Saturday 15th November 2008

There are few experiences more ambivalent than the feeling of being encased in the womb of a train berth, lights out, being gently rocked from side to side. It’s strangely safe and cosy, but you are simultaneously the mercy of anything existing ten centimetres from your head. I remember this in the middle of the night when a train wallah comes by, chanting, “chai, garam chai,” far too close to my ear, or, Blair Witch-like, the shape of an elbow or a leg suddenly appears through the curtain.

As people hunker down to sleep, it’s easy to spot the middle class man at a loss without his wife and housekeeper: struggling to work out how the sheets on his bed fit, and searching maniacally through his bag for the socks someone else packed for him. From the berth opposite comes a waft of fresh shit. Someone is changing a nappy in full view. I realise that there’s nowhere to stash it except somewhere in the carraige. The smell turns slowly stale throughout the night.

I’m with Eva, a good friend of mine from Cambridge. She arrived in Delhi only the day before, and bewildered I dragged her through the chaotic and unforgiving bazaars of the old part of the city. She was as shocked as she was delighted by the dirt, the smells, the bodies that unapologetically ram and push and grope and reach out. This morning, I introduced Eva to Shafi, our Muslim friend at the Government Tourist Agency. Though we don’t require his services any more, he’ll call us up for a chat, and we’ll pop in for chai with him to talk hypothetical travel plans and wishful thinking.

“You don’t come around any more,” he says. “You don’t understand how rude it is in India not to come and see your friends.” It’s not enough to say that we are here now.

Every time we come in, Shafi laments our job as journalists. He tells us that we lie. “You are not honest,” is his favourite catchphrase. He will then lament the latest atrocities committed in the country: six-year olds being raped, nuns being killed, more people dying of poverty who never appear in the newspaper. Instead, he says (quite rightly) newspapers are all full of sex and Bollywood.

“How do you find India?” he asks, pointing to Eva. She replies politely that it is nice. “No, it is not nice. Do you like it better than London?” Eva hesitates. “No, of course you do not. London is much better. Delhi is not nice. Have you cried yet? You will cry soon.”

For a man who works at the Government Tourist Agency, Shafi has a strange way of making India more appealing. What is even stranger is that it works.

After a tear-free afternoon, we’re on the Tamil Nadu Express to Chennai. The journey is 1,090 miles in total; more than the distance between Newcastle and Norway. It takes 32 hours to get from one end to the other. Judging by the state of the toilets after only two of those hours, it’s going to be a long trip.

I remember being shown a picture slide in a colonial history lecture at university. It was of a Victorian memsahib, being tucked into bed by a houseboy, folding layers of net curtains around her as she, half-dressed, dropped off to sleep. Upon seeing it I remember coiling in bitter disgust at the weakness of our foremothers, ruling a country they marked as uninhabitable, running to hill stations in the hot summer, and being swathed in taffeta before they went to bed. Meanwhile. the ‘natives’ were primitive enough to cope with the elements.

My curtain now is all too reassuring, as my separation from smells and belches and bodies. And I’m a little ashamed of hiding. I was told it was customary on trains to strike up conversation and meet new people, like Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar. My thoughts go back to the sepia memsahib and I somehow make a connection to her fears. They're the same fears that the protagonist overcomes in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. This is India: a mixture of the beautiful and the profane – as Shafi would agree – sometimes at the same time. And there’s not always a curtain to separate you from it.