Around India in 80 Trains (23 page)

Our room had the deliberately distressed look of a Shoreditch boutique hotel, except that the peeling paint and crumbling walls were wonderfully authentic. A tiled blue floor with a Donald Duck shower curtain across the windows made the room resemble a bathroom with two beds in the middle. The actual bathroom was hung with a sign requesting that used toilet paper be put in a bin. It was the ultimate in shabby chic.

A beam of evening sunshine swept through the doorway like a sniper ray, and I basked in the warmth for a few minutes wondering how Passepartout was coping in such close proximity to a beacon of religion. Perhaps it would have the effect of Kryptonite. Or maybe it would have the reverse effect. I glanced across to the other bed where he was dozing and half hoped to see the beginnings of the stigmata.

Balmy air wrapped around my shoulders as I stepped over a couple of cats and crossed the yard that was now strung with fairy lights and a selection of my damp vests and pants. George’s wife had cooked calamari pasta and fried meaty rockfish, attracting the attention of two more cats. The female, and more cunning of the two, was sitting in Passepartout’s lap when George approached holding a bottle of rum.

‘Can I sit with you?’

‘Of course.’

George was a soft-spoken man with receding hair and three gold hoops in one ear. He had wide-set eyes and gleaming, reddish-brown skin pulled tight across his high cheekbones, which made him appear to be smiling all the time. Since the early 1960s, George and his family had had a rough ride. After a trip to visit relatives in Goa, they had returned to find the government had seized their home with all their papers inside. To earn a little money they began to invite foreigners from the beach to come and party on the disused church grounds, where they hosted barbecues. With the Church authorities’ permission, they opened a small restaurant.

George unscrewed the bottle. ‘It was very successful, but then the local Catholics got jealous and took it away from us.’

At the mention of the ‘c’-word, my heart sank. Passepartout sat up. My heart shrivelled.

‘Catholic priests, man!’ he snorted, lighting up a cigarette.

‘This was probably around 1992,’ George said. ‘At that time this property belonged to the local community, so I went back to the Church and asked them if I could start running guest rooms.’ He gestured to the rooftop. ‘We started inviting people to sit on the roof to watch sunsets. The priest said he was going to help me renew the licence and instead went to the police and made sure it wasn’t renewed.’

Passepartout was shaking his head.

George glanced up at the sky as a shooting star sliced through the cluster of white lights. He nodded towards the rooftop.

‘Let’s go up, it’s a lovely night.’

A cat’s cradle of washing lines criss-crossed the terrace, draped with old duvets that provided shade to a couple of charpoys. As the highest point in Diu, the rooftop offered a panoramic view of the town, its lights flickering under an aura of skin-tingling romance. A maximum of 45 people could sleep on the roof for the sum of
`
100 each, often finding themselves alongside George who came up in summer. We perched on a charpoy and were soon joined by Mikkel, a German in a kurta pyjama who had lived in Goa since the 1980s and regularly visited George.

‘No thumping trance in this Portuguese town, huh?’ He bit his bottom lip, pounding the air with his fist.

This was what made Diu a speck of gold dust. Peacocks sailed from one treetop to another, warm waters lapped against unpolluted shores, the air was clean and the only booming beats came from a wedding across the road. George sipped his rum and smiled. ‘Sweet family, they invited us all—they’ll be there all night.’

As recently as three years ago, the family home was closed again and George’s family was forced to spend seven months in Goa living off their savings. They eventually won the case and received a staying order, but George was still fighting for compensation from the government. He took a long drink and looked at the floor. His financial battles were far from over.

Passepartout watched him closely.

‘At least you’re doing something useful with a church.’

George nodded, a grateful curve at the corner of his mouth.

‘They’re hypocrites. And I would know, I used to be a Sunday-school teacher.’

George looked up. ‘Really?’

‘They claim to want to help everyone and yet most of the world’s wealth is owned by the Catholic Church!’

I turned away to watch the lights of the liners blinking on the ocean. Despite the bhangra beats from across the road and the enticing whoops and claps, my bathroom-cum-bedroom beckoned.

Auto drivers and other informants with a hidden agenda had sworn blind that Una was the only train station that could connect the mainland to Diu and vice versa. This was another lie. It was also possible to take a passenger train from a stop at Delwada. It was an 8km journey from Diu, so after three days of peace we piled our bags into the back of an open auto rickshaw and made our way to the station to catch a passenger train to Sasan Gir, Junagadh, the next pin in the map. On the approach to the bridge connecting Diu to the mainland, it appeared that a bundle of clothes had been dumped on the side of the road. Sniggering, the driver slowed down. It was a bundle of clothes, but someone was still wearing them—and was now paying the price for a heavy weekend on the booze.

