Around India in 80 Trains (3 page)

We were currently staying in the home of Imthiaz and Sweetie Pasha. They were my parents’ closest friends, who were nothing less than surrogate parents to me, so I trusted they would offer some sound advice—without laughing at me for my failure to book the first train. Reaching across the table, I picked up the internal phone and dialled up to their room. Imthiaz answered:

‘Yes.’

‘Uncle Imthi, it’s me.’

‘How are you, dear?’

‘We have a bit of a problem, I can’t get those tickets to Kanyakumari and I’m …’

‘Leave it with me, dear.’

Click.

The next morning, over a breakfast of papayas and egg dosai in the garden, I spied Subbu, the resident Jack-of-all-trades, hovering at the corner. He approached as though trying not to wake a sleeping dog and handed over two tickets to Nagercoil, a short train ride from Kanyakumari. He saluted and crept backwards, shaking his head, then ran down the driveway. It turned out that after I had spoken to Imthiaz, he had made a phone call to Subbu, who cycled to the station. There, he paid an opportunistic auto rickshaw driver to stand in the queue while he came back home and slept, returning at 8am to buy our tickets. Since my last dealings with India, it seemed that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

In 1976 my parents left Madras and arrived in South Shields in the north of England as a couple of newly married junior doctors. Two children and 15 years later, my dad was lured back by unfulfilled promises, returning with us to Madras in 1991. Leaving behind a life of semi-detached suburban comfort and a bay-window view of the Derbyshire Dales, he now awoke to a balcony view of Elliot’s Beach and rats eating sandalwood soap in the bathroom. He drove to work in a borrowed 1960s Fiat, taking a packed lunch of Amul cheese sandwiches in a kid’s Virgin Atlantic shoulder bag, once filled with my crayons and colouring books.

Thrilled by the sunshine, beach apartment and mangoes for breakfast, I joined an elitist school, aged nine. Mocked for having an English accent, laughed at for wearing the wrong shade of blue school skirt, and walloped for contesting the Indian penchant for mugging and vomiting up reams of text, I soon realised that the honeymoon period was over. One day, while waiting outside the staff room, I overheard the teachers discussing my mum—‘that
firang
woman who wears T-shirts and jeans and drives her own car’. It made me sad.

I was sad when Pal-Ma, the old milk lady with red-rimmed teeth, was beaten up by the drunk man upstairs and when posters of Rajiv Gandhi’s blown-up body were plastered all over town—a collage of his bald spot and Lotto trainers. I was scared when a man tipped a severed human head out of his lungi onto the local police chief’s desk, and when the retired colonel across the road—who had offered to rig a cable at night to steal the neighbour’s Star TV connection—watched us through a blind on his balcony when my mum was out. I missed home.

I missed getting out the wooden sledge in winter, which our neighbour had carved when we were tiny. I missed drinking water from the tap. I missed the warm hamsters we had left behind. I missed watching
Simon and the Witch
after school. I missed the taste of McVitie’s Chocolate Digestives. I missed seeing my parents smiling. But most of all, I missed my big brother. Too old to catch up on nine years’ worth of Hindi lessons, Rahul, aged 13, was soon sent to an American international school in a desolate hill station, where clouds came into the dorm rooms, and anybody’s parents could turn up and teach. One morning he awoke to find a rat had chewed off the sponge from his Sony headphones to line its nest. But we were not the only ones struggling to acclimatise.

My mum paid bribes to have a gas cylinder installed in the kitchen, waited eight months for milk coupons and endured Hollywood car-chases around the city, tailed by men wanting to buy her Mercedes or borrow it for their daughters’ weddings. And across town, my dad faced his own battles. At work, during moments of quiet, he occupied himself by taking swabs of air conditioners in the intensive care unit, the specimens returning from the labs with diseases he had only ever read about as a student. His findings were responded to with little more than a shrug and a
‘so what?’
. But after discovering that the hearts of deceased patients were being illegally removed and sold on, and the holes stuffed with cotton wool, he drew the line. This was not a country where he wanted his family to live. In 1993, he repacked his boxes and his brood and left for good.

Returning to Madras was like being reunited with an ex-lover. On the surface we were friends, but while wounds may heal, their scars run deep. We had seen little of each other since 1993 and in that time Madras had adopted a new name, expanded its waistline and grown into a monster of a metropolis that I barely recognised. But like an ex-lover, it still smelt the same. On the drive from the airport, a heady mix of diesel, waste and noxious fumes from the Cooum river was occasionally delivered from evil by top notes of sea air and jasmine swinging from the rear-view mirror. The Honda’s headlamps bounced over bundles of bodies asleep by the roadside and my heart tightened. By the time I dragged my bag into my room, my hair was stuck to the back of my neck, my skin was clammy with grime and studded with mosquito bites. India wastes no time in extending its welcome.

