Around India in 80 Trains (24 page)

It was now mid-March, and two months of cooked food, twinned with soaring temperatures, had led to pangs of longing for the cold crunchiness of an M&S salad bowl. Before boarding the Saurashtra Mail, the nearest available option was at a wooden cart just outside the station, where a pyramid of apples gleamed like polished cricket balls. Once train 37 had begun to thunder into its five-hour journey to Dwarka, I moved into the doorway with a bottle of Aquafina and sat down to rinse my apples. Drumbeats and bell-ringing came from the adjoining carriage where pilgrims to Lord Krishna’s home were singing and clapping their way through the afternoon, tapping their thighs with the backs of their hands. The stretch to Dwarka was desolate and felt detached from the rest of the country. It had the pleasing serenity that foreign eyes searched for in Indian village life, but its calm belied ugly truths. Agricultural mechanisation and the government’s handing over of much of the land to industrialists had stripped many farmers of their livelihood. Production costs far exceeded revenue from produce, causing a decline in profits and a reported increase in farmer suicides, though Gujarat’s chief minister vehemently denied this was the case.

Both apples devoured, I returned to our compartment, where Passepartout was reading
Shantaram
and copying down a section spoken by Didier. I leant over his arm to read it:

‘In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate. And now you have it.’

I went back to my book.

Legend has it that Dwarka was once the kingdom of Lord Krishna, submerged in the ocean after the epic Mahabharata war. Archaeologists believe that Dwarka emerged and then disappeared under water on a further seven occasions, but the town’s main interest was now the Dwarkadhish temple which sits on the banks of the Gomati river. Around the corner from the limestone structure, a carnival of pilgrims bopped along the street pushing a wooden cart fixed with three megaphones. Revellers wore marigold cravats and pumped both arms in the air, as shop owners and residents leant out of doors and windows to join in the merriment. Kids jiggled on fathers’ shoulders and families danced their way towards the water’s edge, carrying paper boats filled with flowers and flames to immerse beside shoes that were now bobbing on the water, lapped off the steps by the rising tide.

The temple entrance was clogged with noisemakers, so I slipped in and out of the cool shadows, then drifted towards the seafront, picking up a little friend along the way. Ajay was no more than 10 years old and was dressed like Huckleberry Finn. He left the basket of garlands he was selling with a friend and tagged along behind Passepartout, fascinated by his camera. Ajay and I sat on the edge of a sandy hill, where friends and lovers had gathered to watch the sunset, and scrolled through photos. He turned to ask if he could join Passepartout, who was now paddling in the water. As the setting sunlight reached his honey-coloured eyes, they glowed with delight and he handed back the camera, hopped down the rocks and ran to the edge of the waves, where he stood with one hand on his hip, his legs bowed with rickets, chatting to Passepartout.

Even if we were devoid of one, Dwarka had a soul. It lived within the drumbeats, the ripples of laughter and the waves that chased young women, grabbing at the hems of their saris. While much of India made way for shopping malls and coffee shops, bulldozing history and turning its culture to rubble, Dwarka was a pocket of peace. Whether or not there was a God who cared about its fate, its people did.

Dwarka was not the end of the railway line. Highly questionable map-reading skills meant that I had failed to notice that the end was, in fact, one stop away in Okha. Passepartout had tried his best to point out my mistake but train 38, the Okha-Puri Express, was already booked back to Ahmedabad, where we had one final errand before catching the Ranakpur Express to Jodhpur.

The watchseller put down his paper and jumped off his stool as we approached.

‘Niiiice watch, sir, goooood watch, sir. Rolex?’, he asked, dangling a couple in the light, pleased with their shininess.

Passepartout slipped off the broken watch and handed it over.

‘No. I bought this from you about a week ago and it’s not working.’

‘Noooo problem, sir.’ He took it and without bothering to look for the fault, laid it back in the glass case for some other sucker to buy. He then allowed Passepartout to choose another, shaking his head happily and waved us off.

