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.

Tuesday 11th November 2008

A kerfuffle breaks out on board the Rajdhani Express to Delhi. At a time when many passengers are attempting to drop off to sleep, three men are shouting in Hindi.

“You are like a machine, sir,” one man shouts to the ticket inspector. And again: “you are like a machine.” It appears that two of the men have purchased senior citizen tickets, at a 50% discount, but cannot seem to produce any I.D. Despite the presence of the ubiquitous Indian moustache and manly paunch, they still don’t quite look old enough. The argument snowballs as high pitched female voices join the fray.

Taking on Indian bureaucracy is more dangerous than competing with it’s cricket team, and you’re twice as sure to lose. When something is written on a piece of paper in India, especially when it’s in someone’s job description, it’s hammered with a golden chisel. India probably has the largest list of rules in the world. And it’s not always clear who is allowed to break them and when.

For example, when do you call a place after its British name, and when must you use the politically correct post-independence moniker? Kasturba Gandhi Marg instead of Curzon Road, but Victoria Terminus Station instead of the mouthful that is Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus? Many Indians have laughed at our polite use of ‘Mumbai,’ instead of the far more common ‘Bombay.’ Try telling someone you are hoping to visit post-colonial ‘Puducherry’ rather than the original ‘Pondicherry’ and most people will just frown and look confused. The same ambiguity that applies to place names also applies to rickshaw driver etiquette, tipping, and the behaviour of traffic policemen. Rule-breaking is the secret language of India, but must have some logical system behind it. I think back to ‘Indian Mind’ and accept that as a foreigner it will always elude me.

Yesterday, we queued at the foreign traveller’s ticket desk at Churchgate Station in central Bombay. All major ticket offices in India have a separate office for tourists. In a strange fit of benevolence, Indian Railways decided to reserve foreigners a certain quota of tickets on each train. Today, however, most of the people in line look suspiciously Indian. No one bats an eyelid, and not even the portly lady behind the glass counter.

We were here to change our rail tickets for the same train the next day. When we reached the front counter, we were handed a form, faded from relentless photocopying. It was almost unreadable. After we’d filled it out, we joined the line once again.

In the meantime, a middle aged gentleman had poised himself to jump to the front of the line with the classic sideways manoeuvre. His sense of entitlement was baffling, though it wasn’t the first time we’d seen it done. The assembled ‘tourists’ would not, this time, let him get away with it, and he was neither surprised nor apologetic as he was hissed and shooed to the back of the queue.

Reaching the portly lady once again, she told us that we were too late: an hour earlier and she could have done something for us, but now…it was impossible. Didn’t we know it was impossible? Glancing at the wall clock behind her head, we were baffled by the seemingly arbitrary cut-off point. She sighed, and explained that for a higher sum, she could help us. And did we have our passports? Sadly, one of us did, and the other did not. We hadn’t needed them to book in the first place, but once again we came upon a rule that seemed nothing if not random. But we had driving licenses, and surely she could see we were foreign? If one of us was, it made sense that the other was too. We looked meaningfully around at the sea of Indian faces behind us.

“I can see you are foreign, madam,” she said. “You are white. I know you are white, you know you are white.” She sighed. “I wish I could help you.” And then she came out with a line we had heard many times before in India, the line that slid the last brick into the impenetrable wall: “It’s in my job.”

The official who draws up job descriptions, I think to myself, is a bit like the army chief in Monty Python, I think to myself, except with a bushier moustache. He sits in his office, and twiddles his thumbs. He pretends in his pomposity to know it all, and when he is forced to divulge a rule, he resorts to making it up, There’s a Railway rule book it is possible to buy from stations, and it’s several centimetres thick.

So, we give up the interview we were hoping to stay in Bombay for, and instead join the Rajdhani Express. Here, we find that the berth reservations have been entirely rejigged, and we have no idea where we are supposed to sleep. The ticket inspector standing outside with a sign points out our new numbers, and writes them on our tickets. We are half a carriage away from each other. When the train leaves, Elsa shifts bunks, choosing from the two opposite me. An old man points and shouts in Hindi.

“He says that seat belongs to someone,” translates a businessman in the berth below. Does it belong to him, I ask? “No. It belongs to someone. Someone who will get on the train later.” But isn’t this an express train? I thought it didn’t make any stops. He shrugs. “It belongs to somebody.” And so, as the man and his translator begin to fall asleep, we make a bed in tribute to the absent passenger, and Elsa considers it a rule to crawl in. For, as with faries, if you believe in a rule hard enough, it’s certain to exist.

