Kokrajhar railway station has two platforms. Number one for trains headed west. Number two for trains headed east. But I still managed to get things mixed up on Thursday evening, missing the Brahmaputra Mail which would have taken me to the foothills of West Bengal.

I was back at the station Friday morning at 7:30 am to take the Dekargaon-New Jalpaiguri Passenger train, a daily unreserved train that starts in Sonitpur district in upper Assam, passes through Bodoland, and ends at Jalpaiguri, better known as Siliguri.

But the train was late.

In the sea of impatient faces, one caught my eye. It was creased with age, with sunken cheeks and deep set eyes, which were focused somewhere in the distance. He was old, short and reed thin. His clothes were plain but neat. His shoes were enormous in size, black and bulging, and it was only when he came and sat down next to me, that I noticed the round patch of leather that had been neatly stitched on the right shoe-top to cover what might have been a hole.

He looked every bit of the indigent Bhadralok, and I wanted to talk to him about life under Mamata. But it did not seem right to break his reverie. Until, abruptly, a child's shrieking laughter pierced the air. It was his phone ringing. "The train is late," he told someone in Bengali. "I don't know how long it will take."

As he hung up, I took the plunge.

"I am going to Alipurduar. What about you?" I asked him. Alipurduar is a town in the Dooars, the plains in the shadow of the eastern Himalayas, near the border of Bhutan.

"Two stations short of Alipurduar town. My family lives there. In Mahakalpuri."

"And you work in Kokrajhar?"

"I work in the tea gardens at Dalabari."

"Oh, what do you do?"

"I am on the technical side. I fix the machinery in the factory. I have been doing it since I was very young."

“May I ask, what’s your name and how old are you?"

"Sushil Das. I am seventy. I retired ten years ago. But I'm still working." He smiled.

"Wouldn't you like to rest now?"

"The heart wants to. So does the body. But there are some compulsions…”

His face darkened. I changed track, telling him about myself, and coming to the workings of the tea gardens.

"Dalabari estate is owned by the Nahatas. They are niraamish (vegetarians). Marwaris. The technical staff is Bengali, Bihari, Punjabi,” he said. “And the workers are from Ranchi district.” A district had become shorthand for an entire state – Jharkhand.

By bringing in Adivasis from Jharkhand and Orissa to work on their tea estates in the mid 19th century, the British capitalists created a pool of migrant indentured labour that could be held captive and made to work under exploitative conditions and wages. The ownership of the tea gardens may have partially changed hands, with Indians taking over many estates, but the system has survived. In an irony of history, this month, there’s been much outrage in the UK over labour conditions in Assam’s tea gardens owned by a consortium that includes the Tata group. An investigation by Observer and The Guardian found girls being trafficked from the gardens into domestic work in the cities, and even prostitution, by "slave traders". The Ethical Tea Partnership, which certifies tea estates for ethical practices, as well as the World Bank, which has invested in the gardens for "promoting competitiveness in an industry that is vital to the Indian economy", have both expressed concern. The report pointed out that workers are paid barely half the legal minimum wage in Assam.

“How much is the labour paid?,” I asked the old man.

“Rs 90 a day. But they get facilities. Quarters to live in, three kilos of food grain every week for two rupees a kilo, firewood, medicines. Aisa chalta hai ki bhookhe pet bhi nahi rehte aur pet bar ke bhi rehte. Their stomachs are neither empty nor full.”

If workers of functional tea gardens live on the edge, it is not surprising that starvation deaths have been reported from the tea gardens that have closed down in West Bengal. I had plans to visit the closed tea gardens near Birpara in Siliguri.

"Why are gardens in Bengal closing down?”

"Because workers there make too many demands. Owners are not able to meet them," he said.

The middle class swings between sympathy for the poor, and its own instinct for self preservation. It needs to keep the system that gives it jobs, even if the system is exploitative. Not that the middle class – of small towns, and small incomes – has much social security either.

“I have three sons. One is a teacher, one runs a business of supplying sound system, one owns and hires out a tractor. They have told me that I should stop working. But if I do so, I would lose all freedom. Both my wife and I are old. Both of us need medicines. If I ask my son for Rs 500 and he says take Rs 400, I would feel bad…So it is best to work as long as you can," said Das, adding that he made about 10,000 rupees a month.

The conversation finally moved to the elections.

"Who do you support?"

"CPM. I like its ideology. Adarsh niti. It is the best."

“But apparently the party is not doing well. Trinamool is in the government…”

“Trinamool is creating all this violence…” he said, in an unusually animated voice.

“In your area?”

“No, no, our area is fine. I meant Medinipur.”

“But journalists say that Mamata Banerjee is getting a lot of support from people and that the TMC would improve its tally in the coming elections…”

“Maybe. But remember, it is CPM people who are going and joining Trinamool. Even in Alipurduar, Dasrath Tirkey, the Trinamool candidate was a CPM man till recently. You can change the shirt. But you cannot change the man.”

I would have liked him to decode this cryptic comment. Did he, for instance, mean that the violence he was accusing the Trinamool of, was not specific to the party, but was part of the political culture of Bengal?

But such questions were drowned in the siren of the incoming train.

It wasn’t the passenger train. It was the Dibrugarh-Delhi Rajdhani. Along the length of the platform, people who had risen from their benches went back to sit on them. The old man looked confused. It took him longer than others to understand that this was a train with only air-conditioned coaches. His Rs 40 ticket was not good enough for it.

But I was in a hurry. I could not afford to miss another train. I said a quick goodbye and ran to get on, and to get to the tea gardens of Siliguri.

Click here to read all the stories Supriya Sharma has filed about her 2,500-km rail journey from Guwahati to Jammu to listen to India's conversations about the forthcoming elections -- and life.

Click here to see the photographs Supriya took on her way to Jalpaiguri.