Canadian Train Ride - 2005
Venkat Mullur
March 28, 2008
The Entrance
A long line waited at the entrance to "gate 11"; train 60 to Montreal was ready for yet another on-time departure. Long lines brought back memories of long waits, and the tedious company of strangers, fleetingly, randomly, united in a common pursuit. A middle-aged woman wanted to make sure she was in the right line, and I nodded. This line was incongruous. Somehow it suggested inefficiency, in the midst of Canadian orderliness. Union Station, in the heart of downtown Toronto on Bay Street, is built in the tradition of late 19th century North American railroad passenger ports. The light brownstone building, with the yellow Via Rail logo, in sharp contrast to more numerous green Go Train logos, is comforting, inviting. Without the urgency seen at airports, and yet having some of the plush of business travel, Union Station, like its more crowded cousins south in the United States, is very much a working and well-functioning place.
Soon enough, the line started moving, and the blue-uniformed railroad workers, standing a few paces apart, were inspecting tickets. The line moved up to an up-escalator, which after about a flight or so, brought us to a train platform, gate 11. At the entrance to each car of the waiting train, was a Via Rail employee, courteously directing passengers into the right cars - Kingston Car 3, Cornwall Car 4, Montreal, please go to the head of the train. Such rules are easy to enforce in Canada. Trains are one of many viable transportation options available to people here, and so you don´t see the impossible crowding that you would in India, nor would you see the purposeful, orderly, yet urgent, crowding that you would in the UK. And to the south, the United States is egregious among industrialized countries, in how its people largely avoid any meaningful train travel, preferring, instead, cars.
I climbed up the stairs three steps- into comfort class car 4. The vestibule connecting the cars was to my right; I turned left, entered the seating area, and started to look for an empty row of seats. I walked the length of the car, and walked back. People were already seated in all the two-seat rows. I was not sure how or when they got there. Not far from the head of the car, I found a quartet of seats. These were reserved for groups, said a bi-lingual - French and English - sign neatly clipped to the open food tray on one of the seats.
I took my chances and occupied a window seat, after hoisting my airline-style carry-on suitcase and laptop bag to the overhead cabin. Now, this happened to be an emergency exit row, and so, a few minutes later, a train cabin attendant stopped by and routinely explained the mechanics of hammering a hole into the window, ripping out the seat cushion, and using it as a blunt object to push out the shatter-proof, two-ply spider-glass. Off late, I try to take these mandatory instructions seriously. Obediently, somehow I felt it was the civic thing to do, I quickly imagined an emergency scenario, and pictured me following the sequence of actions that was just blandly explained to me.
Quartet Quarters
On time at 11:30 AM, the train inched out of "gate 11". I was as yet the only occupant at the quartet, the group seating area, and would be so until the next scheduled stop at Oshawa. Across the aisle, and in front, was another such quartet of seats. Older women, a mother and daughter, sat across from a single unaccompanied woman. This woman, also older, in her early sixties I guessed, was not known to the other women. In my travels, I have picked up the knack of telling how closely acquainted people are, based on the non-verbal aspects of their conversation. The daughter, I overheard, was accompanying the mother back from a holiday (the Canadian term for vacation) in Toronto. Her mother, she said, once used to live in Toronto. The capital of Ontario, to a Canadian, is the soul of the country. Often in Canada, people use Toronto and Canada interchangeably. Consider this: Oh Canada is so diverse, have you been to Toronto? Diverse, in these parts of the world, is another way of saying multiracial, less offensively. Or this: Canada is getting to be more and more like the U.S., did you hear about the shootings near Bloor and Yonge? A country of 35 million, spread across a massive, under-populated and incredibly rich continent, Canada still defines itself in terms relative to the United States, subconsciously and consciously inviting comparison to its powerful neighbor to the south. The U.S. is never too far in Canada.
