Around India in 80 Trains (32 page)

He shook his head.

Even if it was in refusal, I had come round to the Indian way of not taking ‘no’ for an answer. I got on my hands and knees, crawled under the hatch at the side and began to thumb the dusty towers against the wall. Aside from a range of get-rich-quick manuals penned by Americans wearing veneers, the English selection was an homage to manic depression:
Why Men Lie and Women Cry
,
By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, Veronika Decides to Die
and
The Inheritance of Loss
. Having finished crying in Chandigarh I was pretty certain I did not want to die, so Kiran Desai was now my new travel buddy. I held it up to the boy.

‘How much?’

He broke into a smile. ‘500.’

I turned it over to where the original price read Rs 495 and a chunk of pages fell out. I looked at him and he grinned sheepishly.

‘200.’

Handing over
`
200 I flicked through the pages whose lines arced and occasionally trailed off the edges. It was a photocopied version and I hoped that Kiran would forgive me. A hardback edition sat on my bookshelf at home, so I tempered my guilt with the belief that the legitimate purchase cancelled out the fraudulent.

Not long after leaving Delhi, the train rolled without stopping through a station called Subzi Mandi. A bank of mud, ankle-deep with plastic and paper, stretched from the tracks up to the roadside, where two men squatted next to each other engrossed in conversation. A few metres away another pair was squatting side by side, sharing a joke. A circle of women had also gathered with their saris wound up past their knees and were resting on their haunches, chatting and fending off a group of piglets scampering around their feet.

‘Ablutions,’ my neighbour explained over the top of his newspaper, seeing my nose and palms pressed against the glass. He was right: this patch of land was the communal shithouse where the local residents came to make their morning offerings. Instead of getting together at the pub after work, they displayed an admirable grasp on time management and had turned a necessity into a social gathering: a pit stop for exchanging gossip and news. Counting sheep in the Derbyshire Dales was my favourite ‘timepass’ as a child, but in the absence of spring lambs I began to count the buttocks winking in the sunshine, a salute to the posh passengers munching on their cornflakes and hot milk. As the train crawled by, I counted 87 people dotted along the carpet of rubbish, which brimmed with piglets foraging through the poo. It gave a whole new meaning to my ‘log’ book, in which I made a note, along with a reminder not to eat Indian bacon.

The early morning start began to take its toll and with my faecal fascination now over, I dozed off against the window, waking as my neighbour shook my shoulder.

‘Excuse me ma’am, we are coming to Amritsar.’

I thanked him, cringing at the line of drool that had wound its way down my chin.

‘Ma’am be careful, if you sleep people will take your things.’

In 48 train journeys, neither Passepartout nor I had suffered theft of any kind. We had observed fellow passengers securing briefcases and suitcases with what appeared to be bicycle chains, and equally observed their horror as we stored rucksacks under the seats with little more than a half-hearted kick and a leap of faith.

‘To where you are going?’ he asked.

‘The Golden Temple and probably the Wagah border ceremony if I have time.’

‘Oh that is very funny.’

‘What is?’

‘Wagah border. It is like your Monty Python man.’

I knew little about the ceremony, and had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but I smiled anyway and shook my head.

‘John Cleese,’ he said.

‘Yes, John Cleese was part of Monty Python,’ I replied, in the tone of a primary school teacher.

He said nothing, but looked at me strangely. As the train drew to a halt he whipped out a comb from his breast pocket, scraped his side parting back into place and smiled at me, a piece of cornflakes stuck in his teeth. He picked up his briefcase and made his way off the train as I stretched and hunted about for my flip-flops.

Amritsar, like other holy cities in India, danced to a different beat. On the surface it resembled any big city: buses belched grime and grease; dogs hobbled and scratched; steam rose from karahis hissing on the pavement; cows lived off a diet of Amir Khan posters; rubbish reeked and women with umbrellas picked their way between potholes, dodging cyclists and sunlight amid the clanging, yelling, pushing and selling. But beneath that layer the city throbbed with the thrill and excitement that came with pilgrimage. The word alone was enough to incite the kind of delirium that ‘road trip!’ brought to American college students.

On the approach to the Golden Temple a carnival thronging with turbans was moving and shaking its way through the streets while men handed out handkerchiefs for visitors to cover their heads, and drums beat out a welcome between trumpets and horns. Exchanging my bag and shoes for a small token, I waded through the footbath, adding more muck to my feet, and descended the stairs to the enclosure.

Rising from the middle of a lake of water was the gurdwara, gleaming like a treasure chest recovered from the seabed. Its gold-plated walls and turrets fired back flashes of sunlight that skipped across the ripples in the water, which was said to contain amrit, or immortal nectar. The lake looked inviting until I noticed algae floating on the surface like a layer of lime marmalade. Sikh men, stripped to the waist, bathed at its edges or sat cross-legged with their friends and families, basking in the aura radiating from their holy shrine. Despite the hundreds of men, women and children of all faiths circling the lake, no more than a murmur was audible beneath the music playing through loudspeakers. Overhead the sun was at the peak of its rage, searing my neck and arms as heat bounced back and forth between the whitewashed walls of the compound. I tried to tail the crowd around the lake, scalding the soles of my feet, but gave up within minutes as hunger and heat exhaustion got the better of me.

