If Jesus ever came to Jamalpur on a train and other travel diaries...

"We hope you go everywhereand may you always return to that one place where you came fromand may you always tell stories that begin with...Once upon a time in a faraway place where the train stopped I found love and hope."

- The Eye has to Travel

In this diary and if you cared to read it, memories had been compiled of a little boy growing up in a small railway town called Jamalpur in Bihar where he spent hours on a bridge watching the trains go by.

At the National Railway Museum, designer Samant Chauhan attempted to break the barriers of time and space and it didn't matter if it was a fashion show. What mattered was the narrative, the attempt and the context of nostalgia.

There are once-upon-a-time kind of stories in faraway places which weren't so distant anyways in this show. It isn't literal but somehow if you sat there as the sun beat down upon you and saw it like a kalaiedoscope, you'd see places from a distant past or a distant future.

Some places exist in memory and no epitaphs are required because they remain a mystery and belong only to a certain time and place. For instance, in the diary of sketches, there is a looming cross.

The cross on top of the house of God shone on rainy afternoons and the designer wondered if Jesus ever came to Jamalpur on a train and stayed on to tell us that religion is personal and that all these wars are unnecessary.

At the Railway Museum where they paid a tribute to the Indian Railways that first taught us the beauty of travel and made us unafraid of the unfamiliar because the train had a pace and it eased you into new landscapes, they attempted at making it a space time itself is transformed and where we can go back to our earliest memories of our first train rides.

An artist can pay homage in his medium. Threads and needles being his, this was his attempt at creating the landscape of his lived and imagined memories.

***

I have always liked trains, their rhythm and the freedom I thought a journey like that would provide by suspending one in between two places as you watch the world go by, the power of observation heightened and worlds would fit in window frames.

Trains made me slow down. They also told me that all you need is a frame to dream of distant possibilities. I though once I saw a unicorn grazing in the fields from a train window.

An offsite show at the ongoing Amazon India Fashion Week in Delhi, Chauhan's show was based on memories of growing up in Jamalpur. But it wasn't just his memories. He had traveled back and forth in time. He had imagined memory of the 25,000 British men and women that lived there once.

To have it in a railway museum made sense because Jamalpur was a railway town and he had always wondered about the Brahmaputra Mail which came from Assam and many years later, he would finally weave his memories on to Muga silk of Assam.

It wasn't just any space but almost a station, a monstrous piece of architecture that can overwhelm anything smaller in scale. Besides it had the diaphanous structure of memory draped around this replica of so many destinations, departure and arrival points. It is interesting to recycle historical elements that could generate new meanings by the altered context of medium and individual and collective memories. Memory itself is shifting landscape.

I was interested in memories. I am curious about what people remember of places, of journeys and how these shape them as artists, designers or writers who are forever trying to answer the question "who am I".

Yet another offsite show happened at the National Crafts Museum and Pero, the boho label of designer Aneeth Arora, used travel as their inspiration. Both were about travels.

Both had memories noted down in diaries given to the audience. Both had attempted to work with nostalgia, and both had tried to work into their weaves and embroideries the flowers and landscapes they saw on those travels.

"Travel Diaries" by Pero

In a diary that had attached travel tickets, and maps and postcards, the designer had explained the travels to Peru, China and Mexico and how cultures worldwide inspired the collection and how the clothing is special because of the stories they narrate of faraway places that she trekked to.

There were hand-scribbled notes on the terraced gardens in China that reminded her of those in Nagaland, little drawings of cups, a leaf tucked in between the pages and directions to places like Llachon, a "pretty village" located far away from the city of Puno. The designer wrote "want to see their colorful stripes" and noted as she navigated the territory of Lima how it was still possible to find beautifully dressed men as one travels the world.

There's a lot of craft details, a lot of stamps and "as colorful as possible" emphasis on pages where the designer is thinking of the collection she would make with bright embroidered flowers and tassels. And as the models walked and danced on the runway in their dreadlocks and velvet booties and lace socks at the Crafts Museum, they looked beautiful and yet contrived with the choreographed dancing for travelers are born and not created. A traveler is free. A traveler isn't a tourist.

And this is how I have always looked at the idea of traveling - as one great romance. But then, there are interpretations and this one was a beautiful one reminding me of the travels I sought, the places I dreamed of visiting and the encounters I hoped for. And there are no real hippies anymore.