Appearances
This train is a local; it makes five stops before it reaches Cornwall. At Oshawa, the first stop east of Toronto, an overweight white woman and her equally overweight son joined me at the quartet. The woman, in her late 30s it appeared, looked poor. Her freckle-faced son, 11 or so, had a beautiful face which exuded purity. He looked intelligent, and poignant in a way kids do when they are vulnerable. The first thing the boy did was reach into his mother´s backpack and retrieve a crossword puzzle book. His mother, pulled out what I first thought was a simple math puzzle, a sheet of paper with numbers in a grid. She handed the sheet of paper to the boy, who rolled his eyes, produced a pencil that was in the book, a bookmark, and started filling in the squares. After a few wrong entries, the sheet of paper had enough eraser dust to warrant a shakeout. The boy lifted the sheet and swept the eraser debris away, towards me. The mother and I exchanged looks; I resigning, maybe a tad indulgent, and she solicitous. Then the boy, displaying perfect diction and an educated man´s grasp of conversational English, asked his mother to try and solve the puzzle. She replied, and her tone revealed education, upper-class restraint. Her eyes were loving, and respectful. As if the boy was an equal, a partner in a tough assignment.
This kind of respect towards children is typical of a certain kind of educated North American. Such parents usually go out of their way to answer (with more than a hint of didactic flourish) a child´s questions. The thinking here is that acknowledging a child as an adult could somehow increase brain development and sow the seeds of future success. In public, at times, seeing such an approach used with children makes me look away. Maybe I am witnessing a personal exchange, and shouldn´t be mindful. But no, the idea is to show-off, to be a bit pretentious. Many years of living in the U.S., and my own experience as a father, have taught me that parenting is quite a public exercise here. If you are witness to positive parenting, the expected thing to do is to acknowledge the other parent, show appreciation. But crude anger and mockery, if publicly directed at a child, is grounds for frowning, and if violence is suspected, grounds for calling in the police. In the U.S. and Canada, countries where privacy rights are jealously guarded, and where the separation between one´s family life and the public is sanctified by many a leader self-righteously choosing "family over my job", parenting itself is one of the most prescriptive, closely monitored, and publicly evaluated realms of family life.
So this mother-son duo surprised me, and I felt shame at having jumped to conclusions. At some point between Oshawa and the next station, I realized that the puzzle being passed back and forth between the two was Su-Do-Ku, the Japanese puzzle that was "sweeping the country", fiendishly addictive, yet mockingly simple in its premise. The challenge of the puzzle is to fill in a 9x9 grid with single-digit numbers (1-9) so that each number appears exactly once - row-wise, column-wise, and in each mini 3x3 grid that makes up the larger grid. At least thrice, the two had passed the puzzle back-forth. The train floor separating my row of seats (as yet unoccupied) and their's was littered with eraser dust. Su-do-ku, as advertised, was proving impossibly addictive. A Tamil word, roughly alliterated as "soduku" came to mind. It means to straighten out joints, to crack your fingers. Mental soduku in progress, as the train rolled by east.
The mother-daughter couple, sitting across the aisle, was going to Montreal. The middle-aged daughter was the primary care-giver for her mother. And because of that, she said and I overheard, she was traveling for free. This did not surprise me. Canada, always benevolent to its citizens, has all kinds of social programs which dole out real cash. The idea is simple. The country is sharing its God-given bounty oil, lumber, nickel, copper with its own people. Such largesse has not gone unnoticed by newly arrived immigrants and asylum seekers, landing everyday in Toronto, Montreal, and other airports where large trans-Atlantic planes operate. The daughter spoke to the unaccompanied woman, sitting across, in French-accented English. Not surprising; this was a train to Montreal, the heart and soul of francophone Canada. Until I heard her say, "Those people in Montreal, I can´t understand them, they are not like us. We speak French, but of a different kind." Now what kind would that be? Unlike the English, the French do not have a deep colonial footprint in far-flung corners of the world. To a non-English speaker in the two giant English-speaking, immigrant countries of North America, understanding the nuances between English English, Australian English, Canadian English, American English (and its numerous regional variations), and Indian English (and its numerous regional variations) is tricky. But the French? You have the Quebecois and the European French. And yet she sounded like someone from Canada, by the way she easily pronounced its great cities Toe-raw-no, Munt-riaal, Ku-beck, and so on. Perhaps the care-giving daughter and her mother were Acadian French and while still of the new world, yet from places far enough from Quebec so as to feel different. A long-forgotten people who once populated parts of what are now the American state of Maine, southern Quebec, and parts of the Canadian Maritimes. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, fleeing an increasingly powerful (and intolerant) Protestant presence, these Catholic residents, from parts not too far from where our train was headed, fled to the American South. Vast areas including present-day Louisiana were, at the time, under French (and hence Catholic) rule, a conducive haven. With the eventual American purchase of the Louisiana territory, there came African American slaves who joined the French-speaking Haitians already there. The descendants of those early Acadians have, for centuries now, intermingled with other races, and can be found in Louisiana. French-speaking people from the bayous near New Orleans are commonly referred to as ´Cajuns, a corruption of Acadians. And so it comes that a ´Cajun whose forbears settled parts of eastern Ontario, Quebec, and Maine might find the French spoken in Montreal odd, not pure.
