Around India in 80 Trains (25 page)

Travelling by camel was in conflict with our specified mode of transport, but avoiding Jaisalmer’s main attraction would have been churlish for the sake of petty logistics. And so, after spending a night at the Jaisalmer Fort we found ourselves atop a jaded quartet of blinking camels, along with Steve and Ayelet, a dry-humoured Irish couple we had met at the dorm in Jodhpur. Ayelet was a sculptor with a jagged fringe, mischievous eyes and a pin-sized stud in her freckled nose that wrinkled when she laughed, which was often, and mostly at Steve. He had spread on sun cream as thick as cottage cheese and was sporting a cerise headscarf tied like Lawrence of Arabia. As the sun blazed angrily, our guide, Ali, trudged ahead and we began to bob and lurch into the heart of the Thar desert to spend the night on the dunes.

Ali was of an indefinable age. He had the build and suppleness of a teenager, performing all manner of tasks on his haunches, and attributed his more colourful English vocabulary to repeated listening of the Black Eyed Peas. But his hands were calloused and worn and he handled his camels like a veteran. His eyes flicked around as though he had been taught to be suspicious of everyone he met, but his pout frequently gave way to laughter that sounded like a combination of an asthma attack and a braying donkey.

We had stopped for lunch under a tree and were watching a herd of goats playing up a group of women running after them with sticks, when Ali looked up from where he was kneading dough.

‘You want goat?’

‘A goat?’

‘We can get goat for dinner.’

‘How will you cook it?’

‘With port.’

‘Port?’

‘Yes, port!’

‘You’ve got port to cook us goat?’

Goat in port sounded a little fancy considering our plates had just been cleaned with dirt and the tea stirred with sticks. Ali spat out the twig he was chewing and jumped up in exasperation.

‘Oh my dog!’ he shouted, stumbling across to where two other guides were brewing tea and chopping cauliflower. He picked up the steel pot from the fire and waved it over his head.

‘PORT!’

‘Oh, you mean POT!’

‘Yes, cook it in port!
Tonight’s gonna be a good, good night!
’ he sang, waving the pot around.

‘Oh my dog? Don’t you mean “Oh my God?”’ I asked.

‘Yes, yes, GOD! Ali yelled, hee-hawing with laughter.

‘I would normally say, “Oh
your
God”.’ Passepartout chipped in.

‘It’s just a turn of phrase,’ I replied.

‘Yes, a phrase that has absolutely no relation to reality. It’s been bent into a literary device that we all use now, like “heavenly” or “paradise”.’

Ayelet flashed me a cheeky grin.

After a Rajasthani thali, a nap under the trees and another cup of sandy tea, we restacked the camels with quilts and bedding and set off across the parched expanse, passing little more than rocks, a dried cow’s skull and a scattering of depressed-looking trees. Our camels, from the outset, had adopted an air of endearing ignorance, but plodded into the thorny branches with suspiciously precise direction, causing the needles to slash across our cheeks, adding insult to already injured, sunburnt skin. Just as my throat had become so dry that I could barely croak up enough saliva to form words of complaint, we arrived at the dunes. A shack was waiting, which looked from afar like a haystack thatched with blankets. Santa had already visited, leaving a hessian sack of Kingfishers and Pepsi bottles covered in rapidly melting ice. Passepartout and Steve took a couple of beers and clambered onto the top of a dune to watch the beetles embroidering the sand with their tracks. ‘I used to be a Sunday-school teacher …’ drifted down as they walked away.

I crept inside the shack and dug a hole that I sat in for the next hour, venturing out briefly to watch the sun come down over the creamy curves of sand. Apparently the Thar Desert was equipped with 24-hour room service and the unsuspecting goat had arrived just after we did, and was now tethered to a pole, enjoying what was to be its last supper. The meal was soon hacked out in an undigested mound as the headless goat twitched its last and ended up in the ‘port’.

