Sunrise with Seamonsters (55 page)

The opinion of the Indian in the hill station is that the plains are disorderly and crime-ridden. It is believed that as soon as they are above three or four thousand feet people tend to behave themselves. "People on the plains indulge in bad behavior, indiscipline and mischief," a man at
Simla station told me. He was a train Guard, but he was full of complaints about lowland vandalism and tardiness and "mischief—especially political mischief" on the railways.

"You're very frank, sir," I said.

"It is because I have resigned," he replied.

The residents of Simla are often visited by relatives. "They always say, 'I'm coming for two or three days,' but after three weeks they're still here. And there is something about this air that excites them and makes them difficult."

The man speaking was an army colonel. He had a remedy for unwelcome guests. He made lists of sights that were not to be missed in Simla. Each one was a day's walk from his house and it was usually at the top of a steep hill. After a few days of this sightseeing the starch was taken out of his guests and they were fairly glad when it was time to go.

The most knowledgeable railway buff I met in Simla was a man who, over a period of years, had traveled all over India on trains visiting race tracks. He seldom stayed overnight. He would hurry to Lucknow on a night train, gamble all day at the track, and then catch the sleeper to Calcutta and do the same thing. I said it seemed a difficult thing to do, all that railroading. No, he said, the difficult thing was putting on a sad face and hailing a tonga and then riding Third Class so that no potential thief would guess that he had five thousand rupees of winnings in his pocket.

I glided down from Simla in the cozy little blue train to Kalka and then in the late evening boarded the sleeper for Delhi. It was air-conditioned, and the bed was made—starched sheets and a soft pillow. There was no better way to Delhi.

At seven the next morning I looked out the window and saw the outskirts of Delhi, simmering under the grey lid of the sky.

At Old Delhi Station, it seemed to me that the unluckiest railwayman in this season of heat was a fireman on a steam locomotive. Rambling around the station yard I discovered an even more exhausting job: boilermaker. The boilermaker is essentially a welder, but because he deals with all aspects of the boiler he is often required to use his welding torch inside the boiler or the firebox.

Today it was 103° at the Old Delhi loco shed, but Suresh Baboo, a boilermaker, crawled out of a locomotive's firebox to tell me that he was not deterred by a little thing like heat.

He was a railwayman Grade Two and earned one thousand rupees a month ($100) of which four hundred was his "Dearness Allowance" ("Because in Delhi, food and living are very dear").

Was this enough to live on? Not in Delhi. "We are asking for an increase in the Dearness," said Suresh Baboo.

"For some reason—probably because of the British tradition—morale among railwaymen is very high," said Mr K. T. V. Raghavan, Chairman of the Indian Railway Board. His position in the hierarchy of the Indian Civil Service shows the importance of the railway in India: he is the second most senior civil servant in the country.

Mr. Raghavan impressed me by speaking of the special nature of the railway in India. It was not merely a way of going to and from work, but rather in India a solution to the complex demands of the family. Birth, death, marriage, illness, and religious festivals all required witnesses and rituals which implied a journey home. Indians, Mr Raghavan said, only
seemed
to be restless travelers; in fact, most of them were merely showing piety and carrying out religious or domestic duties.

In Delhi I found the best organized railway station in India. This was Hazrat Nizamuddin Station, just south of the city and a short walk from Humayun's Tomb.

There were flowers and shrubs in pots on the platform, and every day on the orders of the Stationmaster, Mr G. L. Suri, ant powder was sprinkled along the walls. Mr Suri proudly took me on a tour of the station. He hadn't been recommended to me by the Railway Board—I had simply stopped on one of the one hundred and eighty trains that pass through each day and noticed how unusual it looked. How was it possible to keep a station so clean in the hot season?

Mr. Suri said, "I do my duty—I get satisfaction from it. Sometimes I work sixteen hours a day. I do not accept excuses." He nodded and added softly, "And I am very tough."

The Janata-Madras Express passes through Hazrat Nizamuddin Station, and of course it stops, because "Janata" means "People" and the People's Express stops everywhere. It is probably the slowest express in the world.