The Past
The train stopped at Couburg, some distance west of Kingston, the mid-way point between Toronto and Cornwall. I heard the fat woman say that this was her old stomping grounds, an American expression that suggested a wild past, forbidden pleasures, and a hint of trouble. Her eleven-year old, immersed now in a crossword puzzle, rolled his eyes, and sighed. "I know you have mixed feelings about this place mom, he said. He continued. "Some days you regret leaving Couberg, and some days I hear you wish you never had set foot in that town. Would you make up your mind?" At this, his mother looked away from the window, Couberg station was passing by as the train slowly inched out of the platform. I could only guess the kind of life she had lead in Couberg - maybe an early romance, perhaps some experimentation with drugs. Maybe the boy himself was a result of earlier indiscretions. Or, more likely, it could simply be that she felt a certain distance from her humbler beginnings in this working class township on the northern shores of Lake Ontario, curiously, only a few miles from the international border.
After Couberg, I got up, and walked towards the vestibule, passing the luggage racks at the end of car, on both sides of the aisle. I passed the food-service girl she appeared to be barely eighteen at the end of the car, before stopping and facing the locked doors with big windows. Looking out at the lush, green landscape pass by, and hearing, for the first time, train noises - changing tracks, passing over track gaps, the pull-push of cars behind and cars in front I felt powerful. When confronted with heavy machinery, man-made, and nature-defying like this efficient fast train, running through picturesque northern country (at times miles from Lake Ontario, and at times the oceanic lake only a few feet on the south side of the train), I usually feel a rush of adrenaline. As if I were directly in control of the awesome man-made powers and technology that goes into running a train as this one.
In this part of North America, nature, a result of retreating glaciers from the last ice-age, was well tamed and no match for the equipment and constructions unleashed by the best of western know-how and engineering. City after city, and town after passing town bore witness to the great industrial revolution of the last century. We passed Amherstview, the station a blur, some fifteen minutes before Kingston, and my mind went back to India where, as a child, I did quite a lot of traveling on trains.
My India is the old India of holy poverty, and socialistic liberalism. It is the India that laid the foundations for the jobs-driven, services driven economic success we now hear about. But what is not widely known or recognized anymore is that this other India had dreamed up and built up lasting edifices and institutions, whose size and power were a sharp contrast to the teeming people that maintained and used the infrastructure. The train ride from New Delhi in the north to Madras in the south-east was roughly 2,100 km, roughly, 1,500 miles. Halfway through the (then) two-night journey, I would get goose-bumps seeing the train wind through remote mountains the Vindhyas, dividing India into north and south during early afternoon. Some of these tunnels took five to six minutes to pass through. The train would emerge out - my brothers and I full of the excitement of the dark, sinister sounding tunnel crossing - so high that the clusters of villages in the valley below would appear as tiny dots. And then, after about fifteen such tunnels, the landscape would abruptly change. The short, stunted, and gnarled trees of north-central India, born of dusty soil, would give way to more lush vegetation. Plantations of oranges were common further south, and everywhere, from now until the town of Vijayawada some 400 miles to the south-east, the land and its peoples reflected the (relative) richness born of the volcanic soil that is the Deccan Plateau of south-central India. This most quintessential of Indian railway crossings is one of the greatest modern triumphs of Indian engineering, and rivals the best of the North American labors auto plants, lake-front harbors, ocean-going vessels headed to Chicago, coming all the way inland through the St Lawrence Seaway to our east, from the Atlantic - that I saw pass by as the train fast approached Kingston.
