In a new book, Ruskin Bond writes about what trains in small towns of India meant to him

The importance of a town can be defined by its institutions. If it doesn’t have institutions, it is known by its cinemas or cafés and restaurants, or bookshops, or schools and colleges, or its railway stations.

Many of my early stories, written when I was in my twenties, were set in railway stations or on trains or busy platforms. In those days, everyone travelled by train. The air services were still in their infancy, bus journeys were uncomfortable over long distances, and travel by river boats had gone out with the advent of the railways.

My solitary walks often took me to the railway station. I would buy a platform ticket, park myself on a platform bench, and watch the rest of India go by.

And go by it did. India doesn’t stay in one place. It is always on the move. Entire families are on their way to weddings or to religious fairs or places of pilgrimage, or simply to look up a family member in another part of the country. In the present century, they travel to distant lands for work or education, or a different kind of life. When I was a boy, small-town India travelled to big-town India and elsewhere in the country, but people did not travel abroad quite so much, money being in short supply.

I sat on railway platforms and watched the trains arriving and departing; the crowds getting in or out of them, the activity on the platforms as porters, vendors, passengers, stray animals, stray stationmasters, all jostled for space; and I would go back to my room and typewriter and write stories like “The Eyes have It”, “The Night Train at Deoli”, and “Time Stops at Shamli”.

As a schoolboy, I would have to travel by train whenever I returned to my boarding school in Shimla. I would get into a second-class compartment at Dehradun, get out at Saharanpur, take a bus to Ambala, and catch the night train from Delhi to Kalka, where I would join the school party on its narrow-gauge mountain journey to Shimla.

On one occasion, when I was 11 or 12, travelling on my own (my mother and stepfather being occupied on a shikar trip, or hunt – their choice of recreation), I missed the connecting train at Ambala, the Saharanpur bus having broken down on the way. Ambala Cantt. was a busy junction with several platforms, and I did not know what to do with myself – wait for another train and hope it would be the right one, or take a bus back to Saharanpur. I sat on my bedding-roll, feeling lost and depressed, when along came a strange lady in a white sari. She asked me where I was going, and when I told her I’d missed my train, she took me by the hand and led me to another platform, and lo and behold, another train for Kalka arrived, and she put me into a compartment, saw that I was comfortable – and disappeared!

That kind lady stayed in my memory for many years, and I finally wrote about the encounter in a story called “The Woman on Platform 8”.

Memory is a writer’s best friend.

The trains were all pulled by steam engines in those days. They made a lot of noise, huffing and puffing and whistling and rattling along the rails, and schoolboys loved them and we all wanted to be engine drivers! There was coal dust in my blood; my maternal grandfather had been in the Railways – not as an engine driver or stationmaster but as a carriage-maker. He must take some of the responsibility for those hard, uncomfortable carriage berths which denied sleep to weary passengers. And those upper berths! I could never climb onto them without help, although I often saw very large ladies springing into them like ducks into a pond.

A bookworm as a boy, and an addictive reader as a man, I have always been attracted to railway station bookstalls. The smaller stations don’t have much variety, sometimes limiting themselves to newspapers and film magazines, astrological journals and railway guides. A few books might have been available – the crime novels of James Hadley Chase or Erle Stanley Gardner, or a bestseller by Sidney Sheldon or Harold Robbins, “that well-known typist”, as one critic called him. At one time, Khushwant Singh’s books were popular travel reading, but you don’t see them anymore. Now you can get stand-up comedians on your phone, and jokes aren’t funny when repeated.

Back in the 1960s, there was a Hindi novelist, Gulshan Nanda, whose books were everywhere. Even waiters, room-boys, and taxi drivers were reading them. He must have made a lot of money. But today it’s difficult to find anyone under 40 who has heard of him. Books, especially novels, are subject to changes in fashion. Some writers date very quickly. We still read the Sherlock Holmes stories (because the characters are interesting), but who reads the Sexton Blake stories, popular in the war years? A few years ago, one of our publishers brought out about two dozen new editions of the works of Edgar Wallace, but no one bought them. And yet his rival, Agatha Christie, still sells in millions.

Some of the bigger stations have well-stocked bookstalls. The one that really impressed me was Wheeler’s Book Shop at the Ajmer railway station. The town itself had no bookshop when I was there in the 1980s, but readers flocked to the station for their books, the bookshop being a magnet for book lovers. I think it was used more by local residents than by travellers.

For many years, Wheelers in the north and Higginbothams in the south had the monopoly of railway bookstalls. Back in the 1800s, Wheeler brought out Kipling’s early stories in their Railway Library. He was then living in Allahabad (now Prayagraj), where Wheeler had its headquarters, and he was a correspondent for The Pioneer of Lucknow and The Civil & Military Gazette of Lahore. A few years later, he went to America and achieved fame with his two Jungle Books and Kim.

Excerpted with permission from ‘As the Trains Go By’ in The Ghosts of Indian Small Towns: A Journey Through Time, Ruskin Bond, Aleph Book Company.