Shengottah was a watering hole for Kerala-bound trains on the Tamil Nadu border on the metre-gauge track from Chennai to Thiruvananthapuram. From there started the ghat section up to the Aryankavu pass, and steam-engine trains needed a little push from behind on the climb and therefore, an extra locomotive was attached at the station. The coupling or decoupling of locos used to take time and the engine drivers and passengers used that time for lunch.
The station had excellent catering services with refreshment rooms for both Indian and continental food in the 1950s. The arrival at Shengottah was a pleasurable experience for travellers as the station served excellent South Indian vegetarian fare, delivered to the compartment, of fine white rice with sambar and curries with a tender banana leaf tucked on top of brass tiffin carriers. It also served continental food in the refreshment rooms or in compartments. Their white-liveried bearers could be seen rushing along the platform with salvers held high with clinking crockery.
It was my childhood days, and my father was the assistant stationmaster. Besides the refreshment rooms, the station had good bookstalls and one of them was Higginbothams which had colourful foreign journals strung along the front. Father used to get Illustrated Weekly and Reader’s Digest from there, and it was my childhood hobby to spend hours looking at the advertisements.
Our house was on the slope of a hillock and down below was the railway marshalling yard. Throughout the day, I could see locomotives sliding back and forth on the tracks and occasionally some came to the turntable in front of our house to have a 360-degree turn. To me, they were living beings and one night, it so happened that one of them derailed on the turntable. Soon fitters and khalasis arrived to re-rail it and they worked throughout the night. I felt sorry for the engine, lying unable to move with headlights on.
All kinds of steam locos were there. At night, while sleeping near my mother, I could listen to train sounds such as yardmen’s whistles and steam hissing through a faulty dynamo or boiler weights. Our neighbours were both drivers. One day as my mother opened the door hearing a knock, I saw our neighbour’s daughter with a platter of the most fragrant biriyani I had ever eaten. It must have been either Id, and I became a biriyani fan ever since and every time I yearn for a biriyani, it is a yearning for that taste.
The other neighbour was D’Costa, the driver of the steam crane who wore his trousers with suspenders and had a smoking pipe dangling from his mouth most of the time. He lived with his wife, whom we called missiamma, a kind woman, and his son, who was a fireman. I was a frequent visitor to their house as missiamma was fun and had parrots kept in cages. They kept water stored in buckets just under the cages and the son had the strange habit of dipping his comb in the bucket while combing his hair which I thought was rather unhygienic with bird droppings.
In that idyllic world, I had two nightmares, one was a young boy at the sinter heaps of the shunting yard who would wave a pen-knife at me in jest every time I passed through the side road. The other was going to the local cinema with my parents. At the cinema, the chairs were of the folding type with a big gap at the back and invariably, about half an hour after the movie started, I would fall through the gap.
Some time later, father got his transfer orders out of Shengottah.