Friday, June 27, 2014

Howrah Station: A Paean (/n. pay-n)

Howrah Station is the second last stop on the way to Salvation, AR. Your space ship will stop momentarily although intolerably for what seems to be nothing more than "a spot of time voyeurism, old chap". Time moves on, water flows under the bridge (to be covered later), you move from stalking one ex to the next on facebook, but Howrah station stays unchanged, unmoved. Uncompromising, sordid it looks on from under its piss stained walls mocking at development and your break neck speed. Millions of inconsequential folk routinely use it to get somewhere but it has nowhere to go. No friday night parties, no walk of shame the next day. (if this is making you think about sex, you maybe need this: A friend in Howrah )

Whatever, don't know where that was going. Right outside gate number 5 of the station, however, is an old lady who has been selling weed for the last few decades. (an obvious digression is to discuss the economics of selling lame drugs in India, which is pretty much a job for a lifer with none of the upside or sexiness that selling drugs in the west entails, but that's for later. It's too early in a blog post to digress. In para number 2.)
The weed surprisingly is not that old. Often one finds, weeded fiends queuing along ticket counters, making those thick crooked human lines. He has no ticket to buy but inquiries to make while the inquiry counter sits deserted, alone. The inquiries seldom add up to much but like most human conversation are regressive at best. "where does this train go?", "what train", "this train that I'm the engine of" and he walks away alone mimicking the engine and the only limb of a train that knows not where it goes while others in the queue look on.

Howrah also has a sandwich shop. As an ode to the Bengal famine that swept this land in the 1940s, the sandwiches are mostly insufficient and unappetizing and named more for who makes them rather than what they contain. The chicken sandwich for instance is made by a chicken that was once destined for the slaughterhouse, but grew out of the meat machine hierarchy owing to its perceived culinary skills. Coming back to the sandwich, however, these are disappointing even after a bad case of the munchies.

The station comes replete with its own suspension bridge. The suspension here referring to the disbelief one feels at the sheer mass of people crossing it in a mulling about I have nowhere to go way. That bridge is proof humanity overtook nature in a way that was never intended. The river was put fat and wide between the station and the city to prevent mass droves of I.F. from crossing over to the other side. And one has his doubts resurface. Did I pay the old woman too much for this weed? It doesn't seem to be working.