Around India in 80 Trains (40 page)

I speared a few pieces of chicken in white wine. We were sitting in The Big Chill café in Khan Market, beneath a series of framed film posters, jammed alongside one another, paying homage to
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
,
The Graduate
and
La Dolce Vita
. The restaurant was filled with couples linking fingers under the table, slurping from shared malt milkshakes, and bored girls stabbing at Blackberrys. I looked up at the still from
Amélie
where an impish Audrey Tautou held up a silver spoon, as though poised to smack Passepartout on the head. He had summoned me to offer an apology. Since his arrival on the Lifeline Express we had not acknowledged the breakdown in Chandigarh. Expecting a squash rally of accusations, I found none.

‘I’m sorry I made things so personal.’

I folded my arms and nodded, unconvinced by the apology.

‘I don’t really understand why you persisted down that route when you knew how much it upset me. We had a job to do and you seemed hell-bent on just ruining it.’

He closed his eyes and nodded in agreement. ‘I know, and I’m sorry. There’s nothing I hate more than having to admit being wrong.’

He sat staring at me expectantly.

‘Okay, apology accepted.’ I glanced at his wrist where a slim steel bangle sat.

‘Are you wearing a kara?!’

‘Yes. After you left I went on up to Amritsar where I met these three Sikh lads. They took me off to their village for a couple of days and took care of me.’ He grinned. ‘They even tied me a turban.’

‘And now you’re wearing a kara? That’s not really very in keeping with your beliefs, or lack thereof?’

‘They gave it to me. And besides, theirs is actually a culture.’

I looked down at my chicken and said nothing. After Amritsar he had made his way to Varanasi and Haridwar then spent time in Kushinagar. Whether or not his choice of holy sites was coincidental, he had certainly tempered since Chandigarh.

The rest of the afternoon was spent traipsing around Khan Market in search of a book Dr Agarwal had recommended called
Scoop!
, a collection of eyewitness accounts and insider stories tracing back to Partition. Fittingly, Khan Market’s shops and residences had been built by the Ministry of Rehabilitation and given to migrants at the time of Partition. It had flourished into one of the most expensive shopping districts in India, favoured by expats, the upper class and cool kids. It housed independent shops selling incense, embroidered stationery and jewellery, alongside Nike and Benetton outlets. Coffee shops, Subway, Japanese restaurants and a Fab India spanned several floors. After little luck we came upon BahriSons bookseller, a booklover’s dream. The shop had opened at the time of Partition and was crammed with crick-necked customers thumbing the rows of creased spines. It had the warm allure of a coffee shop on a rainy day. An assistant clambered up a ladder and much to my delight, descended with dust on his jumper and a copy of
Scoop!

It was too late for Passepartout to reserve a ticket to accompany me that evening, so with my book in hand, I gave him a hug, agreeing to meet him in Udhampur and left him hunting for
The
Greatest Show on Earth
.

Three men were sharing my compartment to Jammu. One lay in the side berth flicking through a copy of
Outlook
and two sat by the window, one reading, the other finishing a container of bhindi and parathas. As train 64 jerked and began to move out of the station a rat appeared in the aisle. It went up on its hind legs, its wrists hanging limply, and looked at me. The rats at the temple in Deshnok had not bothered me, but this one did. Those rats were supposed to be there. This one was not. Madras had a lot to answer for when it came to my phobias, and my dislike of rats stemmed from another incident that had taken place in our Besant Nagar flat.

One afternoon, after finding chunks of Modern Bakery bread rimmed with teeth marks, my mum realised we had rats and enlisted the help of our maid, Devi, to capture them. Devi’s normal ritual was to arrive half an hour late, citing a detour to the temple as her excuse, then fall asleep under the dining table having barely swept one bedroom. Put out, she lumbered to her feet while I stood on the dining table watching them pull the sofa away from the wall. A rat shot out and darted into the record collection before Devi clamped a dustbin on top of it.

Through a combination of telepathy and hollering across balconies—a form of communication unique to the Madras maids’ cartel—my grandma’s maid heard about the rat and came over to inspect it. One-Eyed-Mary appeared at the front door, her eye rolling in its socket like a marble, panting ‘Show me! Show me!’ and salivating through saffron-coloured teeth. Lifting the bin, Mary allowed the vigilant rat to shoot out and hide behind the fridge. Devi, exerting more energy in one movement than in the six months she had worked with us, walloped Mary with her broom while my mum waited for the two to finish and help with the recapture. Feeling guilty, Mary pushed everyone aside and crouched down by the fridge. Suddenly she yelped with delight. She turned around, her eye swirling with delirium, the rat thrashing around in a bulge in her petticoat. Needless to say the rat bit her and ended up dunked in a bucket of water while Mary ended up in hospital.

I lifted my feet off the floor as the rat strolled about sniffing at puffed rice, before disappearing under my seat. The gentleman finishing his dinner threw the box under the seat and picked grains from his teeth.

‘You are travelling to Jammu?’ he asked.

‘Yes, but I’m not really stopping, I’m carrying on up to Udhampur.’

‘But Udhampur is very small, you have friends there?’

‘No, I’m travelling around the country by train and wanted to get to each end of the railways.’

‘You have been to Kanyakumari?’

‘Yes, I started in the South, then went to Dwarka and am now heading to Udhampur, then across to Ledo in Assam.’

‘How many journeys have you taken?’

‘I think this is number 64?’

‘What is your profession?’

‘I’m a journalist.’

‘Oh, I am also a journalist!’ He handed me a card saying NEWS BEAURO CHEIF that I tucked into the back of my book.

‘If you will excuse me I will retire, I have had a very long day,’ he said, climbing up to his berth.