There are only extensions of such nostalgia of counter culture movements that grew out of political and social contexts. Nostalgia sells. Fashion is aspiration. Although I have faith that it could be art. But then this isn't a review or a critique.

Long ago, in a quaint little town called Vernon Downs in Upstate New York, I had been assigned by my newspaper to write about Hippiefest, an annual event. It was funny how the they sold an idea and how it became a fashion statement more than anything else, I had written in my notes. It was July 2007 and I was younger by a decade almost. Sometimes, we write to let it out. Peace, love — and Christian Dior? Dreadlocks and lace, etc?At first glance, a walk through Vernon Downs had seemed like a trip into the past.

On men's bare chests, painted peace lockets proclaimed "make love, not war." Even Manish Arora called his collection Cosmic Love in Paris this time. It has those psychedelic patterns. It made you think of the lost eras that never actually belonged to me even though I was born at the fag end of 1970s.

The Turtles took the stage, long-haired people wearing tie-dye cheered but then this Hippiefest was very much an event of the present.

Some concert fans sported Coach bags and Christian Dior sunglasses. Tickets cost $30, and a beer sponsorship advertisement hung on top of the stage, while people bought $5 beers and listened to the music of counter culture past.

But it was all for profit. Everything.

Beers in hand, they smoked and danced. They spoke of peace and happiness and freedom. And then about peace again. And then, in the same order they mourned and they recalled movements that made them or unmade them, those they were part or aspired to be engaged with.

In the 1960s, it was Vietnam that galvanized the Hippie movement.

"They are selling peace for a dollar and don't forget the taxes," Mary Hill said pointing to the green peace sign. "They are taking away from the Hippie freedom."

She was visiting with a friend and they were babies during the Hippie era, they said, always "wannabe hippies". Wearing beads, flowing skirts, tye-dye tees, they made peace with the fact they would forever remain wannabes, that they would forever long for that freedom and resistance that had its roots in a more sophisticated understanding of the world. The hippies traveled, sometimes even to maybe watch sunsets in different cities, and perhaps knowing that "otherness" is meant to explored and loved was what came from travels.

At the Hippiefesr in 2007, they wore "granny" sunglasses and swayed to the music from the 1970s. The hippies in them had waited for this moment. We all love that era. We love what we can't be. decade later, I was thinking of Mary Hill and her friend. We are forever exploiting such movements and making them trends again. But what the heck. It looked nice. It brought back memories of the Rainbow Community's tent city during Kumbh. Love comes and love goes.

The diary is pretty with notes and postcards and it belongs to the designer as she goes about looking for patterns and prints and weaves. My travel notes are scribbles and photos of abstract things. I go everywhere looking for love. I go everywhere looking for bits of the past. Fashion can be so many things. It can be a powerful expression. A show can be an experience, which could teleport you to spaces known and beyond.

I like being transported to other places, times zones. This one made me remember my commitment to visit Cuba, Mexico and Peru. For different reasons. I wanted to see where Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa wrote and lived or were exiled from. That's how you interpret a show. If it makes you long for something. A yearning is all that needs to be there. Pero's travel diaries made me go through my own travel notes.

***

"Train memories" by Samant Chauhan

Chauhan called his ode to Muga silk and travels "The Eye has to Travel" and said these were his train memories on record. As he narrated his memories to me, I took notes. We come from the same place. We both saw how the landscape changed when we sat by the window in a train that first took us to Delhi.

Many years ago, former Harper's editor Diane Vreeland had lived a life of adventures and travels. A film dedicated to her was called "the eye has to travel" and we have connected the dots as storytellers do. Our eyes traveled from the windows of trains. Trains prepared us for journeys into the unknown. We are in the end memory keepers.

In those days, there used to be no ATM under the Choti Pul, he says. They lived in the railway colony then and because most of his family was in the railways, he remembers having said in an interview that if he ever became a fashion designer, he would design uniforms for the railway staff.

Imagine a boy wanting to be on each of the train that stopped by the little mofussil town. He slept soundly through the nights and dreamed of this one particular train - Brahmaputra Mail. The way the train entered landscapes like scene changes in a theatre. He would make imaginary maps, make up landscape of golden fields.

Years later, he finally headed east in the same train and saw the golden fields of Assam where he would work with the golden threads of Muga silk, which is on the brink of extinction and he recreated the maize and wheat of the landscape the Brahmaputra Mail offered in gold threads.

The train bore him to many places with so many stories and so many skies and all he ever thought was to paint them on the garments and preserve everything in golden hues, Chauhan says.