It would be several days before this long rumbling steam train arrived in Madras. It was cheap—all second class—but it was not really for long-distance passengers; it went fourteen hundred miles, stopping at every station—just like a country bus—and most people only went a few miles.

In India, it is easy to tell the long-distance travelers. They are heavily laden, and always carry a big steel trunk. At railway stations in India one sees the family grouped around the trunk—they sit on it, sleep beside it, use it for a table, and when their train draws in they hire a skinny man to wrestle it on board.

"My mother was typical," a man told me on this train. "She carried all her jewelry and all her saris—thirty or forty of them. She brought glasses to drink out of, cooking utensils, plates and the trays we call
thali.
She
took the essential household. All Indians do this. The trouble was that my mother used to take all these things even if she was only going away for a day or so."

It seemed that the trunk was an Indian's best defense against being robbed, contaminated, or stranded: it made them completely portable and very safe. At any moment, using the trunk, an Indian could set up house.

"You're not going far," I was reminded.

No, only to Agra—six hours on this slow beast; but six hours was nothing on an Indian train, where some people might say, "When do I arrive? Let me see. Today is Thursday and tomorrow is..."

I was sitting across from Bansilal Bajaj, who was on home leave from Abu Dhabi—every two years he got two months' leave, and he spent a month of that on Indian Railways, going up and down the country.

"In Abu Dhabi all we do is work. I am in the catering and cleaning business, but I am no more than a machine. When I come back to India I am human again."

It was a lovely evening, very clear, just after a heavy rainstorm of the monsoon. Now there was not a cloud in the sky, and in the west it was the color of a tropical sea—greeny-blue, reflected in perfectly still pools and paddy fields. There was a sweetness in the air and for a number of miles no people—just color and empty space and darting birds.

Just after dark the lights in the train failed, and we traveled clattering through pitch-blackness, with the steam engine puffing and wheezing, and the whistle blowing off-key, and the only lights were the sparks from the smokestack, sailing past the window like fireflies.

It was almost nine by the time we arrived in Agra. The town is nothing. The Agra Fort is substantial. Akbar's Mausoleum of Sikandra has character, and the Moti Masjid (the "Pearl Mosque") has personality; but the Taj Mahal is something else. Just looking at it you are certain that you will never forget it. It is not merely a visual experience, but an emotional one—its pure symmetry imparts such strong feeling; and it is a spiritual experience, too; for the Taj Mahal is alone among buildings I have seen. It is not merely lovely; it looks as if it has a soul.

The Ganga-Yamuna Express to Varanasi was like a certain kind of Asiatic prison cell.

It was a long night. Dawn broke at Kanpur, and two hours later at Lucknow it was very sunny and bright, a noontime heat, though it was hardly half-past seven in the morning.

All the paddy fields were brim full. The rains were dangerously strong
in Hardwar and had flooded Delhi, but here beside the line of the Ganga-Yamuna Express they had guaranteed a great rice crop and had given the landscape a serene lithographed look—the palms very still, the buffaloes obedient, the Indians up to their shins in water. An emblematic mother weeding vegetables with her infant in the middle of another field under the shade of a big black umbrella.

For miles, for hours—for days on these plains—you see nothing else at this time of year: men, women, and children planting, or plowing or tending the crop, and all of them working under the blazing sun and burned as black as their buffaloes.

The villages were mud huts and grass roofs, like a glimpse of central Africa in the province of Uttar Pradesh, except that in the center of every frail village was always a substantial stone temple. None of these villages were sign-posted but sometimes a tiny station or a halt displayed the name. One sun-baked station in the middle of the hot plain was Rudanli. Three horse-drawn tongas were waiting at the platform, and some people looked hopefully up from their tin trunks. The Ganga-Yamuna Express did not stop.

We were going the long way to Varanasi, taking "the Faizabad Loop," via Ayodhya where monkeys on the platform sat on the inkblots of shade. We passed through Shahganj, where rice planters stood scanning the blue sky for clouds; and then after Jaunpur we joined the main line.