I stole his space by the window and leant against the glass watching little more than the reflection of our compartment against the navy sky. Silhouettes of towns whipped by at longer and longer intervals the further we pushed out of Delhi. The occasional wail and jolt of passing trains snapped my eyes open and I went back to my book when the gentleman sitting opposite me looked up.

‘From where do you hail?’

‘England.’

‘I can see that, but where?’

‘I live in London.’

‘I read mathematics at Cambridge.’

‘Oh, which college?’

‘King’s.’

‘Gorgeous chapel.’

‘Your Stephen Fry’s alma mater.’

‘Didn’t he go to Queen’s?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sure there was an episode of
Shooting Stars
where he says he went to …’

‘Were you at Cambridge?’

‘No, I read French at Leeds.’

‘I have not heard of it. My son is at university in London,’ he continued. ‘It has changed too much.’

‘In what way?’ I asked.

‘I can see that all the class has now gone from England. Their colloquial speech, their lack of finesse. It is shocking. They are no better than the riff-raff we used to see on the streets in Cambridge.’

‘When were you last there?’

He darkened and turned to volume as his preferred weapon of defence. ‘Cambridge had a uniqueness you won’t find in your other universities …’

My lids began to droop as he continued his trip down memory lane.

‘… the punter was a wonderful …’

‘Oh that’s still a great pub,’ I perked up. ‘It does really good scallops and black pudding.’

‘I was talking about the sport. This establishment of which you are talking must be something new.’

Sunday afternoon punting was about as much of a sport as sunbathing, but I allowed him to continue. In addition to their penchant for arguing, Indians love a good monologue and I soon slipped into a coma of boredom and nodded off. When I woke he had made up his bed and gone to sleep so I shook out the contents of my own paper bag and began tucking in the sheets. Every time I pulled one corner another came out and I held the sheet down with one knee while trying to shove the edges down the back of the berth. Aware that I was being watched, I hid the ridges with the blanket, like a 6-year-old cramming toys behind a cupboard door.

‘You have travelled on 64 trains and you still do not know how to make up a bed.’

The man in the side berth signalled for me to stand in the aisle as he tugged the sheets off my bed and started again. With Mary Poppins’ proficiency he nipped, tucked and smoothed the sheets into place. All my bed lacked was an After Eight mint on the pillow. Taking up his magazine, he sat down, then scrutinised the windows and fan which had begun to rattle unnervingly.

‘I thought Rajdhanis were supposed to be new?’ I asked.

‘They are but even then some of these are cut and paste jobs. The compartment will be from a mail train while the carriage might be new.’

I nodded in agreement, wondering how he knew. He eyed me suspiciously.

‘You know how to calculate the age of a carriage?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know what the numbers painted on the outside mean?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know how to tell engines apart?’

‘No.’

He put down the magazine, laid his glasses on top and leant forward.

‘Do you know anything?’

‘Erm, probably not.’

He exhaled with poorly disguised disgust. ‘You have travelled on more of the Indian Railways than most Indians will ever do and yet you can’t make a bed and you have learnt nothing. May I?’ He turned to the back of my logbook and began to sketch a train. ‘See, on the outside of every carriage there are five numbers painted.’

I had noticed them from the start but assumed they simply provided insider information for train manufacturers and had never bothered to ask anyone what they meant for fear of a fabricated response.

‘Let’s say the number is 88432, that means the carriage was built in 1988. Then look at the last three digits. If they lie between 401 and 600 you have a general 2nd class coach. Subtract 401 from 432. This means that it was the 31
^st
coach built that year. Any carriage whose last three digits lie between 201and 400 is a sleeper class carriage. So if the number painted on the outside is 97312, it was made in 1997.

‘And so if I then take 201 from 312, that makes it the 111
^st
sleeper class coach made in 1997?’

‘Correct.’

It was like learning a secret handshake.

‘You’ll find that in one long train there will be a whole mix of different numbers. It’s a good way of choosing the carriage most likely to have nice new insides.’

Wishing this gem had been in my possession from the outset I thanked him and closed my book. Arun was from Cochin. As a child he had lived by a railway track, waking to the sound of horns and watching from the windows as trains clattered past. His parents had been in the Army and had often been transferred from one city to another: constant uprooting meant that he and the railways had become firm friends.

‘Now do you know how to read the actual train numbers?’ Arun asked.

Recollecting the chat with Mandovi Rick on the Konkan Railway, I recounted that the final digit changed for return trains, trains beginning with ‘2’ were normally the fastest and that the first number often indicated the region. Appeased, he bowed his head. ‘And a number made up of only three digits generally indicates passenger trains. But I’m sure you have not bothered with those.’

‘About 14 actually. And I’m counting half a dozen Mumbai commuters in that.’

‘Oh, not bad.’

Indignant, I tied up my logbook and clambered up to bed as he unrolled his sheets and disappeared to the toilets to change.

Jammu Tawi station had the bleakness of Blackburn in November. The skies hung low in rumpled puffs of grey and rain stippled the platform as I sat waiting for the connection to Udhampur. Even the dogs looked bored with each other’s back ends and lay on their sides staring at the wall. Every 10 minutes fellow passengers peered up at the signs, checked watches and murmured to one another before eventually dispersing. It turned out that the train was delayed by an hour. In normal circumstances I would have busied myself in the city, but this being India, it was likely that the train would arrive ahead of schedule and cause fits of panic. I made my way towards the station restaurant and passed the time with my copy of
Scoop!
and the best omelette sandwich to be found in any of India’s railway stations. Before I had mopped up the last blob of ketchup the passenger train hissed and creaked into the station and waiting passengers began to hook themselves to the handrails before it had drawn to a halt. Foreign phones—which included any purchased outside the state of Jammu and Kashmir—did not work, as a security measure against militant activity so there was no way I could contact Passepartout.