On the main concourse, families sit huddled together in little circles under the departure boards which read both in English and Hindi. There’s none of the push and shove of the bus stations here, or of the rickshaw scrums and marketplaces. Those travelling air conditioned (A/C) classes walk with a sense of briskness and self-importance. There are stalls on each platform selling tea and samosas, and stands selling books and medicines (or both together, for those who like to take a Xanax before Tolstoy).
Every so often a train will pull in alongside us, with open sides and no seating arrangements, and without glass in the windows. Men, boys and the occasional woman will peek out from behind rusty bars.
Indian Railways employs 1.6 million people – 1.3% of the population. It’s the second biggest employer in the world. And 14 million passengers travel Indian trains every day. For a large chunk of an already large country, they’re part of daily life.
We eventually find our train, which is a class above rusty bars, but certainly not anything Wes Anderson might have dreamed up. We’re travelling 2 A/C, the class down from first which includes air conditioning and two tier berths rather than one. Elsa and I have been tucked into a side compartment, and we spend some time squeaking, pulling at curtains and lifting and lowering seats, and generally acting like silly Western tourists should. Already, the more trainwise Indians have unwrapped their blankets, stowed themselves away into their berths, and are snoozing with makeshift blindfolds tied around their heads.A train wallah comes around selling snacks and we buy cookies and chocolate and giggle about midnight feasts. Wearing a gingham shirt and a matching cap, a second comes around taking our meal orders – there are two things on the menu, the descriptive ‘veg’ and ‘non-veg’ and even trying to make this preference understood proves surprisingly difficult. But soon we are on our way, helped by a startlingly hot samosa, silver and red mithai and a cup of chai.
Indian trains have three gears: steady rolling, stock still, and painful crawl. For the first hour we’re on third as we creep past slums on the outskirts of the city, allowing people to run, jump up and sit on the roof cross legged. There is a class all of its own up there, an open air cabin the ticket inspectors will never brave. There are people running over the tracks, adults as well as children. An Indian train driver will, on average, kill forty people during their career, even at speeds such as this.
Through the night, the train picks up speed and rocks its human cargo gently to sleep. The Indian landscape whizzes past in shades of black. Occasionally it’s possible to catch the twinkling pattern of a building’s Diwali lights but as we get closer. The gentle piped Indian folk music is only occasionally interspersed with the crackling headlines of All-India radio, which bring us back into a world of plunging stock markets and new American presidents.
As the journey continues, we catch a whiff of moist toes and stale bodily emissions, so it’s something of a relief when dinner arrives, masking it with the scent of cumin and warm paratha. There are little foil packets – of daal, rice, rolled up parathas and paneer masala (Indian cheese curry). Everything is steaming, fresh and spicy.
“If we were in America, this would all be shrink-wrapped,” Elsa says. “There’d be nothing bad in it, but there there’d be nothing good in it either.”
Taking a walk through the crowds of bodies that crawl over bunks, steam is sucked through the train corridors from the kitchen car. Inside, huge puts bubble over with red viscous liquid, hands madly chop. One man is flipping chapattis over a jumping flame. Another is pouring dall into the little foil containers, and passing full trays to a man who scurries away to put them in on a hit plate a few carriages away. Awaiting distribution. It’s a terrific human chain which feeds the hundreds of people on the train.
Carriage through carriage, families sit in their berths, the kids crawling over the top bunks, and their parents holding babies on the laps on the seats below. They take their trays as they are handed around by the stewards who squeeze past with trays piled high. Kids peek from the bunks above, grinning and playing hide and seek with the white girl. “Foreigner!” they call as they giggle and pop their head behind their curtain. “Foreigner! Foreigner!” Squeezing back the way we came, we pass squat toilets where people battle with obstreperous children or smoke furiously and without subtlety.
Back in the bunk, one last bulletin from All India news is played before people hunker down with blankets and pillows for the night. Curtains close and lights are dimmed. It is all too easy, lulled by the gentle sideways rocking of the train, to fall into a deep and satisfying sleep.
We are woken by another bulletin, and Obama has “hardly been shown a warm welcome” by Wall Street, which seems to have gone and crashed again. Chai is brought around, and people rush to the sinks, of which there seems to be a major shortage, to perform morning ablutions. In the meantime, the smell of omelette wafts down the train, and people open up their morning Times of India. More on Obama. He’s expected to save Kashmir, and avoid more war with Pakistan. And still 89 days before he becomes president.
A steward fights his way through the carriage, snatching bedsheets and blankets as people are distracted by washing or chai, and folding them quickly and neatly, into perfect uniform quadrilaterals, whipping them off. A complete turnaround is performed before we reach Mumbai Central station. The next set of passengers is already waiting, and there is no time to lose.
No comments:
Post a Comment