Sam Pitroda with David Chanoff - Dreaming big : my journey to connect India

The little boy and his friend squatted in the dust at the edge of the small crowd, listening intently to the strangers. The strangers were visiting relatives in the village of Tikar, located on the fringes of the Kutch salt desert. They were talking about a wondrous thing they had seen, referring to it as an aag gaadi. The two boys tried with all their might to imagine the object, and though the strangers were speaking in clear Gujarati, their perception of the thing stayed maddeningly outside their grasp. They were told the aag gaadi was huge and black, that it had fire inside it, that smoke poured out from its nostrils, and that it moved by itself, as though by magic. It was powerful beyond imagination, as powerful as a god. Behind it trailed many bogies, though the boys had no idea what bogies meant. All the strangers said was that there were people inside the bogies. The boys looked at each other, thinking the exact same thought. This was a thing they had to see with their own eyes.

The next morning at eight oclock the boys left their homes for school, just as they always did. But instead of heading for the little, white thatch-roofed building, where they both studied in the third grade, they met at the beginning of the salt pans near the river, just beyond the last houses. The strangers had said the aag gaadi visited the town of Halvad, seven miles to the south of Tikar. Not only had the boys never been there, they had never even been beyond the millet fields dotting the outskirts of the village. But they were adventurous boys, and they were consumed with wanting to see the thingso consumed that they ran the entire seven miles to the place.

When the boys got to Halvad, they asked the people around, Where is the aag gaadi?

Some people told them to go to the station. That was the place where the aag gaadi was going to come. So they went to the station and waited, speculating about what the thing was going to be like. Maybe it is like a giant water buffalo, said one of the boys. Maybe it is like four bullocks pulling a huge cart, said the other.

As they looked away from the station into the distance they saw something coming towards them. It looked little at first, not much more than a dot, but as it came closer, it grew bigger and bigger until it was almost upon them. A huge black thing with smoke billowing out of its top, running on its own, with nothing pulling it. They stood there, staring at it, mesmerized. Then, suddenly, the thing let out a terrifying shriek, which sent the boys bolting off towards the town. They had never heard such a horrible sound. No one had told them the aag gaadi made a noise like that.

It was only when it stopped making the noise that the boys stopped running. Warily, they made their way back to the station, not knowing what might happen next. Then they saw the bogies. Peeking inside, they saw people sitting on benches. What a thing! The boys had no chairs in their houses, no benches; they and everyone they knew squatted on the ground. And here the thing had people sitting on benches inside it!

Afterwards, they ran back to Tikar, but they didnt go back to school, something which they were punished for later on. But seeing the aag gaadi was worth it. Now they had their own stories to tell.

One of those eight-year-old boys was Gangaram Pitroda, my father, born in January 1916. In our home, in the evening, my brothers and sisters and I would sit around him, the youngest on his lap, listening intently as he told us wonderful storiestales about the train that he and his friend had seen all that time ago, about how our mother and he travelled a thousand miles across India from Gujarat to Orissa when they were young, undertaking some of the journey by train, some on a camels back, stories about how he made a living making nails after they started living in Titilagarh, a village about 1500 kilometres south-east of Tikar, and stories about working in the forest near Titilagarh where he cut and hauled trees, where he had seen tigers with shining yellow eyes.

When I was older I put the stories together. Our familys ancestors had been carpenters and blacksmiths