Varanasi Station has the contours of a Hindu temple, built in the Mauryan style, and like a temple it is filled with holy men and pilgrims. It is also full of sacred cows. The cows at Varanasi Station are wise to the place—they get water at the drinking fountains, food near the refreshment stalls, shelter along the platforms, and exercise beside the tracks; they also know how to use the cross-over bridges and can climb up and down the steepest stairs.

"We are installing cow-catchers," the Station Superintendent told me—but he did not mean the traditional ones, on the engines, he meant fences to prevent the cows from entering the station.

The flocks of goats at Varanasi Station are on their way to the Ganges to have their throats cut and be dumped into the river as a sacrifice; the beggars are testing the piety of the pilgrims; and those small narrow bundles that are part of so many of the travelers' luggage are in fact human corpses, headed for the cremation fires on the ghats. Because nothing that is holy in India can be regarded as dirty, holy Varanasi with its fifteen hundred temples is one of the filthiest of Indian cities and positively stinking with sanctity. I met an Indian medical student who had just arrived in Varanasi. He was on his way to the Ganges to take his ritual bath. He said he was definitely planning to bathe in the Ganges, among the dead goats and monkeys and corpses of beggars who died at the
station and were taken in rickshaws to the river and thrown in uncremated.

"Oh, yes," the medical student said. "I will immerse myself."

"What about the health aspect?"

He said, "It is a question of mind over matter."

From a distance in the early morning, Varanasi looks wonderful, and the most glorious sight of it is from the Howrah Mail as it crosses the Dufferin Bridge which spans the Ganges just east of the city.

The Howrah Mail, one of India's best trains, leaves Varanasi at five-thirty in the morning, just as the passengers from Delhi are yawning and peering out the window and getting their first glimpses of the holy city. And the people waiting on the platform at Varanasi are watching the train with admiration, because this train represents luxury—it has three chair cars, and sleeping cars, and a pantry car, where food is cooked and dished up in trays which are distributed around the train by waiters. The Howrah Mail is efficiently air-conditioned; it is famous for being fast and is nearly always on time. From the high vantage point of the bridge the whole populous riverbank and all the ghats can be seen gilded in the light of the rising sun, and its splendour is intensified because the distance blurs the city's decay, and at this time of day—the early morning—the river is filled with people washing, swimming, and generally going about their prayers.

From here—the outskirts of Varanasi all the way to Calcutta—the land is waterlogged and fertile, an endless rice field. At noon the train stops at Gaya, where Buddha received enlightenment.

Gaya also marks the beginning of a very strange landscape. Sudden single hills are thrust out of the flatness like massive dinosaurs petrified on the flat Bihari plain; and other hills are like pyramids, and still more like slag heaps. They don't seem to belong to any range of hills and have a comic plopped-down look.

It was wet and cool and jungly four hours later when we entered West Bengal, and when the train stopped some blind beggars got on. The Ticket Examiner asked them to beg in a different part of the train and they meekly agreed.

This Ticket Examiner was a woman—one of three or four women who work on the Howrah Mail. "And there are many women working on Indian Railways." Her name was Ollie Francis. "I was a Christian," she said. "But then I married Mr Ningam and so I became a Hindu. It was not an arranged marriage. I married for love."

She had seven children, the eldest eighteen, the youngest five. She missed them when she made this Calcutta run, but her relatives helped look after them. She had worked for the railways for twenty years.

What Ollie liked best about the Howrah Mail was its speed—less than fourteen hours from Varanasi to Calcutta. As the train drew into Howrah Station, the daylight was extinguished by smoke, and rain mixed with
fog; frightening numbers of people were making their way through the mud and the lamplight.

Howrah is very large; but like Calcutta it is in a state of decay. Enormous and noisy, a combination of grandeur and desolation, the wonder is that it still works. Calcutta is one of the cities of the world that I associate with the future. This is how New York City could look, I think, after a terrible disaster.

The monsoon that beautifies and enriches the countryside had made Calcutta ugly and almost uninhabitable. Rain in India gives all buildings, especially modern ones, a look of senility. The streets were flooded, there were stalled cars everywhere, and people waded among the drowned dogs.