Penguin Book Of Indian Railway Stories , livre ebook

Penguin Books Ltd

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

116 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

The stories in this collection capture the essence of the Indian Railways - from the small-town station, at the time of the Raj, to the present day big-city station bursting at the seams. The teening and varied life of the Indian Railway station and its environs have fascinated writers from Jules Verne in the 1870s to more recently Satyajit Ray, R.K. Laxman and more modern writers. In this anthology, one of India's best-known writers makes a selection of greattest railway stories the subcontinent has produced. Julese Verne Rudyard Kipling Flora Annie Steel Hon. J.W. Best Jim Corbett Khushwant Singh Ruskin Bond Manoj Das Intizar Husain Satyajit Ray Bill Aitkin R.K. Laxman Victor Banerjee Manojit Mitra.

Informations

Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	14 octobre 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184754605
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Edited by Ruskin Bond
I NDIAN R AILWAY S TORIES

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents

About the Author
By the Same Author
Dedication
A Traveller s Tale
I NTRODUCTION
Soot Gets in Your Eyes Ruskin Bond
I : S TORIES B EFORE I NDEPENDENCE
Around the World in Eighty Days Jules Verne
The Man Who Would Be King Rudyard Kipling
By Cow-Catcher and Trolley Anonymous
The Bold Prentice Rudyard Kipling
Snow-Leopard Flora Annie Steel
The By-gone Days Anonymous
The Coolie Anonymous
The Luck of John Fernandez J.W. Best
II : S TORIES A FTER I NDEPENDENCE
Loyalty Jim Corbett
Mano Majra Station Khushwant Singh
The Woman on Platform 8 Ruskin Bond
The Intimate Demon Manoj Das
A Stranded Railroad Car Intizar Husain
Barin Bhowmik s Ailment Satyajit Ray
Balbir Arora Goes Metric Bill Aitken
Railway Reverie R.K. Laxman
The Cherry Choo-Choo Victor Banerjee
99 UP Manojit Mitra
Footnotes
The Intimate Demon
Acknowledgments
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS THE PENGUIN BOOK OF INDIAN RAILWAY STORIES
Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, in 1934, and grew up in Jamnagar (Gujarat), Dehradun and Shimla. In the course of a writing career spanning thirty-five years, he has written over a hundred short stories, essays, novels and more than thirty books for children. Three collections of the short stories, The Night Train at Deoli Time Stops at Shamli and Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra have been published by Penguin India. He has also edited an anthology, The Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories .
The Room on the Roof was his first novel, written when he was seventeen, and it received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Vagrants in the Valley was also written in his teens and picks up from where The Room on the Roof leaves off. These two novellas were published in one volume by Penguin India in 1993 as was a much-acclaimed collection of his non-fiction writing, Rain in the Mountains.
Ruskin Bond received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India for 1992, for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra.
ALSO BY RUSKIN BOND
Fiction
The Room on the Roof & Vagrants in the Valley
The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories
Time Stops at Shamli and Other Stories
Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra
Strangers in the Night: Two Novellas
A Season of Ghosts
When Darkness Falls and Other Stories
A Flight of Pigeons
Delhi Is Not Far
A Face in the Dark and Other Stories
Non-Fiction
Rain in the Mountains
Scenes from a Writer s Life
The Lamp is Lit
The Little Book of Comfort
Landour Days
Anthologies
Collected Fiction (1955-1996)
The Best of Ruskin Bond
Friends in Small Places
Indian Ghost Stories (ed.)
Classic Indian Love Stories and Lyrics (ed.)
FOR ALL MY FAMILY

Plenty of room on this train!
A Traveller s Tale

There s a North Indian line, whose most cherished design Is to cut all expenses uncommonly fine.
It once was my fate on this railway to wait An hour and a half for a train that was late.
The one consolation I found at the station Was engaging the staff in a long conversation.
And making him shirk in the meantime his work Of pointsman and signalman, porter and clerk.
He carried a fragment of greasy old rag, Which had once been a green or perhaps a red flag.
Why don t they supply a new flag? said I. He answered me Sahib, ye-Scotch line to hai.
I did not forget, the next time I met The Agent, to tell him this story, you bet.
He said, when I came to the end of the same, I m thinking ye ll have remembered his name.
When I said that I had, Man, he said, but I m glad. Ram Prasad, was it? Thank you. I ll fine Ram Prasad.
How dare the man wag a dirty old rag When he knows he s expected to find his own flag?
A. G. Shirreff (1917)
Soot Gets in Your Eyes

