Colored Eyes, Golden Buildings And Konkan Railway in India

I have always been intrigued by colored (green / grey / blue) eyes in Indians. I would keep thinking about the origin of such eyes. Had I seen such eyes only in models and actors and women, I would have brushed it aside as just one more instance of artificial stuff (using contacts). But I have come across too many such eyes in small boys or old men or people living in rural areas and the explanation of “contact lenses” doesn’t apply.

Being inquisitive by nature, whenever I talk to a person, I ask what he does, where he is from etc. After a good amount of data collection and analysis, I came to the conclusion that people in India with colored eyes are primarily from the western part (meaning the states in the west: starting from coastal Karnataka to Konkanast people of Maharashtra, all the way to Punjab and Kashmir). Meaning a person with colored eyes is very likely to be from that region as against from the eastern belt (Tamil Nadu to West Bengal, UP or North Eastern States).

Whenever I see a person with colored eyes, I would be itching to verify my findings. Recently when I was travelling by train I came across a person, going to Delhi, with those green colored eyes. After some time the person came and sat next to me to look out of the window. We were not near any station. You would now have guessed that the person was a male. (Women stop looking out of the window in a train for amusement when they reach the age of 3. The reason is that the view does not cost anything and they cannot feel or emote much about a telegraph pole or a river)

Seeing those green eyes, I starting talking to the man. I asked him (in Hindi) where he was from. He replied “Haan” (YES). This weird answer reminded me of another friend of mine but that’s another story. I asked him whether he was from Punjab (a state in north India). This time his eyes gleamed and he replied “Illai illai, Tamil" (No No, Tamil). After a minute, I closed my mouth  which had involuntarily opened. “Tamil? A Tamil guy with green eyes? Since when?”

I asked myself. He seemed an average sort of guy just like me. In the sense it was ridiculous to think of him using contact lenses.

This was a dark blow to my research. This new data was quite in variance with what I had seen in the past. With a heavy heart I continued my journey north. A lady sat next to me in the train going from Delhi to Rajasthan. Her husband and son had come to the station to see her off. Her husband stopped talking to his wife and approached me quietly. I was scared stiff. This was north India. And I was in Delhi – right in the middle of rowdy land. Gentle polite nature is foreign to north Indians. You can’t even trust a small 4 year old north Indian boy to not mess with someone else's woman. So when this 50 year old man approached me, it was with a lot of anxiety that I said “Yes?”. He asked me if he could ask me a favor. 

So when this man approached me and asked me what my destination was, I had all fingers and a couple of toes in my mouth as I mumbled my destination. And he said “Ha, my wife is travelling alone and she has been allotted the upper berth. Can you please let her take your (lower) berth, and can you sleep on the upper berth?”. I thanked my stars that it was such a simple request. I had tears of happiness when I said “Absolutely fine. No problem”. And that’s when he asked me for my mobile number. I was stupefied. And too naive to refuse. I gave him my mobile number. Then the father and son got off the train as the train started moving. I looked at the lady more closely. She had green eyes. And my eyes lit up. But the train was too crowded. About 200 people were traveling in a compartment meant for 72. This was because it was about 6PM; a lot of people working in Delhi stay in the suburbs up to 100km away (for example, Rewadi in Haryana). And  the evening local train going to Rewadi had been cancelled of late (presumably because it was very convenient to passengers) and hence a lot of these suburban travelers climb into reserved compartment. And the train is so packed that you can hardly see where your feet are (and that was not because you had a fat tummy). So I couldn’t speak to the lady with the green eyes much. I came to know that she was from Delhi and travelling to Rajasthan to visit her daughter and son in law. She seemed to be a Rajasthani. I heaved a sigh of relief. At least I could hang on to my theory of colored eyes.

In the meantime night came and I went to the upper berth and switched off my mobile to conserve battery and went to sleep. In the morning someone woke me up roughly. And I opened my eyes one at a time. It was this lady who woke me up. And she stared at me accusingly. And asked me, “have you not received any call?”. I asked “What call? My mobile is off”. Then I turned my face away since I couldn’t bear to look at her angry face. She said that her station had come but not her daughter / son-in–law. And she added that sometime at night she had gone to the toilet for not more than 5 minutes. When she came back, her money was gone and so were her glasses. She almost had tears in her eyes. I searched her eyes (as women normally do). Was she accusing me of stealing her money and her glasses? No. She was not. She was just upset. I asked her to give me her daughter's telephone number. I dialed the number and gave my phone to the lady. Mother and daughter spoke. And then the daughter came with her husband to the station in the next few minutes (I guessed that they lived close by), thanked me and left the station with this lady.

