Have been stuck with Dimapur for the last quite a few entries....so thought lets fast forward a bit and move ahead in life !!! So life in Dimapur was continuing as in the same leisurely pace, and in the same fixed rhythm....Another thing I really really need to mention here is the yearly rituals of visiting Kolkata - Dada-Dadi's place and some of these visits extending to Agratala to mamar badi - which literally translated to Hindi means mama's house, or nani's place to be more precise in my case..... These were typically during summer vacations...
Those times were really far back, and we were yet to see the boom in aviation that is a very recent phenomenon. The only means of long distance travel for middle class indians used to be the grand old Indian Railways.....First Class or 2nd AC in case of a LTC travel and 2nd class in other cases....wait what is first class....... old timers like me can perhaps recall the ultimate luxury of a first Class compartment - it was non AC but only 4 people allowed in a coupe which was self sufficient .....great option for travel for a family of four. But we being a 3 member family, experiences were always not great with a stranger travelling as the 4th person - either for the person or us 
...I mean it was quite OK, as Indian Railways was not supposed to be a private jet anyway, but the exclusivity and the privacy of a 1st Class Compartment was somehow lost !!!! And then somewhere down the line the 2nd AC was introduced and that became the next word for luxury for middle class train journeys.....and then as always there was the omnipresent "2nd Class" or later rechristened as "Sleeper Class" ....but what about the current middle Class favourite "3rd AC"......Well, the brainwave that created this was still in incubation in the mind of some genius railway official/minister and was not born yet 
Journey from Dimapur to Kolkata- Howrah to be more precise (For those of you who don't have a clue to what has Howrah got to do with Kolkata - Howrah is separated from Kolkata by the Hoogly river and did not have a terminal station for Railways......though we have a station in Kolkata - named Sealdah these days, but Howrah continues to be the major railway terminal and the gateway to eastern India.....)....Ok, so the journey was almost of 2 days..........by a train called "Kamrup Express" .....(Kamrup is a place in Assam).....Though it was a continuous route with no change involved, there was physical change required as half of the track was "narrow gauge" and half "broad/normal" gauge.....The luggage and the passengers needed to move physically from one train to other in some station ...........well can't recall the name...will come back to you on this ....But it was not as easy as it sounds............when we moved from Narrow gauge to Normal Gauge train in the forward journey towards Howrah, there was no guarantee that the same seats that were reserved would be available there as well.....mostly there were confusions, with multiple passengers laying claim to the same seats by virtue of having valid tickets to them !!!......But how can that happen 
....are we not supposed to get tickets from the same countrywide railway network with common database......the software will never allow that.........rite !!!! Well dears, we need to take a step back, we are talking of the eighties here, very people in India would have heard of "telecom networks" and "databases" those days.....we were still many years away from these basic facilities which we take so much for granted today and cannot imagine life without!!!
So coming back to the train journeys, no ticket which you got was guaranteed to be unique, though I must say the error rate was not more than 5%, and the railways was run with quite a high level of efficiency in spite of the complete manual systems with high probability of error....In case you landed up in such an error scenario, there were these tripartite negotiations which you needed to have with the TT and the other family that was laying claim to "your" seats.....at the end of some hectic lobbying if you were lucky enough you could retain your seats and the third party would be accommodated elsewhere............and if you were not, it could be vice versa..........So each journey used to to be exciting and unpredictable, with events unfolding on the course of the same........
And then there was another problem of food.....These trains to north east of the country were mostly not equipped with pantry cars and you really didn't get much food in the stations too, that way it is available all through north and east.........In fact in other routes you have so much of variety that you are spoilt for choice........My parents do recall quite a few of these journeys when they had lot of trouble to get me the food of my choice.....which I called "eto khabar".....which is a typical bengali word (which even many of bengali friends out there may also not be able to relate to !!!) Basically it means some food we normally eat at meal time....say rice or roti .....which as I just mentioned was very difficult to get.........and being perishable items, these could not be actually carried from home for a 2 day journey.....There are specific instances of where I refused to eat anything other than "eto Khabar" for some time .....rejecting all available options like biscuits, fruits etc ......and then some co-passenger came to the rescue with food to my taste, and had to go without food themselves!!!! It must be so embarrassing for my parents, but I never knew or felt anything....but then those were childhood days......happy, carefree, sunshine filled.............................
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