller, the man on a journey, in which sense, I guess I could say that the journey was a destination in its own right.

As I sit here in my room, next to my open window, I can hear the siren of a train wailing through the night, and it brings back old feelings, thoughts, recollections so vivid and yet sufficiently hazy, that I don't quite know if they're my own memories or just figments of a romantic imagination. But I guess I don't dream of going away from home any more, at least, not all the time. It is but natural, you know, because where I live is just where I am physically, and even home has become a destination now...