The train has many ways to entice the traveler. The most potent of them is the sound of it passing through the dead of the night, audible for miles afar.

Before I had been to any station I was already attracted to train travel. Gwalior is a small city. And its geography makes it even more compact. The ring of hills on all sides not only gives it a palpable horizon but also creates a mini climate of its own. The rocky boundaries thus make Gwalior hotter than other nearby places. The pollution too is worse because the smog seems to settle down in the valley. But not all is bad. The sounds too do not escape as they do in a city of the plains.

In the dead of a quiet winter night, the sound of a passing train wafts through the air, collides with the mountains and then turns back, spreading over and over again all over the city, waiting to pique the wanderlust of a teenager. On many such a nights, lying in my quilt, near the small window in my small room on the third floor of my tower like house, I would be beckoned irresistibly by the sound of the train.

Reading a book about the adventure of Dickensian heroes and Chekhovian men; of the barges floating on the Mississippi in a Twain story; about the journey of Stanley and Livingstone through the Great Lakes of Africa; of Kapal Kundala going back to a Sunderban island; about the Kawabata heroes traveling through the snow laden trees of the northern Honshu; traveling vicariously through these great books, while lying in my quilt, the faint yet clear sound of the train passing somewhere near my city would seem irresistible.

The desire to know more than my surroundings offered; to feel more than the books told; the need to understand more than the city could explain to me would desperately put my mind to catching such a train to a place unknown. Budding youth and naïve mind are a fertile ground for peregrine thoughts. At that time I had no idea how exactly I would go about it.

But the sound of a train, passing in the quiet of a night, was the perfect background to my nighttime reading. It gave me the happiest of all feelings: the pleasure of traveling with my heroes and my characters, while lying in the safety of my quilt and my room.

On many a nights like this, while reading about a great adventure, upon hearing the sound of a train passing by to the South, I would suddenly imagine myself in the coach of the train. The thought was exhilarating enough to give me goose bumps. The Natyashastra says that it is a basic human desire to want to experience all human emotions, even dangerous and tragic. That is why the Natya was invented, to make the audience familiar with the emotions that they would not want to feel in their real life. Experiencing failure in career, rejection in love and death of a loved one are some things which we don’t want to feel ourselves but love to experience them vicariously through a play or a movie.

In something similar to this feeling, though I absolutely loved the safety of my quilt and my room, I wanted to know how I would feel traveling in a train the sound of which I was hearing at the exact moment. The dead of the night… the pitch dark surroundings… the nearby tracks and shrubs visible from the window of a sleeper class coach… the country wind passing through. The sheer thought would give me goose bumps. To a teenager who had barely traveled out of his city, such a thought of traipsing in a train through the wilderness in the dead of the night seemed nothing less than a true adventure.

What made it more romantic was the fact that my room was open on all sides. The sight would often lead a helping hand to sound and the imagination would be complete.

My home was more like a tower with only 10 by 25 feet. On two sides were the streets. On two sides were the verandahs of the neighbors’ houses. My room, on the third floor was thus open on all four sides and with windows and doors on three. The door opened to the south and with no great building obstructing my view, as it was an undeveloped and poor neighborhood, the view of the horizon was very clear.

On many evenings I had the pleasure to watch the sunset from my room, lying on my bed or sitting on my chair, reading or doing my chores, while the glorious Sun set on Gwalior. On the East there was small window which sent such a draft of wind on opening, that the entire room would become windy. Peeping through this very private window on to the eastern world, I would discern the eastern hills with Cancer hospital, the most famous landmark. For gazing at north and the most glorious skyline of Gwalior, the fort, the Sahasra Bahu temple, the Teli ka Mandir and the TV Tower on the skyline, I would have to go to the terrace.

The West was reserved for the night and the early mornings. For this is where my bed was, just beneath the tiny window which opened on to the Western mountains with Gargaj ke Hanuman and Gupteshwar visible right through my window. The window hung at four feet from the floor and as my bed jutted right next to it the only thing I had to do to gaze at the western mountains was to sit up in my bed and throw open the window. Gupteshwar and the western mountains would be instantly visible along with the fresh wind on my face.

My house was built in 1999 and the third story was built by 2002. Since 2002 I had been gazing at the western mountains. In 2002 there were very few lights visible during the night on those mountains except the lights on the Gupteshwar temple and the path leading to it. But year by passing year I would see more and more lights creeping up the mountainside making the night landscape of the western mountains more and more glittery. And it is by this side that most of the trains to the south passed, beckoning me irresistibly to take one of them one day.

And the south had started to bubble up in my consciousness. The idea of the South was building in my mind through some works that I had read; some Discovery documentaries about the rainforests of Kerala that I had happened to watch; through the idea of Kanyakumari and everything Tamil that was building up in my mind; and through the travel lust that was building in me which no longer wanted to be satisfied vicariously through books.

The comfortable feeling that I always had on listening to the sound of a train in the dead of the night was making me slightly restless as time passed. I was no longer willing to wait my entire lifetime comfortably lying in the safety of my room and my bed. I wanted to be on the other side of the divide, in the unsafety of that sleeper train coach, traveling to an unknown destination through the dead of the night.

I wanted to ditch my security. I wanted to have freedom. I wanted to ditch the comfort of my quilt and the safety of the closed latch. I wanted to test the adventure of looking at the open wilderness sitting at the gate of a sleeper coach. I wanted to leave the safety of the closed latch of my room to throw myself of the uncertainty of the birth of a sleeper coach.

I had no idea that one day I would take a train in a sleeper class coach of Millennium Express and find myself on the other side of the divide: with all the adventure, uncertainty of the train coach and reflect upon the safety of my room and my quilt. But that is the story for another day.