By the time I bought tickets, Passepartout had vanished. There was only one platform and as I scanned it, a circle of heavily embroidered, dyed cotton began to close in on me. A tribal troop of Rabari women wearing necklaces and earrings akin to wedding jewellery, had flocked to investigate and were now clamping tattooed hands across their mouths. Beautiful grid-like work, considered to contain magical symbolism, emblazoned their arms, necks and giggling faces. Where their braless breasts sagged low, their hard chests resembled chessboards. By tradition, the Rabaris were camel herders but had begun to move towards the big cities to seek employment as labourers. Meanwhile Passepartout had been returned by a tiny man and his family, who had taken him to look at turtles in their garden. Train 34 arrived and I shuffled up the steps among the women, feeling terribly underdressed. By the time it departed they had got tired of me and gone back to gossiping, their earlobes swinging wildly, so I took out a notepad and tried to look busy.

Hemant, a 30-year-old from Bharuch, was sitting opposite me reading a copy of
Angels and Demons
, following the words with a plastic ruler and a lazy eye. He pretended not to be watching me making notes, but I could see his mouth open and close as he looked for the right moment to begin a series of questions that he eventually unloaded like a round of machine-gunfire. ‘Is the UK giving free education? How is employment? Is there crime in London? What is the government doing to stop it? Are men having relations with men? Are there places where they are going for this?’ I picked my way slowly through each one, explaining state schools, benefit fraud, knife crime and Clapham Common, when the train halted for a moment and Passepartout jumped down to find a packet of Lay’s and some water. Hemant crossed his arms and with his good eye, followed Passepartout out of the door.

‘Husband is from?’

‘Norway.’

‘You are having issues?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Tell again?’

‘Sometimes, but that happens when you’re with someone all day, everyday.’

‘How many?’

‘How many what?’

‘Issues. Boys?’

He meant children.

‘Oh. No, sorry, no issues.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m too young.’

‘What is your age?’

‘28.’

‘Running 28?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Means, you are completing 28 or running 28?’

‘I’ll be 29 next birthday.’

‘Then you are old. By now you must be having issues or trouble will come.’

Passepartout returned carrying three palm-sized packets of Jal Ganga water that smelt like Plasticine. Moments later the train pulled into Sasan Gir and I thanked Hemant for his advice. It was now much easier to let the assumption slide that Passepartout, my barren womb and I were a family, than go through the torturous process of allaying suspicions of harlotry.

Gir National Park turned out to be a disappointment. We had joined a group of backpackers and at 5am a jeep arrived to drive us into the sanctuary. Not only were the windows blacked out, but they did not open, prompting fury from those with cameras, and demands for a reimbursement. Serbian threats encouraged the guide to take heed and he eventually produced an open-top jeep, which then ran out of petrol and broke down in the middle of the park. Fortunately we had seen one lethargic lion by this point. He was slimmer-faced and smaller than his African cousins and wore his mane in a shorter, more bedraggled fashion. He had arched his tail, sprayed a jet of scent on a tree, then strolled off into the bushes. Shortly after the sighting, the jeep coughed then rolled to a standstill in a rut, where we sat waiting for help to arrive. Only in India, among innumerable potential hazards, would a park guide encourage everyone to get out and stretch their legs, pee and have a cigarette.

From Gir, 90 minutes on train 35—the Dhasa-Veraval passenger train—took us back to Veraval Junction from where we could connect to Rajkot, and from Rajkot to Dwarka. A steady blast of humid air steamed straight up my nostrils as I rolled about in exhaustion, sticking to the seat like Velcro. We stopped for an early dinner of
mackeroni
cheej back
that had more sugar in it than a treacle tart, before boarding the Somnath Express for the second time.

Pushing the door into the dimly lit carriage, we were met with a sharp slap of cold air. As much as I had grown to adore passenger trains for their warmth and the distinct lack of boundaries, it was a momentary relief to be back in the restrained, cooler confines of the second-tier carriage. Our only other companion was listening to an iPod and nodded politely before shifting up to the window and continuing to work on a spreadsheet. Shortly before midnight train 36 arrived into Rajkot, where we spent the night sleeping soundly in motionless beds before the long morning journey to Dwarka.