[Editor's Note: This article is published as part of Inherited Memories, a series by Slow Reads in which we invited our readers to share personal essays about family objects and the lives and memories connected to them. We continue to welcome submissions from our readers and the Slow Reads community. Details of the submission guidelines can be found at the end of this essay.]

The endless, emerald green paddy fields, the beautifully chaotic stations with chants of "jhaalmuri" or "gorom chaa", and the games that we played, such as "name, place, animal, thing", are all carefully tucked into the memories of train journeys for a lot of us. My family artefact is woven into the history of railways in Bengal and spans across eras.

It's an object that travelled on trains with my grandfather, and it is a teller of stories and a keeper of secrets. It traversed timelines, landscapes, and generations. Brimming with history and a silent witness to the British Raj, Partition, and East Pakistan, it now rests under my mother's bed.

It retired with my grandfather. It was the "line box" in which my "dada" (grandfather) stored all his railway documents, and it used to travel with him in the railway saloon. It came back home with him to rest under the bed until the next adventure. My aunt fondly recalls how the number of her father's saloons increased in direct proportion to his position in the railways.

Any guesses about the line box's age?

My dada retired as the Chief Signal Engineer in 1965 and, according to his daughter, my fupu (aunt), this box had been his constant, faithful companion long before that. Even after retirement, it accompanied him as he was called back to duty to modernise the East Pakistan Railway's signalling system. She estimates that it was issued to him by the Indian Railways before Partition. So, this box has attained the ripe old age of over 80 without a single dent or any deterioration in the quality of its Burma teak wood.

The golden stencilling on the box says "EPR", or "East Pakistan Railways", but according to my aunt, it is a re-stencilled label added after Partition. The documents stored inside included general rule books, log books, sketches, accident manuals, and working timetables.

A Signal Engineer's job during the early and middle decades of the twentieth century in East Bengal (later Pakistan) was to design, build, and maintain the blueprint and infrastructure for controlling train traffic across the railway network. My aunt recalls my grandfather sketching plans in some of his notebooks while planning routes. She also remembers him going out on inspections to ensure that station levers and signals were functioning properly. The good old line box housed the sketches, slide rules used for rapid logarithmic calculations, field log books, carbon paper, and drafting instruments.

Graduating from Shibpur Engineering College, now known as the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur (IIEST), with a degree in Civil Engineering and diplomas in Mining and Electrical Engineering meant that my grandfather was among a tiny percentage of sought-after railway engineers, because railway development required all three skills, which were rarely found in one person. His first job and posting were in Paksey, where he was responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the legendary Hardinge Bridge. Once East Bengal had developed a pool of structural engineers specialising in bridges, he was transferred to the Eastern Bengal Railway. Before the borders were drawn, he was running operations in Mumbai and Kolkata, the twin engines of the British Raj's industrial economy. Later, he and his family were posted to Bonarpara, Lalmonirhat, Parbatipur, Sylhet, and, of course, Paksey, four times. Paksey was the railway hub of present-day Bangladesh, connecting the northern and southern regions of what was then East Bengal. The line box, like a long-term comrade, followed him wherever he went.

In the years leading up to Partition in 1947, my aunt recalls my grandfather being relocated very frequently, much to the chagrin of her eldest brother, who resented having to change schools so often. Apparently, this happened partly because many railway engineers had expressed an intention to relocate to Indian regions, which gave rise to vacancies in East Bengal. Another reason was that the railway lines had been damaged during the Second World War and needed repair under the supervision of engineers.

I had always wondered about the seemingly vague relationship between mining and signal engineering until recently, when I found out that, in the 1930s and 1940s, mining and railways were inextricably linked, as railways were steam-powered and ran on coal. So, the operation of trains hinged on a steady supply of local coal, which included the discovery of new coal mines. Much to our amusement, my grandma used to say that Grandpa became darker after getting lost in the mines. This was earlier in his career, right after he got married, but, of course, he was rescued after a week and would go on to become the Chief Signal Engineer of Chittagong.

In pursuing the line box, my siblings and I also came to know that my grandfather was sent for training to Westinghouse in Germany, Japan, and the UK in the 1960s, where he was trained in modernising the Pakistan Railway's signalling system. My grandfather's training in the 1960s directly aligned with some of the modernisation drive that was taking place in East Pakistan Railways at the time, for instance, converting mechanical semaphore signals to electrical colour-light signals.

Six decades later, Bangladesh Railway is poised to undergo its next major technological revolution. While signal engineering is already semi-digital, the government is planning to implement advanced wireless and automatic systems to bring it on a par with the railway networks of developed nations. Even before this next overhaul, Bangladesh Railway has come a long way since my grandfather's time in railway signalling, which relied largely on mechanical and electro-mechanical systems, with early relay-based technology emerging towards the end of his career.

The line box is a testament to my grandfather's commitment and dedication to building and maintaining the Bengal railways. I remember how proud my grandmother was of her husband's job and profession, and how her face would light up every time she said something about the railways.

Family artefacts, like my grandfather's line box, are tangible bridges to the past and unearth fascinating stories. They are part of who we are, what shaped us, and what our family was like before we appeared on the scene. They allow us to roam through and explore different worlds. So many interesting aspects of my father's and his siblings' lives as railway children emerged once I became curious about the line box.

Malina Halim is a freelance writer, translator and an online tutor with a background in Economics & Marketing. She can be contacted at [email protected].

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