Arrival
Kingston, in the province of Ontario, is a college town. The northern shores of Lake Ontario are not far. After Kingston, the egg-shaped lake tapers south, and for some time till about Cornwall, the train-line runs parallel to the ocean-going St. Lawrence River. At Kingston, there was a crowd, waiting patiently to get in, and an equal number of people lining up to get off the train. This churn was exciting; more consistent with my memories of rail travel. I saw home-bound college students from universities in and around Toronto. Classes, no doubt, carefully picked to ensure a comfortably early start to the weekend. There were middle-management commuter types both woman and men looking out of place on a long haul train in their business casual attires. And there were families, off to country houses in the wooded North. Their bright North Face backpacks, the collapsible beach chairs quite the rage these cheap Chinese imports -, and the American brand name outdoors clothing, completed the picture. The North American, with his comfortable access to most things material, is, outwardly, one of the most contented, most envied, and one of the most emulated figures in the modern world. To even dream to live up to the material standards of an American or a Canadian is to be fanciful in most parts of the world. Like water finding its level, treacherously breaching the wall that gives it stature, standards of living everywhere are catching up, and more times than not, at the expense of these rich, northern countries. It´s not a zero-sum game, say most economists, the pie is growing. But demographic trends, large-scale systematic and illegal immigration make it so. There isn´t an unlimited supply of cheap land on which to build cheap single-family homes. Increasingly, cities everywhere in North America are seeing all-day rush hours. In Toronto now, newcomers find it almost impossible to enter the middle-class, that icon of envy and tourist brochures. Jobs are protected, and while the official policy which dictates immigration - is one that touts "labor shortages", the newly arrived immigrant is often faced with obstacles in his quest for a job in his avowed profession. A taxi-cab driver once used to be a professor of mathematics; another used to be a lawyer back in his country. In housing too, one sees the tap drying. Instead of the much-advertised, and desired, cozy single-family home, built in spacious environs, one observes town-homes, condominiums and rental units everywhere. Far from the crowded city center in Toronto, houses are built on crowded lots. During one stretch east of Toronto, I saw brownstone homes whizzing by, garbage choking the storm water drains running parallel to the tracks, abutting the boundary walls of the subdivision one saw, looking south. The scene reminded me of the industrial cities of northern England - the beginnings of overcrowding and squalor in a land unaccustomed to either. And yet all this represents a huge step up to the majority of people seeking to immigrate to Canada.
We were approaching Cornwall. I unloaded my bags from the over-sized overhead compartment (a luxury not even available to first-class air travelers anymore). As I walked towards the door of my car, something told me the door wouldn´t open at Cornwall. Maybe it was the emptiness I was the only one, or that others were passing me and crossing over to the next car. I followed a woman, a native of one of the First Nations. You can tell them by their tall, almost Caucasian stature, tanned and weathered visage, and of course the straight jet black hair. A troubled history with settlers, forced immersions into "European culture", and a barbaric, inhuman brush with religious schools serving as boarding houses for aboriginal children all came to mind. In the newest northern province of Nunavut, I had heard the Canadian government was conducting self-esteem classes on first nation reservations. It is important for first nations to feel proud about their culture, say the public service announcements. Canadians should know about coping with a dominant culture that is not entirely home-grown, and yet not entirely foreign. Tellingly, Cornwall, the last major town before the Quebec border, is on border with the United States of America. As the train pulled out of Cornwall, I, walking the bare, somewhat informal platform to the station house, saw the First Nation woman waving gently. The dark glass windows of the departing train gave it a sleek metropolitan look that looked out of place here. Was she waving to someone, still on-board, in particular? I couldn´t tell. Her gesture almost seemed a bit deliberate, almost symbolic, and tinged with sadness. As if she had truly arrived at an end, not merely of a train ride, but an era.