Stepping into the passages between the walls, I moved into the shadows and pressed myself to the stone, cold against my palms and cheeks, until the smell of food and the din of ravenous pilgrims drew me towards the langar. Here, free vegetarian food was served daily to both Sikhs and non-Sikhs to ensure that equality was maintained, in keeping with Sikh philosophy. Diners of all colours, ages, shapes and sizes sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the floors as voluntary servers ladled out dal and flipped steaming chapattis onto metal plates. An average of 100,000 people were fed here every day. Daunted by the clamour of crowds, I lingered for a few moments behind a pillar, watching friends and families, then went to collect my bag as an overwhelming sense of loneliness kicked me in the stomach.

An elderly gentleman with a beard that reached his waist took my token and handed over my backpack. As I pulled on the straps he gestured to his mouth with bunched fingers. Shoulders sagging, red-faced and with an upper lip running like a tap, I shook my head.

‘No, I’ll eat later, I’m not hungry now,’ I lied.

He raised a palm and reached down to behind the bench separating us, then stood up holding a metal jug and bowl. He began to pour rajma into the bowl and it splattered over the sides as he produced a foil packet and began to unroll a pair of rotis. It was his own lunch.

‘Come.’

The gentleman gestured for me to climb over the bench and I shook my head.

‘Oh, no, thank you, that’s your lunch.’

Ignoring me, he began to clear a patch of bags from the floor then laid down a sheet of newspaper. He put down the food and waved me over. I stepped over the bench and took off my bag as he turned the table fan towards me.

‘You must eat,’ he said, sending a colleague down to bring up some water.

I bit into a roti and started to cry.

Meanwhile, visitors had bunched on the staircase waiting to hand in crates, suitcases, packets and boxes. As they filed past, they stared at me sitting cross-legged on the obituaries pages amid a mountain of backpacks. As the gentleman went back to bag duty, another man in a grey safari suit came upstairs.

‘I’m Daljinder,’ he said, wading through the bags and boxes, placing a steel bowl of water on the ground.

‘And he’s Lali,’ he said, pointing to the first gentleman.

Daljinder and Lali were both volunteers who manned the ‘leggez house’. He sat on the edge of the bench.

‘You are Punjabi?’

‘No, I’m from London. My mum’s family is from Hyderabad and my dad’s from Chennai.’

‘But Indian only?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are studying?’

‘No, I’m a journalist, but I’m riding the railways for a few months.’

‘Oh! Where are you going to next?’

‘I’m heading south to join the Golden Chariot.’

‘I have a niece in London, you may know her.’ He scrolled through his phone, ‘you must call her when you go home’, he said, showing me a number that I typed into my phone.

‘So you have seen the temple then?’ he asked.

‘Yes. It’s really beautiful. But what I like most is that everyone is welcomed in.’

‘This is Sikh culture. You can be president or pauper and it is the same.’

‘How often do you volunteer?’

‘I am retired now so I come here most days.’ He refilled the water bowl.

‘Now from here where are you going?’

‘To the Wagah border.’

‘You finish your food and I will take you to find a proper taxi.’

Once I had finished my rajma and rotis and stopped sweating and crying, Daljinder led me to the front of the temple where he put me in a taxi to the Wagah border, calling to check that I had arrived and again that night to make sure I had returned safely to Amritsar.

Wagah is a village that since Partition has lain half in India and half in Pakistan. It sits on the Radcliffe Line, the border between the two countries, where tourists now gather every evening before sunset to watch a 45-minute flag-lowering ceremony that culminates with the slamming of the border gates. It is like the Berlin Wall of the East.

A roar ripped through the air as I squeezed between video cameras, elbows and banners and hauled myself onto a wall to watch the ceremony that was already underway. On the Indian side of the gates an army of mothers with children danced on the road to
Jai Ho
waving arms and blow-dried curls, while packs of men wearing flags as capes pounded fists, their cheeks puffed out by whistles. Western tourists sat along the front rows, knees together, clapping along. On the other side of the gates the Pakistani crowd appeared to be partaking in a memorial service. Not a face flinched. Green flags wilted like dead leaves. As a furious chorus of ‘Hindustan Zindabad!’ came to an end the revellers collapsed in their seats and the Pakistani crowd erupted. It was their turn.

Just below me an Indian man began to thump his chest and chant:

‘Hindustan Zindabad! Hindustan Zindabad! Hindustan Zindabad!’

From the back of the crowd he ploughed his way forward, shoving children out of the way, then swam through bodies to get to the front. To my left a man wearing an ill-fitting toupée shook his head.