Rising above the din of hot wheels as a train cleaved through a fence was a babble of human voices arguing whether the jackfruit was fatter on the other side.
It was in Darsana. Darsana is the first (or last) railway station and town where the train made its first stop as it railed through armed border guardsmen on either side of the tracks in India and Bangladesh across a no-man’s land where blades of jute grass bowed and bent but did not break.
The jackfruit tree was in the middle of a concrete and sand platform. It was laden with the green and golden gourd that bent its branches and kissed the ground. The ampleness of the fruit was not to be missed.
The sickly-sweet smell from the fruit that pervaded the coach was from the cut cloves in the wicker baskets of hawkers parked a good distance from the platform. I never quite liked it. That afternoon though the heaviness of the odour was like a heave of lingering memory.
Inside the train that parked itself for border formalities and a change of engines I heard Amita Choudhary, a passenger, telling her young son, “Dyakh, dyakh, Bangladeshi kathal, dekhechish koto mota?” (See, see, that is a Bangladeshi jackfruit, do you see how fat it is?).
On the bright afternoon of 14 April 2008, Poila Baisakh, Bengali New Year’s Day, the Maitree (Friendship) Express, a passenger train from Kolkata to Dhaka and Dhaka to Calcutta resumed a journey after 43 years. It revived a route that was used by people from Bengal for decades ever since the East Bengal Railways were formed in the mid-19th century. The Maitree Express was the latest of the passenger trains on a route covered by the Dacca and Chittagong Mails.
The reason for recalling the event today however is in the timing. In April 2008, as in August 2024, Bangladesh was under an interim or caretaker government. Sheikh Hasina Wajed took over in the following year. In West Bengal, the Left Front government was tottering but Buddhadev Bhattacharya was still the chief minister. In New Delhi, Manmohan Singh was Prime Minister and Pranab Mukherjee was President.
At Darsana, as the Maitree Express from Dhaka glided slowly into the station from the opposite side on the way to Calcutta, a distance of 372 kms, passengers from the cars of each train leant out of doors and windows across the tracks to touch hands and to wave at one another.
The train from Dhaka was more crowded, its seven cars packing in 332 passengers, the train from Calcutta had only 65. Jaya Varma Sinha, now the chairperson of India’s Railway Board, was then the railway representative at the Indian High Commission in Dhaka. She was the officer who was at the centre of the revival of the passenger service. She was also on board the train to Dhaka.
Having grown up in the shadow of Ritwik Ghatak’s angst over Partition, the revival of the Maitree Express was a rekindling of hope. Embers of hope typically glow and fade. Ghatak’s “Komal Gandhar”, of course epitomised an ebb. In a scene that is now legendary, a character tells another while standing on the edge of a sundered railway line that the tracks that used to remind him of a ‘plus’ sign now remind him of a ‘minus’ sign.
In that moment in Darsana on the border though where hands reached out across tracks just for a feel if not a clasp there was that electrifying frisson of hope.
It is a frisson I have experienced elsewhere – in Jammu & Kashmir when the Aman Setu across the Line of Control was opened for a bus service and in Punjab, at Wagah-minus-the-goosestepping, where buses (no longer) and pedestrians crossed over between Amritsar and Lahore.
In this accursed subcontinent, legacies of colonialism still dictate much of our politics. In the run from Calcutta to Dhaka on the re-inaugurated Maitree Express, the train was stopped once for 15 minutes by an RSS-backed citizen’s forum whose volunteers squatted on the tracks to oppose relations with “terrorist” Bangladesh. In Dhaka, the caretaker government of then chief advisor Fakhruddin Ahmed had compelled itself to go through with the project despite Islamist objections. Bangladesh today again has a chief advisor in the banker Muhammad Yunus. Despite the troubled legacy it is possible to talk about the troubles. Like from the Maitree Expresses.
As India’s Prime Minister agonised over attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh, Yunus was telling his supporters that he would quit if minorities continued to be harmed. Bangladesh is not in denial. Its media have been reporting and showing that these attacks have indeed taken place. If acknowledgement is the first step to addressing an issue, Dhaka is not falling behind.
And therein lies that glimmer of hope. In an accursed subcontinent, where regimes lurch from one to the next, it is still possible to reach out over troubled tracks and sense fingertip to fingertip, damn the rulers. Even Darsana where the trains stood still for a moment was the scene of much bloodletting in 1971 as Bangladesh was birthed from East Pakistan.
Sometimes we mistake a minus sign for what is but a hyphen.
The writer is a journalist. His coverage of conflict zones from across the Indian subcontinent and West Asia for more than 30 years include the wars in Kargil, Iraq and Afghanistan.