The End
A long line waited at the entrance to "gate 11"; train 60 to Montreal was ready for yet another on-time departure. Long lines brought back memories of long waits, and the tedious company of strangers, fleetingly, randomly, united in a common pursuit. A middle-aged woman wanted to make sure she was in the right line, and I nodded. This line was incongruous. Somehow it suggested inefficiency, in the midst of Canadian orderliness. Union Station, in the heart of downtown Toronto on Bay Street, is built in the tradition of late 19th century North American railroad passenger ports. The light brownstone building, with the yellow Via Rail logo, in sharp contrast to more numerous green Go Train logos, is comforting, inviting. Without the urgency seen at airports, and yet having some of the plush of business travel, Union Station, like its more crowded cousins south in the United States, is very much a working and well-functioning place.
Soon enough, the line started moving, and the blue-uniformed railroad workers, standing a few paces apart, were inspecting tickets. The line moved up to an up-escalator, which after about a flight or so, brought us to a train platform, gate 11. At the entrance to each car of the waiting train, was a Via Rail employee, courteously directing passengers into the right cars - Kingston Car 3, Cornwall Car 4, Montreal, please go to the head of the train. Such rules are easy to enforce in Canada. Trains are one of many viable transportation options available to people here, and so you don´t see the impossible crowding that you would in India, nor would you see the purposeful, orderly, yet urgent, crowding that you would in the UK. And to the south, the United States is egregious among industrialized countries, in how its people largely avoid any meaningful train travel, preferring, instead, cars.
I climbed up the stairs three steps- into comfort class car 4. The vestibule connecting the cars was to my right; I turned left, entered the seating area, and started to look for an empty row of seats. I walked the length of the car, and walked back. People were already seated in all the two-seat rows. I was not sure how or when they got there. Not far from the head of the car, I found a quartet of seats. These were reserved for groups, said a bi-lingual - French and English - sign neatly clipped to the open food tray on one of the seats.
I took my chances and occupied a window seat, after hoisting my airline-style carry-on suitcase and laptop bag to the overhead cabin. Now, this happened to be an emergency exit row, and so, a few minutes later, a train cabin attendant stopped by and routinely explained the mechanics of hammering a hole into the window, ripping out the seat cushion, and using it as a blunt object to push out the shatter-proof, two-ply spider-glass. Off late, I try to take these mandatory instructions seriously. Obediently, somehow I felt it was the civic thing to do, I quickly imagined an emergency scenario, and pictured me following the sequence of actions that was just blandly explained to me.
Quartet Quarters
On time at 11:30 AM, the train inched out of "gate 11". I was as yet the only occupant at the quartet, the group seating area, and would be so until the next scheduled stop at Oshawa. Across the aisle, and in front, was another such quartet of seats. Older women, a mother and daughter, sat across from a single unaccompanied woman. This woman, also older, in her early sixties I guessed, was not known to the other women. In my travels, I have picked up the knack of telling how closely acquainted people are, based on the non-verbal aspects of their conversation. The daughter, I overheard, was accompanying the mother back from a holiday (the Canadian term for vacation) in Toronto. Her mother, she said, once used to live in Toronto. The capital of Ontario, to a Canadian, is the soul of the country. Often in Canada, people use Toronto and Canada interchangeably. Consider this: Oh Canada is so diverse, have you been to Toronto? Diverse, in these parts of the world, is another way of saying multiracial, less offensively. Or this: Canada is getting to be more and more like the U.S., did you hear about the shootings near Bloor and Yonge? A country of 35 million, spread across a massive, under-populated and incredibly rich continent, Canada still defines itself in terms relative to the United States, subconsciously and consciously inviting comparison to its powerful neighbor to the south. The U.S. is never too far in Canada.