That night Ali and the guides squatted around the fire using two hands to stir the goat curry, as though manoeuvring a canoe. The sand had dampened with cold and the air had turned sharp and icy. Clutching bowls of curry with near-gangrenous fingertips, I was thankful that it was so steeped with chillies, as the slightest increase in body temperature, even if it made my nose run into the bowl, was an improvement. Using the roti to warm my palms I began to nudge the bits of meat to one side. It was marginally less stretchy than bubble gum and even in the dark, I could sense that it was grey. Sporadic tufts of hair found their way into my mouth, which I quietly spat out and then disposed of with hard but discreet throws into the darkness, flinging the fatty lumps across the sand. As I licked my fingers, Ali began to scream. He ran around in a circle, pointing at the shack, claiming that he had seen a snake track curling its way across the sand. His discovery triggered yelling and pot banging, generating enough drama for the other two musketeers to join him in running around waving flames through the darkness. This was, presumably, included in the trek’s cost as after-dinner entertainment.

Nevertheless, I opted to climb up onto a charpoy for the night. I pulled my socks over my knees, pulled my hat down over my ears and lay on my back watching shooting stars burst and fade like a delicate display of God’s own fireworks. I turned over and instantly regretted throwing the bits of goat as far as I had. Wild dogs were now sniffing around the charpoys, snuffling at bits of hairy gristle. Meanwhile, Steve and Passepartout made their way through the remaining beers that had begun to lend themselves to a well-lubricated lash out against the evidence for intelligent design.

‘I mean it’s ridiculous! The human eye is one of the most flawed examples of design.’

Passepartout was working his way through his usual repertoire. Having heard this so often, I knew what was coming next and giggled as I muttered to myself:
if anything it shows a rather unintelligent designer
.

He cracked open the last bottle of beer and took a sip. ‘If anything it shows a rather
unintelligent
designer.’

I started to laugh so hard that I had to stuff my sleeve into my mouth, while Ayelet pulled her duvet up to her chin and turned over. A cut healing itself satisfied my feeling that the human body was far from unintelligent, but I knew better than to join the conversation and cause desert warfare, so I drew my knees up to my chest and prayed that the dogs would eat me, or at the very least chew off my ears. In the morning, I awoke to find snake tracks trailing beneath the charpoy like unravelled wool.

Only two trains ran from Jaisalmer to Bikaner. After the sleepless journey from Jodhpur, we opted against the night train and chose the 11:10am that arrived at 4:40pm into Lalgarh Junction, a short ride from Bikaner. Only five others were on board: the ticket inspector and four members of the Indian Air Force who boarded at Phalodi airbase. As we picked up speed, blood-red dust soared through the windows. Grappling at the shutter, we yanked it down. This was why everyone else travelled at night. It was the lesser of two evils. Slow-roasting for five hours at high temperatures, turning over once, we awoke fully cooked as train 41 pulled into Lalgarh.

11 | The Venus Flytrap of Insanity

During our time on the Indian Maharaja, we had covered Udaipur, Jaipur and Sawai Madhopur, so we were now free to climb north Rajasthan and continue into Punjab. If all went to plan, we would reach Udhampur within the week.

Originating in Barmer, a small town in west Rajasthan famed for carved wooden furniture, the express train we boarded at Bikaner (number 43) was bound for Kalka, the main junction for passengers joining the Himalayan Queen to Shimla. The well-loved toy train was high on our list of priorities, but Chandigarh, the ‘City Beautiful’, had piqued our interest for its status as not only India’s first planned city, but also its cleanest. In a country where chaos and stink formed the basis of daily existence, planning and cleanliness were two notions that had very much fallen off my radar and become something of a lost hope. Post-partition Nehru had commissioned the development of Chandigarh to reflect new India, proclaiming it ‘unfettered by the traditions of the past … an expression of the nation’s faith in the future’. Such a statement made it impossible to bypass this anomaly. Besides, we had heard that there was a garden made from recycled rubbish and broken bangles that Passepartout was itching to see.