Monday 10th November 2008

The 3.45 pm train from Churchgate to Bandra is twenty minutes late. Not that it matters; the platforms are always crammed with people, the women pushing around each other, creating a kaleidoscope of sari silks, the men a throng of filthy shirts and sacks held up in the air. As the train pulls in, and passengers pour off, another load climbs in, elbows out, anxious to board, even though the train won’t leave for at least another ten minutes. It’s every person for themselves: God help you if you stop to apologise for treading on someone’s feet. If you’re lucky enough to land a seat, someone is bound to ask where you are getting off, and then say, assassin-like, “when you go, this seat is mine.” We get into the all-women’s carriage, and Elsa muses as we cower in a corner, is this some old-fashioned way of separating the sexes, or is it just to protect the women from the men?

While we are stationary, a couple of boys surreptitiously jump on the train, avoiding the train stewards, to sell snacks before jumping out the other side. By the time we pull out, it is impossible to remove your elbow from someone’s face without hitting someone else with it anyway. Some hang half outside the open doors, their scarves blowing precariously in the wind. The smell of fish floats disperses through the carriage as wives are bringing their groceries home from the docks. During the journey, old women with tattered saris tied beneath them like sparkling loincloths squeeze through impossibly small spaces between ladies, holding aloft oranges to sell, or costume rings, or sweets made from apricots, shoving them in front of faces that are practically eyeball to eyeball already.

India laughs in the face of the Malthusian theory. With a population of 1.2 billion and growing, the country is still growing fast. It is estimated to pip China by 2035. In addition, India has 25 million expats in 35 countries abroad. Its insatiable growth – around 25% in the past ten years alone – would, it is assumed, leave the country’s infrastructure staggering under its weight. In reality, sanitation and poverty is just as much a problem as it ever was, but no worse. The levels of starvation are no higher in this decade of population explosion than they have been before. The government are slowly raising levels of literacy, and more and more ordinary children from rural areas are speaking English as well as their regional language, giving them hopes of easier social mobility. More young people are studying abroad, only to come back to contribute to their country’s economy. There are as many hopes for India’s next generation. Malthus would be left scratching his head.

A corollary of India’s huge population is its employment situation. More people require more work. India’s job creation, and cheap labour rates, have made the country a service culture. There is someone to do everything for you: to hand you a hand towel in a high class hotel, to open the door on your way into a café. In restaurants, there are some waiters who simply stand all evening, backs pushed straight against the wall. Pull into any main train station and a dozen unformed men will descend, ready to take your baggage ten feet to the front entrance. Electronic ticket machines are few and far between, despite the length of the queues on the concourse. Instead, ticket clerks fuss behind clear plastic screens.

And yet in certain circumstances, it’s hard to see it happening any other way. In Bombay, hundreds of tiffin-wallahs are responsible for ferrying packed lunched from kitchens, cafes and even housewives to the desks and dens of workers. For want of a travelling lunchbox and a microwave for reheating, they deliver 600,000 meals each day, with a centralised sorting office co-ordinating the whole system. In another area of the city – one that has now become a tourist destination – is Mahalaxmi Dhobi Gat, where hundreds of people create a human washing machine, receiving dirty laundry from Bombay’s restaurants and hotels, scrubbing them and wringing them clean. When labour is so cheap, and jobs are so essential, machines will never interfere with what humans can do.

Neither, however, will India’s trains become any less crowded. As we leave the train at Bandra, the old lady who’d bagsied our seat is thrown off by a woman with a huge bag stuffed with sweetcorn kernels. Now we know, I say. The ladies carriage is not there to protect the men from the women; quite the opposite. With handbags like these, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

Thursday 6th November 2008

New Delhi train station’s architecture might be modelled on a British Polytechnic university. The crowds milling through it give it away, though – travelling at frenetic speeds, weaving in and out of maniacal rickshaw drivers, which just about manage to keep their loads of bags and people inside the vehicle as they lurch around corners. Three priests in identical black and purple robes watch as we pull our bags, cameras and tripods towards the station entrance. We’re on our way to Mumbai to make some documentaries for the paper.

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.