To understand India you have to see it, hear it, breathe it and feel it. Living through the good, the bad and the ugly is the only way to know where you fit in and where India fits into you. Once upon a time we had clashed. But we had both grown up and changed. India in particular was now undergoing a seismic shift, swaying in a constant state of flux where everyone who arrived or left—or who had always lived there—was forced to reassess their relationship with the country. India Version 2.0 was now up and running. Indians championed their nation as a global superpower, expounding its potential to overtake everyone as the fastest-growing economy. Yet for all its advances and progression, this was still a country where, in a village in Orissa, a 2-year-old boy could be married off to a dog called Jyoti to ward off evil spirits and ease the bad omen of his rotting tooth.

With Subbu’s blessed tickets in hand, Passepartout and I finished breakfast and set off to Landmark to buy a map of the railways and a stack of pins to pepper the proposed route. Landmark was one of my favourite bookshops which sold embroidered notebooks and jewelled pens and was crammed with shelf after shelf of multicoloured spines. It was where I used to buy Archie Double Digests as a kid. Sweetie had come along in a cloud of Bulgari and was pacing in the aisles, desperate to see a new film called
3 Idiots
based on the book,
Five
Point
Someone,
by Chetan Bhagat. It had just come out at the cinema and was enjoying rave reviews, so she needed to see it to keep up with the chat at her bridge games.

‘Come, darling!’ she urged, waving a frayed map of the railways in my face. ‘This will do.’

‘It’s from 2002.’

‘Doesn’t matter, all your tracks will look the same.’

‘I’m not sure that’s a very good idea,’ I argued, as Passepartout glanced up over a copy of
In Spite of the Gods
with a look of disbelief.

‘Darling, after one train I guarantee you people will come home.’ She tried to stifle a giggle, then gave up and howled with laughter into her dupatta.

With an outdated map of the railways under one arm, a stack of books under the other and a growing sense of nausea, we left Landmark and embarked upon our first Hindi-film experience.

Sweetie and her friends had arranged to meet for a catch-up. A cinema seemed a strange place to do this; the Madras Club or perhaps a Café Coffee Day would have been a more suitable choice. And yet it seemed that everyone else had had the same idea. Throughout the first half hour members of the audience chatted away to one another, and a few phone calls were made in the row in front. Nobody batted an eyelid. As Kareena Kapoor came floating onto the screen in all her pale-skinned, green-eyed beauty, the audience cheered, clapped and whistled, a few phones reappearing to take photographs. During the interval people disappeared for coffee, spied more friends and began to climb across the seats for a gossip over ice cream. My Hindi was basic at best, but both Passepartout and I had followed the pantomime nature of the film with relative ease until the cast switched from delivering a baby via a webcam, to appearing in Leh, involved in a discussion over mistaken identity. The film ended with a song and dance rendition of the theme song,
Aal Izz Well!
and we filed out of the cinema hoping that the song title would set a precedent for the journey to come.

The following evening was the eve of departure. I was jittery as hell, nibbling my nails and nipping back and forth to the loo in a panic. I sat down on the lid and glanced around the marble bathroom, taking a mental photograph. It would be a while before I would see toilet roll holders, embroidered hand towels and old copies of
Femina
. But the more pressing concern was Passepartout. During the flight over I had brought up the kiss.

‘Can’t blame a guy for trying,’ he grinned.

‘Look, we’ve got four months together and a tough job ahead of us, I don’t think this is a sensible route to go down.’

‘Don’t worry I’ll behave,’ he promised, fiddling with the seat back.

I raised an eyebrow.

‘I promise,’ he added, before going back to his book.

Since then he had said no more and I now decided it was no longer worth worrying about. I washed my face, swiped a couple of toilet rolls for the journey and went off to find Passepartout who was in the kitchen, entertaining the staff with photos of Mishko, his cat. I did not have the heart to tell him that they were more amused by him, than Mishko.

We spread out the outdated map across the dining table as a warm fog of mutton biryani and saffron drifted in from the kitchen. The map gave itself up to a session of slow but determined acupuncture as we stuck pins into areas with subjects of interest: the solar eclipse in Kanyakumari; a classical dance festival in Khajuraho; the rat temple in Deshnok; the world’s first hospital train in Madhya Pradesh; commuter trains in Mumbai; the Osho ashram in Pune; temples in South India; tea estates in Assam; and Dwarka, Udhampur and Ledo—the western, northern and easternmost tips of the railways. Just as I poked a pin into Delhi to mark the railway museum, the door opened and a member of staff ushered in my old school friend Bobby, followed by his entourage.