Train to Pakistan

Description

A little province of retailers and sellers has grown up around the station

to flexibly voyagers with food, betel leaves, cigarettes, tea, rolls and

sweetmeats. This gives the station an appearance of steady action and its staff

a to some degree misrepresented feeling of significance. As a matter of fact the stationmaster himself

sells tickets through the categorize in his office, gathers them at the exit next to

the entryway, and sends and gets messages over the message ticker on the table.

When there are individuals to see him, he comes out on the stage and waves a

green banner for trains which don’t stop. His solitary colleague controls the switches

in the glass lodge on the stage which control the signs on either side, and

helps shunting motors by changing hand focuses on the tracks to get them onto

the sidings. In the nights, he lights the long queue of lights on the stage. He

takes weighty aluminum lights to the signs and sticks them in the braces behind

the red and green glass. In the mornings, he brings them back and puts out the

lights on the stage.

Relatively few trains stop at Mano Majra. Express trains don’t stop by any means. Of the

many moderate traveler trains, just two, one from Delhi to Lahore in the mornings

what’s more, the other from Lahore to Delhi in the nighttimes, are booked to stop for a

few moments. The others stop just when they are held up. The main ordinary

clients are the products trains. Despite the fact that Mano Majra only sometimes has any merchandise to

send or get, its station sidings are typically involved by long columns of carts.

Each passing merchandise train goes through hours shedding carts and gathering others.

After dull, when the wide open is saturated with quiet, the whistling and puffing

of motors, the slamming of cradles, and the thumping of iron couplings can be

heard all as the night progressed.