I’m making many trips alright but there isn’t even a whiff of adventure in any of them. Last week I was on a trip to Warangal which could have been a major adventure but it fizzled out even before it began. I could have been on a real burning train though it turned out to be all smoke and no fire.
They say there is no smoke without fire but in our case it was only smoke. On yet another trip, this time to Warangal I caught an early morning train with another officer who was accompanying me. We got into the Intercity Express and were seated in a compartment that was like a bus with over hundred seats in it. Just when the train was about ten or fifteen minutes away from Kazipet our adventure began. It was exactly at Station Ghanpur railway station when I was blasted out of the kind of lassitude one gets on a boring train journey. We were sitting just one row of seats away from the doors. Suddenly someone barged in from the adjacent coach and began shouting, ‘Get Down! The train is on fire!’
It took some time for me to realize what he was shouting. By then half the people in the coach had scrambled to their feet and were rushing to the door. The train stopped. I collected my bag and jumped out of the door on the stones beside the tracks. In half a minute or so the train was emptied. Women and kids struggled to get down the steep steps as the train had stopped in the middle of the station. Others helped them get down. It was a panic situation except that there was nothing to panic about. There was no fire, not even smoke. Every one stood looking this way and that way at the train wondering where the fire was.
It was a false alarm. After half hour the train started again and then someone said that one of the bogies was filled with smoke and every one thought the train had caught fire. It turns out something was wrong with the brakes, the smoke was a result of some friction. It was a great disappointment. I had my camera out to capture the scenes of a burning train. It could have been quite a scoop if it had happened but fortunately it didn’t. It appears someone broke her arm jumping out of the train in panic. There was fear on the faces of some families. Some did not get into the train again and preferred to stay back.
Though I had missed the fire on the train it was no less an oven at Warangal with the temperatures reaching forty two degrees on both the days I was there. Add to it we had to inspect several dark and cavernous godowns in an industrial area where seeds were stored in gunny bags. The godowns have asbestos sheet roofs which made the insides hot as a furnace. Each bag had to be counted and we did it with sweat pouring down our faces. At first it looked impossible to count all the bags but it turns out they have a system of stacking the bags called a ‘net.’ Once the stacking pattern is mastered it becomes very easy to count the bags in a given area. I learnt it quite quickly and so was able to count thousands of bags in a matter of hours. That was one thing I learnt during my visit to Warangal. The other thing I learnt was that Warangal was no place to go in the summer.
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