It was about half an hour since we had moved out of Zagreb, and the steam locomotive was making a valiant effort to maintain its speed despite the sub-zero temperatures outside. There was a carpet of snow as far as the eye could see. I had with me two companions, Hartley, our chief engineer, and Ivan, our liaison man from the State Trading Corporation of Yugoslavia. Hartley and I were going to select a boiler for our sugar factory. Hartley, who was in his sixties, had spent a lifetime in the sugar industry in Java and had even done a spell as a prisoner of war of the Japanese during the Second World War. Ivan was a youthful 23 and hardly intimidated by the cold.I bit into a bar of chocolate, hoping it would help. I had no reading material and, in the midst of animated Serbo-Croat conversation, I couldn't even snooze. Some time later, the ticket checker arrived. Ivan, who held our tickets, thrust out his hand. The ticket checker looked at the tickets and a torrent of Serbo-Croat broke out between them.
Hartley and I couldn't follow a word. Ivan got up and went into a mini-conference with the checker in the vestibule. He returned a little later with a sorry face. It emerged that we had taken the wrong train. The one we were on was a super-fast express which had arrived at Zagreb Station at the time when our train was scheduled. The train we should have been on was trailing 15 minutes behind. The problem was that the fast train did not halt at Sremska Mitrovica, where we were scheduled to get off. Even if we got out at the next halt and took a train back, we could only make it by evening. The boiler factory would be closed for the day, we would lose a business opportunity and Ivan would lose something of significant concern to him -- his job.
A council of war produced no worthwhile solution. It was getting colder by the hour. Suddenly, I had a brain-wave: ``Let's pull the chain,'' I said. ``And spend years in a communist concentration camp? No go!'', retorted Hartley. ``Unlikely,'' I said, ``Nehru and Tito
are the best of friends, and they would't do it to an Indian.'' So it was decided: I would pull the chain. I prayed it would work, East Europe and all that. Hartley and I would get out on the off-side and Ivan would mingle with the inquisitive crowd. We would get together after the train left. ``Atta boy!'' said Hartley. I looked anxiously through the window as the train passed through Sremska Mitrovica station. Fortunately, I could read Cyrillic. I waited a reasonable time for the train to clear the station, then pulled the chain. With a great hiss of vacuum brakes, the train slowly pulled to a halt. ``Now then, this is it,'' I told Hartley, and we descended on the off-side into six inches of snow. I picked up a couple of beautiful ferns from the track and gave one to Hartley. ``Such beauties,'' I said, and soon we were in animated discussion like a couple of botanists thrilled at finding a new species. Warily, out of the corner of my eye, I watched as the guard and a couple of security men walked along the
track, sizing up the crazy foreigners picking ferns in the deadly cold. They completed their routine inspection, the guard restored the vacuum and, with a huff and a puff, the train pulled out.
Ivan appeared out of nowhere and we trudged the fifty yards back to the station. I cautioned Ivan, ``We must step onto the platform only when our train (the one we were supposed to arrive by) comes in''. Otherwise, how could we explain our tickets to the chap at the turnstile? We waited for a full ten minutes in the bone-chilling cold until our train roared in. Then we joined the passengers making for the exit. There were no hassles this time and Ivan was most relieved to see a reception committee waiting. Beaming and shaking hands, their leader enquired: ``Had a comfortable journey?'' ``Very!'' we replied in unison.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