Appearances
This train is a local; it makes five stops before it reaches Cornwall. At Oshawa, the first stop east of Toronto, an overweight white woman and her equally overweight son joined me at the quartet. The woman, in her late 30s it appeared, looked poor. Her freckle-faced son, 11 or so, had a beautiful face which exuded purity. He looked intelligent, and poignant in a way kids do when they are vulnerable. The first thing the boy did was reach into his mother´s backpack and retrieve a crossword puzzle book. His mother, pulled out what I first thought was a simple math puzzle, a sheet of paper with numbers in a grid. She handed the sheet of paper to the boy, who rolled his eyes, produced a pencil that was in the book, a bookmark, and started filling in the squares. After a few wrong entries, the sheet of paper had enough eraser dust to warrant a shakeout. The boy lifted the sheet and swept the eraser debris away, towards me. The mother and I exchanged looks; I resigning, maybe a tad indulgent, and she solicitous. Then the boy, displaying perfect diction and an educated man´s grasp of conversational English, asked his mother to try and solve the puzzle. She replied, and her tone revealed education, upper-class restraint. Her eyes were loving, and respectful. As if the boy was an equal, a partner in a tough assignment.
This kind of respect towards children is typical of a certain kind of educated North American. Such parents usually go out of their way to answer (with more than a hint of didactic flourish) a child´s questions. The thinking here is that acknowledging a child as an adult could somehow increase brain development and sow the seeds of future success. In public, at times, seeing such an approach used with children makes me look away. Maybe I am witnessing a personal exchange, and shouldn´t be mindful. But no, the idea is to show-off, to be a bit pretentious. Many years of living in the U.S., and my own experience as a father, have taught me that parenting is quite a public exercise here. If you are witness to positive parenting, the expected thing to do is to acknowledge the other parent, show appreciation. But crude anger and mockery, if publicly directed at a child, is grounds for frowning, and if violence is suspected, grounds for calling in the police. In the U.S. and Canada, countries where privacy rights are jealously guarded, and where the separation between one´s family life and the public is sanctified by many a leader self-righteously choosing "family over my job", parenting itself is one of the most prescriptive, closely monitored, and publicly evaluated realms of family life.
So this mother-son duo surprised me, and I felt shame at having jumped to conclusions. At some point between Oshawa and the next station, I realized that the puzzle being passed back and forth between the two was Su-Do-Ku, the Japanese puzzle that was "sweeping the country", fiendishly addictive, yet mockingly simple in its premise. The challenge of the puzzle is to fill in a 9x9 grid with single-digit numbers (1-9) so that each number appears exactly once - row-wise, column-wise, and in each mini 3x3 grid that makes up the larger grid. At least thrice, the two had passed the puzzle back-forth. The train floor separating my row of seats (as yet unoccupied) and their's was littered with eraser dust. Su-do-ku, as advertised, was proving impossibly addictive. A Tamil word, roughly alliterated as "soduku" came to mind. It means to straighten out joints, to crack your fingers. Mental soduku in progress, as the train rolled by east.
The mother-daughter couple, sitting across the aisle, was going to Montreal. The middle-aged daughter was the primary care-giver for her mother. And because of that, she said and I overheard, she was traveling for free. This did not surprise me. Canada, always benevolent to its citizens, has all kinds of social programs which dole out real cash. The idea is simple. The country is sharing its God-given bounty oil, lumber, nickel, copper with its own people. Such largesse has not gone unnoticed by newly arrived immigrants and asylum seekers, landing everyday in Toronto, Montreal, and other airports where large trans-Atlantic planes operate. The daughter spoke to the unaccompanied woman, sitting across, in French-accented English. Not surprising; this was a train to Montreal, the heart and soul of francophone Canada. Until I heard her say, "Those people in Montreal, I can´t understand them, they are not like us. We speak French, but of a different kind." Now what kind would that be? Unlike the English, the French do not have a deep colonial footprint in far-flung corners of the world. To a non-English speaker in the two giant English-speaking, immigrant countries of North America, understanding the nuances between English English, Australian English, Canadian English, American English (and its numerous regional variations), and Indian English (and its numerous regional variations) is tricky. But the French? You have the Quebecois and the European French. And yet she sounded like someone from Canada, by the way she easily pronounced its great cities Toe-raw-no, Munt-riaal, Ku-beck, and so on. Perhaps the care-giving daughter and her mother were Acadian French and while still of the new world, yet from places far enough from Quebec so as to feel different. A long-forgotten people who once populated parts of what are now the American state of Maine, southern Quebec, and parts of the Canadian Maritimes. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, fleeing an increasingly powerful (and intolerant) Protestant presence, these Catholic residents, from parts not too far from where our train was headed, fled to the American South. Vast areas including present-day Louisiana were, at the time, under French (and hence Catholic) rule, a conducive haven. With the eventual American purchase of the Louisiana territory, there came African American slaves who joined the French-speaking Haitians already there. The descendants of those early Acadians have, for centuries now, intermingled with other races, and can be found in Louisiana. French-speaking people from the bayous near New Orleans are commonly referred to as ´Cajuns, a corruption of Acadians. And so it comes that a ´Cajun whose forbears settled parts of eastern Ontario, Quebec, and Maine might find the French spoken in Montreal odd, not pure.