Everything in this collection is memory itself. It is also the memory of wanting to go to a place and imagining it.

It is a tribute to imagination, to the mysterious and the familiar as the train in my head glided past villages, their thatched roofs that looked like caps, pulled over them, the wheat and maize fields that gleamed like they had been made of up a million golden threads, the river we had read about in the geography books and had always imagined it to be like a rope binding us all.

Over time, I had even started making up meanings of the names of stations and then in time, I could even divide my life with these markers. Delhi was via Patna.

*** A clock wasn't the keeper of time in these lonely places that are in a time warp and maybe if you went there you'd know that time doesn't bind anything. And only a train comes here whistling its arrival through the dense fog of time.

I remember counting the train boggies and making wishes. They say if you can complete your prayers before the train disappears into the horizon they might come true.

In the other offsite show, I was happy as a child as I climbed onto an old railway engine. I have never been to Jamalpur but I have read about the railway town in books.

Rudyard Kipling called Jamalpur "unadulteratedly Railway" and the roads that cut across the small town were named in the Anglo-Indian fashion - Albert Road, Victoria Road, Church Street, Steam Road and Queen's Road. On some evenings and afternoons, they played in the Gymkhana Club and once upon a time Ivan Evangelista played with his Volunteer Band. He had never heard the notes floating and breaking the monotony of summer afternoons. Somehow the trains culminated here, Chauhan says.

As he watched from the bridge, he wondered what they brought and what would remains in them - a speck of dust, a whiff of the air from faraway places.

What was he looking for? An escape route on an imagined map?

But any place has surprises if you cared to look into its history.

Jazz, the designer tells me, helped him make sense of the life, its comedies and tragedies.

Jazz, to him, was nostalgia.

It took him back into the realm of oral history of stories passed down to children...

Now, that they live 8 kilometers away from Jamalpur, he sometimes let Jazz take him to the town whose monuments have gone unseen, its past unheard, and perhaps this how a nostalgist can make an attempt to conjure memories in his own medium.

Imagine a railway town on a hot summer night when the wind carried the Jazz notes and ripped open our hearts, drowned out sorrows and maybe that's what it is - listening to Jazz and remembering a town 'Unadulteratedly Railway' and the Volunteer Band that Ivan Evangelista brought to Jamalpur in 1938.

He wasn't born then but then you don't have to be around to experience the past. Memory transferred is also nostalgia.

There was another world out there of fields and villages and towns and homes forsaken or inhabited. It was a solace to sit by the window and watch the colors of the world through square window frames.

All I had to do was to walk through these frames and slip through the bars and become a part of everything that lay outside the window.

Has it ever occurred to you that a train standing in the rain is a lonesome sight and when raindrops beat down its corrugated roof and and all those in transit those with a destination and those without - the escapists, the realists, the wanderers - are looking outside the window and some are finding solace in the shattering of the rain drops that everything falls and breaks and that fragility is a beautiful thing and even raindrops seen from the window of a train are vulnerable like us.

It made sense when the train would stop at small stations. This is how places offered themselves when people climbed in and greeted other travelers in bits. And that's why journeys were revelations.

On silk the designer wove the narratives from those days of staring out of the train windows - the maize, the barley, the wheat, the trees and the flowers, the white and gold of the landscape. He remembers when he was at home a train whistling past made him see his grandfather, who used to be a train driver, run up the staircase and wave a white flag to another driver.

The whistling train would signal his friend's arrival. Two whistles and a camaraderie so rare. Not a word spoken but just a white flag and a smile at seeing his friend ride past him in a blurry moving image.

We have lost so much but as we dig through our train memories I know a white flag is still waving and a train is on its way.

***In my own life, I remember my first train journeys as those that were long drawn and took me to a place so still that I remember learning to imagine lives to kill boredom. Sometimes the train would be chugging along so slow that it would take us hours to reach Arrah, which was only about 60 kilometers.

I counted the halts on the way. I liked empty mofussil town stations on the way on winter afternoons.

There was no hurry. Years later, when my grandfather was no more and I had been left with three of his diaries from those years when he was living in an old house in Arrah, I read through its crinkled pages the fleeting mention of that passenger train that brought us to him for the weekends or for longer durations.

Later, I would call it the house of despair but in that house I learned to gasp at sentences. I learned to be Alice in Wonderland and through the stories I imagined myself in faraway places.