Bikaner was half a day’s journey from Barmer, so there was a fair chance that whoever had boarded at the train’s origin had either adopted our berths as their own or used them to store excess luggage. Arriving at the compartment we were dismayed to find that a combination of the two had taken place. Dismayed, but inwardly thrilled. Over the last couple of weeks I had grown to enjoy a fleeting sense of Schadenfreude when someone else had taken my seat and I was compelled to ask them to move. Elderly or injured passengers, and families with children were the exception, and I was happy to make allowances. But for the most part, culprits were young and able-bodied—their only afflictions being a combination of selective hearing and an inability to make eye contact. This game became all the more enjoyable when they refused to move until a ticket inspector arrived and threw them out.

The seeds of this ruthless new behaviour had been incubated during my time at university, after many Sunday evenings spent squashed into the luggage racks between Birmingham New Street and Leeds. The London Underground had provided some degree of nurturing, but now finding themselves in a truly hospitable environment, the seeds had sprouted into a Venus Flytrap of insanity. Two and a half hours cramped on a Virgin Voyager was one thing, but 48 hours without a seat was not to be sniffed at. It was only a matter of time before I started diving headfirst through moving doorways to bag one.

In the interim, standing around and waiting for people to move was torture. In addition to the 75-litre Lowe Alpines on our backs, we had succumbed to wearing our smaller rucksacks on our chests, like Spanish exchange students who often blocked the entrance to the Tube at Piccadilly Circus. We stood there, bodies sweating like luncheon meat in picnic sandwiches, wondering how and where to offload. An elderly gentleman with round cheeks and a beaky nose hopped up. He looked like a big, smiley bird. He unchained his suitcase from under our seats and, dragging it across the floor, suggested that, seeing as he had already used my berth, we could do a mutual swap.

Easy.

Unexpected.

And a bit disappointing.

Barely five minutes had passed when a flash of white trousers appeared and the inspector plucked the tickets from my hand. Scrolling down his clipboard, grimacing at the withering passes, he peered through his glasses and demanded to know why we were in the wrong seats. The gentleman closed his eyes and nodded.

‘It is all right, between us we have reached a mutual agreement and we are happy. Thank you.’

No longer required to assert any kind of authority, the inspector flicked a pen across our tickets with visible disappointment and carried on to the next compartment. Hoisting myself up the side of the berth, I marked my territory by placing the bag of bedding in the middle before settling down with my book. My iPod was now a redundant artefact buried at the bottom of my bag along with limp jasmine flowers and the odd five-rupee coin. Aside from being thoroughly bored of my music, it hindered my eavesdropping. Passepartout slotted away the rucksacks and settled down with his laptop to trawl through his photographs. While pretending to read, the gentleman glanced continually at the computer screen until his curiosity gave way.

‘Was this taken in Deshnok?’ he asked, finally.

Passepartout, who was only too pleased to offer a private viewing, nattered with the man, who sat with his hands pressed between his thighs, swinging his crossed feet.

That morning, after a stack of roadside aloo parathas, we had taken train 42, the Link Express, from Lalgarh to Deshnok, Rajasthan’s answer to Hamelin. Among the many variations on the story, legend has it that Karni Mata, a 14
^th
-century mystic believed to be an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga, had requested Yama, the Lord of Death, to restore life to one of her clansmen. Yama was unable to grant her wish, as the clansman had already been reincarnated, so Karni Mata declared that from then on, all her tribesmen would be reincarnated as rats until they could be born back into their clan. Queues into Karni Mata’s temple bulged with pilgrims armed with ladoos, and French tourists wearing plastic bags over their feet, eyeing the hordes of brown rats that flitted around the floors, lining up to drink milk from steel dishes or dozing in corners. Their friendly, beady-eyed faces came as a surprise. These were not the black, yellow-gnashered fellows that slunk about at night, slipping in and out of drains. As we walked around, coconut barfi sticking to our toes, it was evident that the holy rats would never be reborn as humans. This was moksha; the end of the cycle and the ultimate goal. A dwelling where hand-fed sugar delights were an hourly occurrence was akin to paradise.