The 3 A.M. Train

A Country Discovers the Computer

In the mid-1980s, India began to make peace with a machine it had long mistrusted.

Until then, computers belonged to a distant world—big cities, air-conditioned offices, and men who spoke in acronyms. In small towns like ours, the word “computer” still carried a faint chill, as if it was designed to replace human beings rather than help them. People spoke of it with suspicion, sometimes with a kind of mockery. It was treated like a clever toy that would soon be exposed as useless.

Then something quietly changed the mood of the country.

The Indian Railways introduced the computerized passenger reservation system. If you had lived through the old system, you would understand why this mattered. Booking a ticket was not a transaction; it was an ordeal. It meant standing in a serpentine queue, shifting your weight from one foot to the other, watching the clock, and hoping the clerk behind the counter would not snap at you for asking a second question. It meant carrying a form filled in hurried handwriting, only to be told that one column was incomplete. It meant hearing the stamp thud onto paper like a judge’s gavel.

When the computer arrived, the queue did not disappear. The impatience did not vanish either. There was still the smell of sweat, paper, and damp cloth in the waiting hall. But something else entered the scene: a screen with glowing letters, a printed slip, and a new kind of certainty. A reservation could be checked, confirmed, and issued without pages being turned and registers being hunted down. The machine did not argue. It simply worked—slowly, perhaps, but with an order that felt unfamiliar and strangely comforting.

People noticed. Slowly, they stopped seeing computers as threats and began to see them as tools.

Bhavana noticed too.

A Restlessness That Wouldn’t Go Away

We were living in Wardha then, a town where technology still meant a sturdy typewriter and a reliable landline. A good pen mattered. A carbon copy mattered. If a file went missing, you didn’t search a database; you searched cupboards and human memory.

Yet Bhavana was drawn to the new world of computers with a seriousness that surprised even me. It wasn’t a passing fascination, the way people get curious about a new appliance. She didn’t want to merely “know about” computers. She wanted skills, the kind that would allow her to sit in front of a screen and make something happen. She wanted to learn properly, not as a hobby but as a doorway.

We had two small children. Our days were already full. And Wardha was not a place where one could casually reinvent oneself. But Bhavana was not a person who waited for ideal conditions. She looked at the reality as it was and began working around it.

There was only one problem: Wardha had no place to learn.

NIIT in Nagpur was a big name at the time. Their course fee was high, and the duration was long—about eighteen months. We were not wealthy. We did not have money lying around for experiments. But we did what middle-class families often do when they believe something matters: we adjusted our expectations and “dug deep,” as the phrase goes, not dramatically, but with quiet resolve. If she learned this well, it could open a door that Wardha had never offered her before.

The training schedule left us only one workable option.

A 7 a.m. class in Nagpur.

The 3 A.M. Routine

For a year and a half, our home ran on a timetable that began when the rest of the town was asleep.

At 3 a.m., the alarm would pierce the darkness. Bhavana would rise quietly, careful not to wake the children. I can still picture the house at that hour—stillness everywhere, the ceiling fan turning lazily, the children breathing in deep sleep, the day not yet born. The kitchen would come alive before sunrise. A light would flick on. A steel vessel would clink. Tea would be made, breakfast prepared, small chores finished with the efficiency of someone who knew there would be no time later.

There was no romance in it. It was not heroic. It was simply what had to be done.

By 3:30 a.m., we would step outside. The road to Sevagram station—then called Wardha (East)—was seven kilometres long and completely deserted. The scooter’s headlight cut through the darkness like a narrow tunnel of visibility. The air was often cold enough to bite. In the monsoon, it carried the damp smell of wet earth. Sometimes, a stray dog barked, startled by the sudden intrusion. Otherwise, it was silence.

I would drop her at the station and watch her disappear into the dimly lit platform, a lone figure moving toward a train that would take her to a different life. I worried, of course. Any husband would. In those days, safety was not a casual concern. It was a daily calculation. Yet Bhavana did not carry fear in the way many people do. She carried responsibility. The excitement was there—she wanted this badly—but it was mixed with the weight of everything else she was still expected to do.

At 4:00 a.m., she boarded the Dadar–Nagpur Express. Often, she was the only passenger in the compartment, a lone woman travelling through the early hours while the world slept. The train rattled through darkness, its sound steady and indifferent. She reached Ajni station before dawn cracked.

This part worried me most. In those days, it wasn’t safe for a woman to walk alone through Congress Nagar, Dhantoli, and Ramdaspeth at that hour. So Bhavana did what she always does when faced with risk: she planned around it. She waited at the station for an hour until the city began to wake. Only when the light became steady and the streets began to move did she walk to NIIT for her 7 a.m. class.

After two hours of logic, flowcharts, and practice code, she walked back to the station and caught the 11 a.m. Maharashtra Express. By 12:30 p.m., she was back in Sevagram. A shared auto-rickshaw dropped her home by 1 p.m.

And then, without a pause, she slipped back into the rest of her life—children, kitchen, household, everything that does not wait simply because you have learned something new.

Summer heat that turned train compartments into ovens, monsoon rain that soaked everything, winter mornings that bit into the skin—she went through them all. She seldom missed a class. It wasn’t stubbornness for the sake of it. It was a steady belief that if she let herself slip even once, the routine would collapse, and the future would again become a distant idea.

Our neighbours didn’t discourage her. If anything, they watched with admiration, and perhaps a little disbelief, as if she had taken on a strange personal vow. They were impressed by her commitment, but they also knew that such commitment is expensive. It costs sleep. It costs ease. It costs the luxury of being ordinary.

What It Really Started

Years later, when people asked how we built systems in Sevagram, they assumed it began with funding or servers or software. They imagined meetings, proposals, approvals, and files moving from one desk to another.

But the truth is simpler and more personal.

It began with a woman waking up at 3 a.m., making sure the children were asleep, braving the winter air, riding a scooter through deserted roads, and sitting on a railway platform before dawn. It began with her willingness to do the difficult thing repeatedly, without applause, because she believed it mattered.

The first chapter of our technology story was not written in code.

It was written in routine.

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