Overnight to Gulbarga!

~
Darlings! It's 4:26am and I'm writing to you from an Upper Berth in an AC 2-tier carriage on the Udyan Express, a superfast train that plies between Bangalore and Bombay! Mind you, I dunno that my "mobile" internet connection is quite this mobile..... but we'll know if I manage to get this posted tonight. Anyway, the Dad hails from Gulbarga, which is unremarkable except for being almost exactly halfway between Bangalore and Bombay (always and forever Bombay in my mind, partly because I fear that "Mumbai" is a bit of a right-wing Hindu nationalist creation). You can follow the journey on this map here. To my mind, that's lovely because it means we left Bangalore tonight at 8pm and we get in at around 8am, giving us the night on the train. Have I mentioned yet how much I love train travel in India? Well, if possible, I love overnight train travel in India even more than day journeys! There's something so wonderfully soothing about the regular swaying of trains -- the Ma claims that I was a perfect train travel baby 'cos I'd fall sound asleep as soon as it began to move! I can still do that -- the only reason I'm awake at 4am is 'cos the Ma is not a sound sleeper (or trains or not). Incidentally, she was taken aback when I told her that Indian Railways has a "Senior Ladies Quota" which meant that she, being a "Senior Lady," automatically got assigned a Lower Berth.

The Ma is currently reading there and I'm up here: it's a pretty cool perch -- all around me, people are asleep, the bluey-green nightlights are on down the centre corridor of the carriage and I'm as snug as a bug in the blankets and sheets supplied by the train staff. Tonight marks the start of Diwali (often called Deepavali in the South) and so we watched fireworks exploding overhead as the train pulled out of Bangalore Station. On a night like this, it's hard to remember how filthy the city is -- all I can think of right now is sitting in a darkened train window, watching houses lit up with lamps and strung up with coloured lights blur by, as children ran along the streets with sparklers in their hands and the dark sky exploded with an unchoreographed but nevertheless beautiful display of starbursts and rockets. I think that Diwali is meant to mark the end of Ram, Lakshman and Sita's exile but don't quote me on that; I also think, logically, that it's another form of a harvest festival. Dasara, which I've written about earlier, is less of a religious thing and more of a local celebration; I suspect Diwali is more of a wider celebration of similar sentiments. For me, though, it's always been the festival of fireworks and family visits -- when I was a teenager, we lived in India for a couple of years and I remember this overnight train ride to Gulbarga from those days. Diwali has always been a big deal for the Dad's side of the Fam and so we would make this trip, meet up with what seemed like a million cousins and spend a week playing around with firecrackers (pataki! even the name is evocative, isnt' it?). The Ma's side of the family weren't into pataki, apparently because it was common knowledge that a lot of them were produced using child labour in places like Sivakashi in Tamil Nadu, but the Dad's side of the family were less... responsible. And had a horde of kids. I'm assured that things are a lot better now; that the international attention drawn to the "firework children" has meant that the pataki factories have been cleaned up a lot. I'm still not sure that I'd go out and buy any but.... I'm also not going to regret those memories.

That's one of the things I realize anew every time I come to India. Child labour is a terrible, terrible thing but it isn't enough to condemn it. It's part of a vicious cycle of exploitative capitalism production that is deeply entrenched in the normative life of everyday Indians. Be it fireworks, or matchsticks or carpets or embroidery, there is a huge consuming class that simply can't (and of course, sometimes won't) pay double or triple the sum for adult-produced products when they have the choice of buying cheap stuff produced by slave kids. I would, but then again, I'm not trying to live off an Indian wage, and nor am I unwilling to put my money where my mouth is. And of course, there will always be folks like the Ma's family, who've not bought commercially produced fireworks since 1963, but that's never going to be the entire consuming class. And the other side of the problem is that there are children who are sold into such practices. Until that stops, the problem will remain. And I'm cynical enough to believe that as long as there are such "surplus" children in India, they will be moved from industry to industry and exploited and murdered in the hundreds of thousands so it's not a question of targeting the industries so much as reducing this population and providing their families with alternative means. Against this context, the right wing Western anti-abortion agenda -- which translates into a refusal to fund critical NGO work -- is nothing short of criminal. I also happen to think that's it's not driven only by religious politics; in a place like India, clearly more "unwanted" children mean more exploitable labour.

Whew! I dunno how we ended up here but I suspect that that rant has been coming for while.

((Goodness! I think I'm actually going to be able to post this from on the train!!! It's now about an hour later and my best guess is that I'm somewhere between Raichur and Wadi -- on this train map. Have I mentioned that the Internet is amazing?!!1))