Around India in 80 Trains (11 page)

Anusha did not care. She looked up and her face fell.

‘Oh my God, why you are coming so late again? I knew, I just knew you were going to come late again. Hurry up, I have a party to get to.’

Anusha’s severe ponytail had been abandoned and her hair spilt down over her shoulders, streaks of henna skimming her temples. Her white coat had gone and she was wearing a pink salwar kameez with purple beading. Her nails were polished pink and her lips smudged with purple. She had blossomed into a vision of pink and purple angst.

‘Can we come to your party?’ I asked.

Anusha snatched the white forms and somehow processed the bookings within minutes. As the printer strained with constipation, curling the tickets onto the floor, she glanced down the remaining list and began to change our choices to trains that were faster, cleaner, safer, more punctual and with better food.

‘Come back when you’re next in Delhi’, she said, ‘I can find you trains with foreign tourist quotas so you won’t have to book so far in advance.’

She shooed us out, fishing out her lipstick from her handbag. I had a feeling that this was not the last time we would see Anusha Thawani.

As a general rule, morning appointments in India take place at one fixed time. Whether it is to meet a friend for coffee, to pick up blouses from the tailor, or to discuss business with a colleague, the time arranged is the same: ’leven-’leven-thirty. Between 11am and half past the hour, is a nicely vague 30-minute window that allows for lie-ins, traffic jams and the two parties to arrive in a state of pressure-free tardiness. The Kerala Express was due to depart at 11:30am, and on average, was only two minutes late. However, this driver was running on Indian Standard Time and the train was nowhere in sight.

The platform was bloated to bursting point. Passengers pushed to the edges, the odd one occasionally dropping off, like quarters in a casino coin pusher machine. They simply wandered up a few girders, found a gap and hauled themselves back onto the platform, unfazed by impending death. This was just another one of many contradictions that made India so very curious. At any given time, the country is in a hurry, racing to keep up with itself. In every sense Indians are in a constant fight to move ahead. People shove to board buses, push to get off trains and retrieve their baggage from overhead bins while planes are still taxiing. Yet, at instances of genuine urgency, there is a distinct predisposition towards nose-picking and bone idleness.

As a soft brown goat on the track chewed its way through an empty Monaco biscuits’ wrapper, flicking its ears, the train appeared in the distance and the big push began. So far it was a game of chance as to which end of the platform we should wait. Thinking we had cracked the overhead signs, we had waited towards the top end of the platform, only to watch carriage A2 flash past. Our compartment was now 17 carriages away and the platform had turned into a mosh pit of madness. Boxes crowd-surfed, bodies pushed both ways in the doorways and at least one man lay face down on the ground, trampled beneath the mob. It reminded me of when the Foo Fighters had played the Isle of Wight.

Once the rage had subsided, we snaked around the families holding hands through the bars and arrived at the door to A2 as train number nine, the Kerala Express to Kottayam creaked and began to move again. Our tickets were for the side upper and lower berths, which were ideal for such a long journey. Passengers in those seats have no reason to share sitting space with anyone else, and can gaze out of the window all day. But side berths cause issues at night. They are narrower than the main berths of a 2A compartment, and leave the lower passenger more susceptible to a face full of passing backside, and the upper passenger more likely to stay awake due to conferences that often take place in the aisle at unsociable hours. Claustrophobics will also want to avoid the upper berth, as the three closed sides and one drawn curtain create the feeling of lying in a moving coffin. It was barely midday, so sleep was a long way off. After sizing up our companions, we unpacked books and iPods, tucked away bags and settled into what was to be home for the next two days. I slotted my bookmark into the back of my book and smiled at Passepartout. So far we were getting on wonderfully well. He had a tendency to get rather ratty when deprived of nicotine and coffee, and I knew to avoid him when he was hungry, but otherwise he chatted to everyone, frequently stopping to take photographs of anyone who wished to pose, and ensuring that he had noted down each person’s address so that he could post them copies. When we were not reading chunks of our books out loud, swapping music, or amusing ourselves with the surrounding oddities, he was content to leave me to go about my own business while he wandered off to find souvenirs for his nephews and nieces.

A bookseller was still on board and stopped by carrying a pile so high, that only his chin and fingertips were visible. The body of books was stacked with the usual suspects: Paulo Coelho, Chetan Bhagat, Dan Brown and Jeffrey Archer. Passepartout scanned it for Richard Dawkins’
The Greatest Show on Earth
, but on principle, I refused to buy photocopied books. A man in the adjoining compartment had chosen
The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari
, which the boy was trying to slide out from the bottom of his pile, when another boy came past jingling luggage locks, followed by a high-pitched vendor selling ‘chackobar’ and ‘badderscatch’ ice cream. All three pushed to get past one another in the aisle. It was like a scene from a Peter Sellers film. The vendors vanished and I went back to my book, eager to find out Dolly’s fate.

‘Excuse me darling, I have a message for you.’

A syrupy voice purred from behind me. It spoke up again.

‘Excuse me darling, I have a message for you.’

I looked around.

‘Excuse me darling, I have a message for you.’

Wondering if the hallucinogenic rice was still causing aftershocks, I spun around in confusion. In the compartment behind us a boy was slouched against the wall tapping at his mobile phone. He had chosen the creepy voice to alert him to text messages and it stayed with us for the next 48 hours. The recipient enjoyed her attentions far too much, judging by the number of messages he must have sent to encourage the multitude of replies.