Time was ticking by. In terms of train journeys, we had almost reached the halfway mark. But it was mid-March, half our time was up, and we were nowhere near Udhampur, the northernmost tip of the railways. As a result, Jodhpur was allotted an unjust 24 hours. We dumped bags at a dormitory near the station and walked into the blue-walled city of jhari bedspreads and masala markets, on a primal hunt for meat. After Gujarat’s vegetarian cuisine, our carnivorous cravings had taken over and we devoured a biryani filled with hunks of soft mutton draped in ribbons of fried onion, as the Umaid Bhawan Palace shimmered in the distance. Mid-afternoon heat soon took its toll and we came back to the dormitory for a post-biryani nap.

An Indian man with a satin-smooth head knelt on his bed, frowning over a map of the railways. He spread it out, holding the bottom corner down with one knee, then squinted through his John Lennon glasses. At the foot of his bed lay a younger version of Neil from
The
Young Ones
, wearing mid-calf shorts, a Che Guevara T-shirt and a pair of high-top Converse that hung over the edge of the bed. His face was hidden by a curtain of unwashed hair.

‘Not sure whether to get the train to Delhi and then head down to Kerala …’ the Indian man pondered with a South African lilt, ‘… it looks like a really long journey.’

He turned the map on its side and followed the route with his finger. A hand swiped idly at the curtain of hair and a sun-deprived face appeared from behind.

‘Kerala’s pretty boring, everyone does it.’ Neil offered.

‘But I’ve never been and I’ve only got a week left. I might just spend a couple of nights on a houseboat and just chill for a bit with some good seafood.’

Memories of the fried prawns on our houseboat came flooding back, so I interrupted.

‘Sorry to eavesdrop, but we took the Kerala Express from Delhi to Kottayam and then a houseboat through Alleppey. It’s one of the most beautiful parts we’ve seen so far, plus the 48-hour journey cuts right through the centre of the country, so you get to see plenty that way.’

‘Wow, that’s long. What class were you travelling in? I’m Anil by the way.’

‘Monisha. AC two-tier. At this time of year it’s too hot not to travel at least in three-tier for such a long journey.’

Neil picked at a spot on his chin. ‘I only ever travel in general class.’

‘Well it would be pretty uncomfortable for 48 hours.’

‘I don’t mind that. That way you actually get to see real India.’

‘Real India?’

Neil sat up and rearranged his hair so that even less of his face was visible.

‘Yeah, you don’t get to see what real India is like if you travel up in the air-conditioned classes. You can’t sit and talk to real people or understand how they live.’

‘Because the Indians in third, second and first tiers aren’t real people?’

‘They’re not the ones who define India. It’s the poor who make this country what it is.’

Anil’s forehead creased in thought and he was watching Neil closely as he went on. The spot was now bleeding.

‘Westerners get a false impression of India when they travel in higher classes, you don’t learn anything about this country by sitting with those people.’

Neil was a walking advert for the poverty tourist board. While it was true that the majority of Indians could not afford to travel in higher classes and that those lower down were more representative of the way in which the population lived, it was foolish to think that nothing could be learnt from within those air-conditioned walls. Neil had rolled off the bed and onto his own, and I dug out a wilting copy of
The 3 Mistakes of My Life
, thanks to a leaking bottle of Biotique Green Apple shampoo. Anil was packing his bag and had broken out into a panic. He had lost the anti-bacterial cover for his toothbrush and was tearing the room apart looking for the small plastic cap.

Later that evening I found him sitting on the terrace with a real Indian lassi, and made sure that he bought tickets to Kottayam in third tier.

The Jaisalmer Express had seats available in only one class and was our first overnight journey in sleeper. It was also the 40
^th
train—the halfway mark! At midnight we boarded in the darkness, barely able to make out bundles of bags from sleeping bodies. Passepartout crawled into the bottom berth and I took the middle, pushing my smaller rucksack up to the open window and balling up my fleece as a pillow. A hand dangled from the upper berth, catching my hair, and a pair of wide-awake eyes watched me from across the aisle. That night, horns blared through the open windows and the wheels clattered louder than ever. At 3am the train ground to a halt. Shivering, I slid out of my space to go to the toilet, where someone was smoking. Fog was collecting in the doorway, but the area was empty. It turned out to be dust sweeping in from the desert through the open windows. I glanced out and saw that we had arrived at Pokhran. In 1998, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, leader of the ‘nonviolent’ Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had conducted five underground nuclear tests at Pokhran, with rightwing Hindus then pushing for a temple to mark the spot. I zipped up my fleece and crawled back into my sheets.