I still go through those diaries sometimes and remember those train journeys where I sat by a rusted window revising the landscape in my mind. There were no breathtaking mountains or lakes or rivers. There were villages, dusty and poor and there were unremarkable stations and railway crossings.

To his date, I wonder about those that live in that little cabin watching out for the trains with a lantern and often I have wanted to sit with the guard and ask if they feel lonely in the night with nothing but stillness that would be ruptured by an oncoming train but that would pass, too.

My grandfather had noted down the timings of the trains that would bring his youngest daughter and her two children to his native town and he would read out from Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach to him and sometimes he would speak about the brilliance of Christopher Marlowe.

Most hardbound books, including Tolstoy's Tales of Sevastopol, were brought back to Patna in that passenger train and now they are in my bookshelf along with my grandfather's diaries.

My grandfather waited for us. It is a solace to know this after so many years. So many years have gone by and I am learning the ways of a lonely man writing in his diary about train timings.

Later, I would take the train out of Patna and eventually a plane to New York. And when I took the Amtrak from New York to Boston or to Utica from New York, I sat by the window looking at abandoned towns and factories and the rivers and the fields and remember that nothing is lost forever.

Once there was that train and then, there was this one now. Train journeys left me with myself. They helped me remember things like that house where I first read Dostoevsky and learned about despair. It was here that I made up places with words guiding me.

It was here that I wished for Chestnut Horse in those Russian folk tales I read on summer afternoons and nights in a town called Arrah and imagined stoves and samovars and a wishing horse and snow.

As I write this, I can feel the hot wind coming in from the window of a lonesome station of a faraway place and a little girl getting sitting by the window wondering what people did in such small towns.

I became a reporter and went to many such towns and sometimes I'd stop by at a railway crossing and hold time still and remember that passenger train to Arrah. Memories only need triggers. We lose nothing. Nothing can be relegated to total absence and sometimes that thought alone is a reassurance.

I don't know if that station looks the same way now. I don't know if the trains still run so slow.

But I love remembering the lit windows of houses I saw from the windows of a train once as I was on way to a metropolis and I got less nervous because the train had kept pace with my newness and introduced the strange city by way of lit windows and forever I shall be grateful to the trains for how they let me view the world from a frame.

My grandfather's diaries are my most cherished possessions and the only sentences where I am mentioned is somehow a sentence with the timings of the trains. I was young then. Now I know that only such trains can beat loneliness of an old man waiting for his daughter and bring some laughter to an old forgotten mofussil town.

The trains carried us. And as a child I'd carry my toys - dolls with their paraphernalia. We learned not to abandon in love and in sorrow.

And the coolies, the bearers of us told us we could carry the world with us.

And such are our memories. It is about a little boy walking to school, matching his footsteps the rhythm of the trains rattling on the tracks. He crosses the bridge and sometimes stands there for hours watching the engines attach and detach.

Lessons of life he learned as he watched the tracks run into infinity as we all did or at least those who chose to.

***

To remember the journeys of the past and the future, to hear again the haunting whistles of the train, and to conjure the lonesome stations of varied landscapes, the frames from which we saw distant lands, imagined the snow and the desert and learned the impossibilities of the horizon is such a delight.

And then, to drink tea, which again was about memories of a lonesome station called Falna. Jiten

Suchede of Jugmug Thela remembers how there was this station with its tall tress lit by the yellow light in the nights.

A lonesome kind of station, he says.Memories can't be recreated but they can be reconstructed and if nostalgia is a pull of the strange, he says he knows that chai at that station in the night was the one he remembers.

He used to be a student in those days and the station came at an odd hour in the night but he would always drink the chai and in his train memories, that chai is special.

Forever, we try to return to the days of innocence and memory is never factual.

It is imagination and emotion, a force of its own.

And in time, Suchede made his little venture of tea and other things but a chai that he would rate 10 upon 10 was in a space and time and then and there.

Chai divided time on the train and every station had a flavour and it lingered as we left and somewhere the taste remains with the nameless vendors.

Maybe this is an ode to memory and maybe this is just him trying to make that chai again for posterity's sake.

It is like looking at old faded photographs frayed edges and eyes that seem to gleam from the sepia-tone treatment are a reminder of who we used to be.

In our search for where we are from and where we are headed a photo is a milestone. Memory is what we carry with us.

And in those two spaces and sitting with those two diaries, I was happy that I was able to return to my travel notes, my memories of trains and chai and so many other things.