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“Keep the door closed. Muggers hop on the train when the door is open,” the man with a French beard sitting in the row behind me warned.
At first, his warning sounded like a ridiculous attempt to scare adults by telling them spooky ghost stories meant for children. But even such stories can frighten gutsy grown-ups if told in the right place at the right time. Sitting in the carriage with inadequate lighting and most of the windows shut on a cold December night, I felt fear creeping into my mind like an unwelcome guest.
Wearing a shawl and a blue woollen cap, the man talked elaborately about railway crimes, emphasising the Tongi junction station in Gazipur is a hotbed of mugging and robbery. As someone who grew up in the industrial town of Tongi and lived there for a good number of years, I concurred with him. During my high school days, I was often warned by my parents not to hang out with friends at the station even in the daytime.
Keeping my bag on the overhead steel rack, I chatted with my travel buddy Md Zahirul Islam. Around 11 hours ago, we had impulsively embarked on a rail journey from the Kamalapur station in Dhaka, boarding a commuter train to Bhairab, a major upazila of the haor-dominated Kishoreganj district. It was now 3am, and we were returning to Dhaka by what we had assumed to be a slow-moving train with halts at many stations.
But it turned out we had boarded a second-class mail train that primarily freights goods and drags along a few battered passenger coaches. Our compartment had semi-hard benches that were certainly not comfortable for long journeys and only one overhead light in the middle that barely lit the entire space, with the door area remaining gloomy. The ride was dirt cheap, only Tk 40 as opposed to Tk 105 in a Shovan Chair seat on an intercity train, but that was not what we wanted at the expense of comfort and security.
“How will criminals escape easily after mugging us? We have so many people here. We can corner them,” Zahirul reiterated. His words mirrored my own unspoken thoughts. I could not consciously accept the possibility that we would be left as helpless victims despite our coach carrying 20-30 passengers, mostly middle-aged men and several women.
“No one will come forward to help if assailants hold a knife to your throat. They may assure you now that they will help, but they will not when the time comes,” one of the boys in the teen group sitting on my right said bluntly. The scenario was discussed for a while, with several passengers putting their two cents in. The teen boys were travelling from Noakhali to Dhaka.
Train travel generally fosters camaraderie among strangers, a key reason why I am immensely drawn to this mode of transport. Passengers feel a sense of ease to form fleeting bonds and make small talk with others, which sometimes leads to extended conversations on a range of subjects. But here on a mail train rattling past villages and paddy fields in the darkness, our conversations revolved around fear, looming dangers, and ways to shield ourselves from predators lurking in the dark.
“Muggers disguised as innocent passengers sometimes board the train. When the train reaches the station where their accomplices are waiting, they open the door and get them in,” the French-bearded man said, as if he were unveiling a conspiracy. His words sent a chill down my spine, stirring up memories of the 2017 Murder on the Orient Express movie, where each passenger becomes a suspect after Johnny Depp is brutally killed aboard. I thought to myself, “What if the mugger we are expecting to board the train is already in our carriage, waiting for the perfect moment to jump into action?”
I went to the door for a vantage point and inspected the passengers to see if I could spot anything suspicious. I examined how they sat, their facial expressions, their body language, and their movements. Most of them were sleeping, their bodies swaying gently with the train’s motion.
Unlike me, Zahirul occasionally altered his position between the door and the seat, but mostly stood at the door, often vaping and blowing a puff of smoke. Every time the train halted at a station, he was on alert, observing who was getting on and off and making sure the door was locked properly. I shared with him my concern that the abettor could be one of our fellow passengers.
He discreetly photographed as many passengers as he could against the interplay of light and shadow, as if he were collecting clues to investigators. A passenger curled up in a wheelchair near the door aroused my suspicion as his entire body was draped in a shawl. Zahirul took a picture after I told him this man could be our prime suspect, who might jump up suddenly in a cinematic style, and the wheelchair could be a setup.
I suspected another passenger who was seated right in front of me when the train stopped at a station. But after a while, he got up abruptly, darted a glance around, as if he were looking for someone, and disembarked hesitatingly. “Perhaps it makes no difference to him whether he gets off at his destination or the next station,” Zahirul tried to soothe me by offering an explanation for the passenger’s hesitation.
But my mind was constantly battling logic and paranoia, the struggle aggravated by the stone-pelting incident, which had happened a while ago. The thwack of stones hitting the train’s exterior broke the silence of the night, but no one was hurt as all the windows and doors were shut. What had earlier made me feel trapped in a moving enclosed box protected us against the mindless violence.
“Would you like some lychee jelly?” I asked Zahirul, ready to bring the packet out of my bag. He declined as the worries suppressed his hunger and sleep. We harked back to our long midnight stroll in Panchabati, a neighbourhood adjacent to the Bhairab station where we saw elegant multi-storey dwellings, as well as nondescript tin-roofed houses with livestock-rearing arrangements.
We also walked past a building dazzlingly illuminated with blue, pink, green, and cyan lights, their vibrancy amplified by the darkness. An ornate iron gate and two large columns in the facade gave it the appearance of a zamindar palace. Streetlights filtered through trees and other objects on some of the dimly-lit alleys, creating intricate shadows on the ground.
Lying at the confluence of the Old Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers, Bhairab developed as a vibrant trading hub during the British rule of the Indian subcontinent. Apart from local Muslim traders, many Hindu families coming from far and wide established themselves as merchants and traders. The junction station built during the opening of the Tongi-Akhaura line in 1910-14 further spurred business, establishing rail connectivity with southeastern Chattogram, northeastern Sylhet, north-central Mymensingh, and Dhaka.
That mercantile glory is still alive and has reached new heights. Bhairab emerged as a footwear manufacturing hub over the past three decades, with shoemakers even exporting their merchandise to countries like Japan. Local traders buy fish from the bustling wholesale market, which offers an array of local freshwater species, and supply those to small and big markets in different parts of the country.
Our train had long halts at some stations because of the loading and unloading of goods, one of the main reasons why the Bhairab station counterman said the travel time to Dhaka could not be specified. The stations in the dead of night exuded an atmospheric presence, as I saw the silhouettes of the handful of passengers on the platforms against the dim surroundings. The rhythmic clanking of the wheels against the tracks reverberated as we crossed railway bridges.
Dawn neared and we were at the Tongi station, where two policemen boarded our carriage, scanned the faces, and got off. I noticed the French-bearded man was gone. I could not decide whether he was just a concerned passenger or deliberately instilled fear among us.
Zahirul insisted on alighting at the Dhaka airport station and taking a bus to go home, repeatedly arguing the Tejgaon station area was unsafe in the early morning. I made several attempts to change his mind, with another passenger also reassuring him that it would now be a completely safe journey to Kamalapur. He was ultimately convinced to stay, even took a nap, and made a daring exit when the train decelerated in Malibagh.
The nerve-wracking journey ended soon as the train arrived in the country’s main railway hub amid the usual hustle and bustle. My mind was exhausted from imagining every possible horror story that never came true. I had suffered more from my imagination than reality, but in the end, I got what I wanted - an unforgettable rail adventure.
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