A head poked around the limp bit of curtain keeping out the sunshine. It had an IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) baseball cap on backwards, a bashful grin and there was a vague effort at a moustache.

‘Lentz?’

Shyam was taking lunch orders, scribbling onto a small notepad with a well-chewed pencil.

‘Weg? Non-weg?’

‘What’s the non-vegetarian option?’

‘Yegger biryani.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Yegger.’

Passepartout put down his book and leant forward.

‘Sorry, what kind of meat is that? Chicken or mutton?’

‘Yeggggggger biryani,’ he repeated, pulling at his cap.

‘Egg,’ said the book buyer from across the aisle.

Feeling rather stupid, we ordered two portions of egg biryani, which arrived, in the end, without the yegg—and without spoons, even after three reminders. At one point Shyam appeared wielding two plastic spoons, one of which he dropped before he reached us, the other disappeared between the door and a conversation with the book buyer.

Outside the tinted windows the outskirts of Delhi began to slip away. Within minutes, BMWs had morphed into bullock carts, shopping malls into shacks. Tying up the remainders of our lunch in an eco nappy-bag, I worked my way down the carriage and squeezed the rubbish into the slot beneath the sink, which actually had a bin bag in place. At this point, I was unaware that the bag would simply be thrown out of the door at the next possible opportunity. It was bright and warm outside and the train was yet to pick up pace, so I heaved open the door and sat down on the step. Behind me the carriage door opened and a lady wearing a tennis shirt and bootleg jeans leant out and tossed a plastic bag full of food straight over my head. Rice, dal and pickle came loose mid-air, the open bag landing on a bush already strung with blue and pink plastic ribbons. Every inch of the foreground sprouted plastic bags, foil and bottles, resembling the immediate aftermath of Glastonbury.

As the train slowed towards Mathura Junction, a man in a striped shirt and suit trousers pushed his friend on a broken-down motorbike up the adjacent track, and a farmer with a herd of suntanned sheep, squatted on the edge of the lines, watching the duo go past. Suddenly the shacks and huts shrank away and the train slowed past farmland. A lone cyclist pedalled at the edge of a field, a mammoth bundle of sticks straddling his back wheel. Bent over between strips of tall grass, one blood-red sari billowed in the wind, like a single tulip in a field of green. Between Jhansi and Bina, the sun and I became embroiled in a game of peek-a-boo. It darted over rooftops and ducked behind trees, hiding behind rogue clouds. But it soon became tired of the game, turning pink from exhaustion and slid down behind the hills, winking on its way out.

As the hours rolled by, a slideshow of bucolic beauty played in the window. Maize swayed, bullocks wallowed in mud baths and blossoms weighed down branches. On the descent towards the South, a new reel of pictures began to play, touched up with a darker green. Trees clambered for space, pushing for prime location. Houses hid behind bushes and lakes shimmered in the sunshine. The sun was now wide awake, bouncing across leaves and leaping above branches. Gone was the dust and dryness of the North. Kerala had a cool Colgate freshness and everything felt clean. Everything, that was, apart from myself. I had started to smell like an unwashed football shirt. Around leven-leven-thirty, the Kerala Express slid into Kottayam station. We jumped down the steps and toasted 48 hours, six states and two stinky people, with a short, sharp burst of proper South Indian coffee.

5 | Hindus Only Allowed

For Indians, a journey is important, but it is reaching the destination that really counts. In a country where survival is priority, this applies, in a broader sense, to their every undertaking. Lying, cheating, bribing and conning are bad, but if they get you where you want, then their definitions become flexible. Buying medical degrees, flashing red lights with no VIP in the car and inviting an entire constituency to a political wedding in exchange for votes is the norm. Everyone does it and everyone knows. The cancer of corruption and nepotism is in no way unique to India; it exists in every country and within every system. But in India it is structured: condemned on the surface, but accepted as integral to a working society. Theoretically, this clashed wildly with the naivety of our travelling mindset but the practicality was undeniable.

After the two-day journey to Kottayam, we recovered in a houseboat on the backwaters of Kumarakom, then took train number 10, the Sabari Express, along the Western Ghats to Coimbatore. There we booked tickets to Erode to visit a man who oversaw the building of temples. I had long been intrigued by the complexities behind their construction and he had invited us to explain the mathematics of structure, positioning and the astrological considerations of each new project. But less than an hour before our departure he failed to answer his phone, choosing instead to fire off sporadic text messages citing a combination of an ill mother and a business meeting out of station. Now, waiting in the chief reservation supervisor’s office at Coimbatore Junction, I clutched a white form to my chest, pulled a sad face and prayed that we could exchange tickets for the next train to Madurai. It was due to depart within the hour and the waiting list was endless.

The office was filled with fellow fraudsters mumbling guilt-ridden stories of dead or dying relatives, or pretending not to understand their ticket’s dates and travel restrictions. The outcome of their efforts also depended upon the discretion of the man in charge. Glaring over his glasses at one poorly rehearsed performance, the supervisor raised back his hand and pushed his tongue between his teeth, which translated loosely as, ‘get out of my sight before I bash the living daylights out of you’. He beckoned me forward. Dewy-eyed and sniffing, I scribbled down the preferred train numbers and handed him our tickets, looking down at the floor while brewing up a plausible lie. Without questioning, he slapped a form for emergency tickets on the table. His pen hovered above the box labelled ‘reason for emergency’ and he eyed me closely for a moment or two, then wrote ‘BRITISH TOURIST’.