The Past
The train stopped at Couburg, some distance west of Kingston, the mid-way point between Toronto and Cornwall. I heard the fat woman say that this was her old stomping grounds, an American expression that suggested a wild past, forbidden pleasures, and a hint of trouble. Her eleven-year old, immersed now in a crossword puzzle, rolled his eyes, and sighed. "I know you have mixed feelings about this place mom, he said. He continued. "Some days you regret leaving Couberg, and some days I hear you wish you never had set foot in that town. Would you make up your mind?" At this, his mother looked away from the window, Couberg station was passing by as the train slowly inched out of the platform. I could only guess the kind of life she had lead in Couberg - maybe an early romance, perhaps some experimentation with drugs. Maybe the boy himself was a result of earlier indiscretions. Or, more likely, it could simply be that she felt a certain distance from her humbler beginnings in this working class township on the northern shores of Lake Ontario, curiously, only a few miles from the international border.
After Couberg, I got up, and walked towards the vestibule, passing the luggage racks at the end of car, on both sides of the aisle. I passed the food-service girl she appeared to be barely eighteen at the end of the car, before stopping and facing the locked doors with big windows. Looking out at the lush, green landscape pass by, and hearing, for the first time, train noises - changing tracks, passing over track gaps, the pull-push of cars behind and cars in front I felt powerful. When confronted with heavy machinery, man-made, and nature-defying like this efficient fast train, running through picturesque northern country (at times miles from Lake Ontario, and at times the oceanic lake only a few feet on the south side of the train), I usually feel a rush of adrenaline. As if I were directly in control of the awesome man-made powers and technology that goes into running a train as this one.
In this part of North America, nature, a result of retreating glaciers from the last ice-age, was well tamed and no match for the equipment and constructions unleashed by the best of western know-how and engineering. City after city, and town after passing town bore witness to the great industrial revolution of the last century. We passed Amherstview, the station a blur, some fifteen minutes before Kingston, and my mind went back to India where, as a child, I did quite a lot of traveling on trains.
My India is the old India of holy poverty, and socialistic liberalism. It is the India that laid the foundations for the jobs-driven, services driven economic success we now hear about. But what is not widely known or recognized anymore is that this other India had dreamed up and built up lasting edifices and institutions, whose size and power were a sharp contrast to the teeming people that maintained and used the infrastructure. The train ride from New Delhi in the north to Madras in the south-east was roughly 2,100 km, roughly, 1,500 miles. Halfway through the (then) two-night journey, I would get goose-bumps seeing the train wind through remote mountains the Vindhyas, dividing India into north and south during early afternoon. Some of these tunnels took five to six minutes to pass through. The train would emerge out - my brothers and I full of the excitement of the dark, sinister sounding tunnel crossing - so high that the clusters of villages in the valley below would appear as tiny dots. And then, after about fifteen such tunnels, the landscape would abruptly change. The short, stunted, and gnarled trees of north-central India, born of dusty soil, would give way to more lush vegetation. Plantations of oranges were common further south, and everywhere, from now until the town of Vijayawada some 400 miles to the south-east, the land and its peoples reflected the (relative) richness born of the volcanic soil that is the Deccan Plateau of south-central India. This most quintessential of Indian railway crossings is one of the greatest modern triumphs of Indian engineering, and rivals the best of the North American labors auto plants, lake-front harbors, ocean-going vessels headed to Chicago, coming all the way inland through the St Lawrence Seaway to our east, from the Atlantic - that I saw pass by as the train fast approached Kingston.