Photo of an Indian girl with colored eyes.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v65/melloyello69/indiapushkar5.jpg from http://www.asiafinest.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t8178.html (search specifically for nbndoi in this link.
I was thinking about these colored eyes when I reached my destination, Jaisalmer,  in Rajasthan. And then I was speechless. Just about everyone had brown / green eyes. And most males had ear studs. I had reached the land of green / brown eyes.

This was the land of the desert. The place looked golden. All buildings were made of galbena (yellow) stone and unpainted. It was like a scene out of Mackenna’s Gold in the last few minutes of the movie. Last week, my brother told me that scenes in Satyajit Ray’s movie “Sonar Kella” (“The golden fort”) were filmed in Jaisalmer. The buildings there look gorgeous.

As I took the train from Rajasthan to Karnataka (a journey of about 2400 km to be covered in 40 hours), I was smiling. The journey had so far been good. I had not lost any of my possessions yet. Except for one ugly verbal spat with a cycle rickshaw driver (who was from Madhya Pradesh) in Delhi, the trip had been fairly pleasant so far. I woke up in the morning to see that we had reached Mt Abu, the only hill station in Rajasthan. And an hour or so later we passed Mehsana where I had lived for 2 months about 25 years back. Little did I know then that a person from that district would become the Prime Minister of India later. I had that hazy look in my eyes (just like Sanjeev Kumar in the film Mousam http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKnjGbAg5mY) and on we went down Gujrat until we reached Vasai Road in the outskirts of Bombay from where the train took the route towards Panvel. At Panvel, the train halted for almost 2 hours. We heard that there was some problem with rock / mud slides in the Konkan track and that many trains were being diverted via Pune instead of going by the original route via Ratnagiri. Our train was not diverted. We reached a place called Chiplun the next morning, about 8 hours late.

Chiplun is a very picturesque little village in the Western Ghats; the station has only 2 platforms. You can imagine how small the village would be. It was raining constantly. And it was lush green. And there was no question of the train leaving anytime soon. The only tea stall in Chiplun had some delicious vada pav. Words can’t describe that vada pav. Pav Is just bread while vada is a potato dish; crisp and spicy and the vada pav is usually served with fried green chillies spiked with salt. I had my heart’s fill. I burrrrrped and then started walking aimlessly and soon reached the engine cabin. Ever since I was a child I had always wanted to look inside a train engine cabin. I begged the drivers whether I could look (and ride) inside. After a lot of thought they said yes I could. And I got inside and started chatting with them about the engine and about the life of a driver. They explained the various instruments to me. They also expressed dismay that the train had not been diverted from Panvel via Pune. They had been driving the train for about 12 hours now and were very tired. One wonders what the Panvel Station Master was thinking when he made us go by the Konkan route.

Soon two new drivers arrived, the old ones were relieved. The old drivers put in a word for me with me the new drivers and I was allowed to ride in the cabin. They also shared some gutkha (a kind of tobacco) with me. I clicked some pictures from the cabin.

Soon we reached Ratnagiri, I thanked the drivers for the ride in the cabin. Our train would go no further because of the blocked tunnel. Our train's counterpart, going to Rajasthan from Trivandrum, was coming the opposite way and it had stopped at the other end of the tunnel. The railways had arranged with Maharashtra state bus transport to carry the 1000 passengers from one train to the other. And carry another set of 1000 passengers from the other train to our train. It was an interesting experience. About 40-50 passengers in each bus. About 20 trips to carry all the passengers from one train to another. Once we reached the station at the other end of the tunnel some 40 km away (and 1 hour by road) we boarded the other train and occupied the same berth seats that we had earlier in the train from Rajasthan.

The train continued on its journey - now about 17 hours late. One of the things I was looking forward to was the trip between Goa and Udupi. I was thinking of those lovely scenes from the movie "Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na" where they show a train as it approaches Goa. As per the original schedule we were supposed to reach Goa at 7AM and Udupi at 11am. Instead we must have reached Goa after 11pm. I had gone to sleep earlier, as it had been a hectic day. I had to alight at Udupi and I was not sure when we would reach Udupi. I estimated that we would reach Udupi at about 5AM. I set three alarms: one for 4AM, one for 4:30AM and one for 5:30AM. Unfortunately I slept soundly and didn’t hear any alarm. I woke up at 5AM to find that the train had stopped at some station. Everyone was asleep, so I got down from the train and asked a couple of people. They told me that we had reached Mangalore (which is beyond Udupi). I hurriedly got out of train, cursing the station master at Panvel because of whom we were 17 hours late and I had missed my station and didn’t get to see the stretch from Goa to Udupi.

I had now travelled more than 5500km. Another 1000km to go before I reached home. I had seen a lot of colored eyes, golden buildings, traveled on the Konkan Railway in the engine cabin and been evacuated from train, fought with a cycle rickshaw fellow in Delhi. Wow, it was lovely. Now I have one more dream left. To ride in the guard compartment of a goods train...