Anywhere, anywhere

In a mock podcast, my eight-year-old grandson quizzed me about my childhood. What was it like when I was his age? And that called for memories of more than seventy years ago.

I paused for a moment because I had been cautioned by my daughter that I should not speak to him about the horrors of Partition and the traumatic dislocations our family had then suffered. I needed to strike a cheerful note.

The setting itself was cheerful, indeed. We were seated outside in the afternoon sun at a cafe in Monza, near Milan, a few days ago. That it could be so pleasant, rather cold, in central Europe when a heatwave was raging across Pakistan was at the back of my mind. There are other reasons why I am grateful for this escape from my regular journalistic engagements.

Anyhow, it readily struck me that, yes, there is something about my childhood that I fondly remember, something that inspires magical images in my mind. It was the railway. We would make long journeys in a train to visit our hometown in northern India from the then Bombay, where my father worked – and he worked for the railways, to earn a lot of free travel.

This romance I am sure I share with a large number of people. So, I tried to recapture those feelings for my grandson. It became an opportunity to relive that excitement and remember that it stayed with me until my youth. In the early decades of Pakistan, the train was the main option for inter-city travel, and it had its magic.

After that little game we played, recording our conversation on a cell phone, I was left with the regret of how the railways have lost their supremacy and charm in Pakistan. No longer would poets like Nasir Kazmi and Munir Niazi tug at your heartstrings with passionate images of the esoteric realm of the railways.

There is, of course, an entire body of literature about the railways in every language. Some journeys have acquired mythical significance. Scenes have been immortalized in great fiction and the cinema. Just the mention of, say, the Trans-Siberian Railway or Agatha Christie’s Oriental Express would tickle your imagination.

In the present context, the point I am making is that we have allowed the railways to go down the drain in our country. In a sense, this amounts to denying our young people a particular experience of adventure and exploration. Travel in itself is a metaphor for life and its uncertainties. I would say that it is difficult to see a train leaving a station without wishing to be on it.

However, when I thought about my childhood memories of railway journeys, I realized that my grandson, living in Europe, has this opportunity of replicating the memories of his maternal grandfather, though in a totally different world. At the same time, I am also able to reclaim a part of my childhood by making railway journeys in Europe.

How the railway network has grown and improved in Europe and a number of other countries has a touch of fancy. In recent years, the high-speed rail infrastructure that connects major cities has revolutionized railway travel. European railways seamlessly weave through more than thirty countries.

Every year, when we spend some time with our daughter, I greedily go after opportunities or excuses to make short trips by train and the feast that lies before me whets the appetite of the child that has survived until these twilight years. Granted this is another kind of experience but the thrill of being on a train remains almost the same.

It has been possible to make day trips, with one-way journeys lasting one or two hours or a little more, to such story-book destinations as Venice, Florence, Verona and Lugano. Now there is this tantalizing prospect of a direct speed train to Paris in just over six hours. A fast train from Milan to Rome takes two hours and 55 minutes.

This exactitude is a matter of routine. Six years ago, I travelled from Geneva to Milan, through Alps and skirting fabled lakes, and the duration on my ticket was not five hours but four hours and 59 minutes.

Well, so much about this childhood fascination for trains. But there is also this miracle of a continent with no borders. With a Schengen visa, you can travel unchecked on a network that sprawls across frontiers that were once etched in blood. And mostly, you use the same currency.

It is this unique historical experience of the European Union, born of the ashes of the Second World War, that regions like South Asia are unwilling to learn from. When the Jang Group had launched its Aman ki Asha project in association with the Times of India group in India, the example of France and Germany becoming friends after centuries of bloody conflicts was often cited.

It could not have been an easy task. But this is how visionary leaders and societies that are capable of learning from past experience can turn the tide of history. There was a reference to Partition at the outset of this column. That was 75 years ago, soon after the most devastating war in human history had ended. Look at how Europe has changed during this period and how we, in South Asia, have not.

If my thoughts seem to be wandering aimlessly, incited by my childlike and yet unsatiated wanderlust, take them as an attempt to look away from the harsh realities of Pakistan’s present politics. Or let this be my Eid pause, because my European break is about to end. Wherever may I go, I have to arrive in Pakistan.

That travelling hopefully is better than to arrive is something else. So, allow me this concluding whiff of fancy with this ditty of A A Milne: “Where am I going? / I don’t quite know, / What does it matter where people go? / Down the wood where bluebells grow / Anywhere, anywhere / I don’t know.”

The writer is a senior journalist. He can be reached at: ghazi_salahuddin @hotmail.com