Arrival
Kingston, in the province of Ontario, is a college town. The northern shores of Lake Ontario are not far. After Kingston, the egg-shaped lake tapers south, and for some time till about Cornwall, the train-line runs parallel to the ocean-going St. Lawrence River. At Kingston, there was a crowd, waiting patiently to get in, and an equal number of people lining up to get off the train. This churn was exciting; more consistent with my memories of rail travel. I saw home-bound college students from universities in and around Toronto. Classes, no doubt, carefully picked to ensure a comfortably early start to the weekend. There were middle-management commuter types both woman and men looking out of place on a long haul train in their business casual attires. And there were families, off to country houses in the wooded North. Their bright North Face backpacks, the collapsible beach chairs quite the rage these cheap Chinese imports -, and the American brand name outdoors clothing, completed the picture. The North American, with his comfortable access to most things material, is, outwardly, one of the most contented, most envied, and one of the most emulated figures in the modern world. To even dream to live up to the material standards of an American or a Canadian is to be fanciful in most parts of the world. Like water finding its level, treacherously breaching the wall that gives it stature, standards of living everywhere are catching up, and more times than not, at the expense of these rich, northern countries. It´s not a zero-sum game, say most economists, the pie is growing. But demographic trends, large-scale systematic and illegal immigration make it so. There isn´t an unlimited supply of cheap land on which to build cheap single-family homes. Increasingly, cities everywhere in North America are seeing all-day rush hours. In Toronto now, newcomers find it almost impossible to enter the middle-class, that icon of envy and tourist brochures. Jobs are protected, and while the official policy which dictates immigration - is one that touts "labor shortages", the newly arrived immigrant is often faced with obstacles in his quest for a job in his avowed profession. A taxi-cab driver once used to be a professor of mathematics; another used to be a lawyer back in his country. In housing too, one sees the tap drying. Instead of the much-advertised, and desired, cozy single-family home, built in spacious environs, one observes town-homes, condominiums and rental units everywhere. Far from the crowded city center in Toronto, houses are built on crowded lots. During one stretch east of Toronto, I saw brownstone homes whizzing by, garbage choking the storm water drains running parallel to the tracks, abutting the boundary walls of the subdivision one saw, looking south. The scene reminded me of the industrial cities of northern England - the beginnings of overcrowding and squalor in a land unaccustomed to either. And yet all this represents a huge step up to the majority of people seeking to immigrate to Canada.
We were approaching Cornwall. I unloaded my bags from the over-sized overhead compartment (a luxury not even available to first-class air travelers anymore). As I walked towards the door of my car, something told me the door wouldn´t open at Cornwall. Maybe it was the emptiness I was the only one, or that others were passing me and crossing over to the next car. I followed a woman, a native of one of the First Nations. You can tell them by their tall, almost Caucasian stature, tanned and weathered visage, and of course the straight jet black hair. A troubled history with settlers, forced immersions into "European culture", and a barbaric, inhuman brush with religious schools serving as boarding houses for aboriginal children all came to mind. In the newest northern province of Nunavut, I had heard the Canadian government was conducting self-esteem classes on first nation reservations. It is important for first nations to feel proud about their culture, say the public service announcements. Canadians should know about coping with a dominant culture that is not entirely home-grown, and yet not entirely foreign. Tellingly, Cornwall, the last major town before the Quebec border, is on border with the United States of America. As the train pulled out of Cornwall, I, walking the bare, somewhat informal platform to the station house, saw the First Nation woman waving gently. The dark glass windows of the departing train gave it a sleek metropolitan look that looked out of place here. Was she waving to someone, still on-board, in particular? I couldn´t tell. Her gesture almost seemed a bit deliberate, almost symbolic, and tinged with sadness. As if she had truly arrived at an end, not merely of a train ride, but an era.
The End
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