M Y ANTHOLOGY OF GHOST STORIES for Penguin India, roundly condemned by several critics, almost immediately went into a second edition. And so I feel cocky enough to indulge myself in compiling an anthology on another favourite subject, the Indian railway.
But what is a nature writer doing, putting together a collection of train stories? Who is this upstart Bond, who has been meandering along like a bullock-cart all these years, and now sets himself up as a railway enthusiast? Just what are his credentials?
Few know that my maternal grandfather, William Clerke, was Assistant Station-master at Karachi in the 1920s, or that my uncle, Fred Clark (they spelt their names differently), was Station Superintendent at Delhi Main during World War II. Occasionally, during school holidays, I would stay with Uncle Fred in his bungalow near the station. He had a wind-up gramophone and a large collection of the records of his favourite band, Spike Jones and his City Slickers. This was the noisiest, most irreverent little orchestra in the world, and it deliberately set out to murder any popular tune that took its fancy. Thus, Sleepy Lagoon became Sloppy Laggon and Romeo and Juliet became Romeow and Julie-cat . Uncle Fred liked it because it was the only band that made enough noise to be heard above the shunting of engines, the whistle of passing trains, and the constant clamour from the railway yards. Some of the instruments used by the band had, in fact, been improvised out of scrap metal picked up in locomotive sheds. As music it was horrific, but I was to remain a Spike Jones fan all my life.
The bungalow had a little garden. But the plants and flowers were usually covered with a fine layer of soot from passing steam engines. So much for the romance of railways! No, railway stations and goods yards never were and never will be the haunt of nature lovers.
A few years ago I travelled by a slow passenger train from Dehradun to Bombay: two days and two nights over the dusty plains of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. My nature notebook was not idle, and although the proposed essay proved abortive, I kept the rough notes for a piece that was to be called Wild Life on a Railway Journey :
1) Myna-bird gets into the compartment at Hardwar and, ticketless, gets out again at Roorkee.
2) Fat, obviously well-fed cockroach lurks in washroom basin.
3) I feed platform dogs and freelance crows with Northern Railway thali lunch.
4) Frogs along the west coast-a continuous chanting from the fields as the train rushes by. You can hear them quite clearly above the sound of the train.
5) By the time we reach Bombay, six hours late, washbasin cockroaches have multiplied and look as though they are ready to eat the passengers.

To be honest, I am not a great railway traveller. I am a poor traveller altogether, being prone to any water-borne infection, unfamiliar food, skin eruptions caused by bugs lurking in the upholstery, suffocation from cigarette and engine smoke, and vertigo from riding in escalators. I am also prone to have things stolen from me. The train stopped at Baroda in the early hours, and a lean hand shot through the window, removing my watch from under my pillow, along with my spectacles, which could have been of no use to anyone, my lens-strength being -7 in one eye and +5 in the other. I had to appear in a Bombay court the next day (having been dragged there to face charges for writing an allegedly obscene short story), and I appeared wearing editor Vinod Mehta s glasses, which were only half the strength of mine. I looked so owlish and helpless that the judge must have felt sorry for me, for the case eventually took a turn in my favour.
But I love railway platforms. I spent a great deal of time on them when I was a boy, waiting for connecting trains to Kalka or Saharanpur or Barrackpore or Rajkot. The odd incident stayed in my memory and when, in my late teens I started writing short stories, those memories became stories such as The Night Train at Deoli, The Woman on Platform 8, The Tunnel, and The Eyes Have It. And when I wasn t sitting on platform benches watching the world and his wife go by, I was browsing at those station bookstalls which were such an institution forty to fifty years ago.
Over a hundred years ago, the Railway booksellers were among the pioneers of publishing in, India.
Take A.H. Wheeler & Co. In the 1880s they started the Indian Railway Library, which saw the first publication of Kipling s early story collections- Plain Tales from the Hills, Wee Willie Winkle, Under the Deodars, Soldiers Three- all stories he had written while working for The Pioneer of Allahabad or The Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore. And what Wheelers was to the north, Higginbothams was to the south.
Kipling was fascinated by the Indian railways, and his in-depth study of the railway headquarters and colony at Jamalpur (E.I. Railway) in City of Dreadful Night is a tour-de-force of early investigative journalism. It was considered to be rather too long for inclusion here. The railways are ever-present in his fiction, and although some might cavil at The Man Who Would Be King being included in a collection of train stories, that opening scene at Marwar Junction sets the tone and impetus for one of his finest stories. His description of a railway journey in Kim is just as relevant today as it was at the turn of the century:
As the 3.25 south-bound roared in, the sleepers sprang to life, and the station filled with clamour and shouting, cries of water and sweetmeat vendors, shouts of policemen, and shrill yells of women gathering up their baskets, their families, and their husbands . . . .
Elsewhere he wrote, Romance brought up the nine-fifteen, but it was really commerce that led to that historic occasion in 1853 when India s first railway train steamed off in an atmosphere of great excitement from Bombay to Thana, a distance of 34 miles. Within ten years the Great Indian Peninsular Railway had opened up the cotton-growing areas of the Deccan plateau. Soon the country was criss-crossed by an extensive network of railway lines, bringing north to south and east to west, enablin