Most enjoyable journey in India.

govannon

The boat trip from bombay to panjim. we missed the connection to goa due to window problems on a lufthansa flight in 1986. i will never never forget that magical trip. clear blue sky the sea so calm, our first thali (was not super) and of course the overcrowded upper deck. what a great expierence

pibikay

Coimbatore to Kaodaikanal via Palani.The Palani-Kodai stretch is very beautifull

Keshava

So many journeys it's impossible to pick one. But the first one is always the most memorable. This is a much edited excerpt from my diary.

After exchanging addresses I wished Andy a fond farewell and made for New Smelly Station where I was quickly overwhelmed by the confusion of the platform at night with continuous tinny-voiced announcements echoing around in Hindi, the omnivorous babel of simultaneous Hindustani, Punjabi and Urdu at top volume, red-vested porters, pants rolled up to their knees, hustling immense steamer trunks down the platform, magazine and newspaper men calling out lists of available publications, vendors of fried foods, barefoot cigarette boys and screeching chai-wallahs pacing maniacally up and down the platform with chai glasses rattling around in battered metal baskets.

On the dimly lit platform passenger manifests are difficult to read, but with help, I find my compartment four minutes before the train is scheduled to depart. I ask the two grandfatherly men in my compartment to keep an eye on my bags and then run out on to the platform to buy two bottles of mineral water which I’ve been consuming at an amazing rate, amazing because at home I so seldom drink water. When the ticket-wallah enters the compartment to verify our tickets he is wearing a worsted wool suit, pale gray shirt and black socks with no shoes. My traveling companions are the two pleasant grandpa types and a severe looking Sikh with very little to say. The Sikh manages to look very imposing even wearing a powder blue salwar and a pair of those effeminate looking tennis sneakers favored by doddering Times Square theater matrons. The train is barely out of the station when one of the older men having finished his chai, tosses the plastic cup out the window along with the ball of tinfoil in which his lunch had been packed. Sensing my lack of ease over his littering he says, “Don’t worry yourself, I am not a polluter. Nothing thrown out onto the tracks goes to waste. The poor can usefully recycle anything!” Out in the passageway two small boys, ignoring their ammah’s command to behave, run back and forth past our compartment making comical gestures and charming the hell out of the old men who wave back and smile at the high-energy kids. Our compartment is awash with sunlight and country smells of cut grass and cattle. During a quiet moment when conversation has abated, I begin to doze. Then through the open windows comes the startling roar of a southbound train crashing through the sonic envelope; a thump of hot, diesel choked air shoves through the compartment as the Howrah Express goes by horns blaring, eating up track, bearing down on New Delhi.

As yet the heat hasn’t been too bad, but I’m still cotton-brained from jet lag and wishing the overhead fans weren’t so ineffective; a pointless wish. When the dhaba-wallah comes through the car taking orders for dinner I realize the only provisions I’ve brought along are two bottles of water and some packets of cashew biscuits. I haven’t a clue as to whether railway food is safe, but I suppose I have to risk it. It’s that or no dinner.

Outside in bright sundrenched fields women are drying out twenty-five-foot lengths of peacock blue and electric green sari silk on the parched yellow grass. Large white oxen graze along the trackside. At the next stop an elderly couple gets on and take seats next to the grandpas. The husband is amiable and talkative; his gently authoritative manner makes him a prime candidate for the sobriquet Baba. His wife is not certain her old man should be associating with the likes of a dubious no-caste rocker like me — definitely disapproves. Interesting dynamic here. For a time at least, he is quiet. The sardarji silent, stoic, sits to my right with arms folded like a sentry at a gurudwara.

The train slows and for a long stretch, travels no faster than twenty miles per hour. Within an hour I spot five three-legged cows among the mud huts and the trackside shitters. The sardarji having sat rigid as a mannequin for the last hour rises to his feet and folds the bunks up to the wall allowing more head room. As he takes his seat again he starts a tentative conversation with Baba, whose last name is Mr. Birla; I sense a more convivial ambiance beginning to emerge. At the next stop the grandpas get off. I watch them stop on the platform as they inspect, and then reject, food from vendors whose push carts are piled high with fried foods resembling the fare offered at Lower East Side cuchifrito stands. Beggars pass by repeating their mantras of wanting — chai-wallahs call out Chai-ahh! Chai-ahh! seeming more plaintive at this station than others. One of them stops at our window but the Birlas have brought their own food including a large thermos of chai which they are kind enough to share with me. When the chai-wallah looks in the window he sees Mr. Birla pouring steaming chai from the thermos, winces sourly, then moves on to search elsewhere for satisfaction. As I give Mr. Birla my cup for filling I think of what John Giorno said to me about always having chai poured into one’s own cup. This is the first time I’ve followed his advice. Until now, I’ve only seen chai drunk from delicate little glasses and so I feel a little self-conscious about my traveling glass, a big old souvenir plastic coffee mug, from a Maryland rest-stop on I-95. Mr. and Mrs. Birla look maha elegant as they take their tea here in the first class compartment.
While writing in my journal the conversation between Mr. Birla and the sardarji slips back and forth between Hindi and English. A handful of polite questions are posed to me by the sardarji, but always via Mr. Birla, never directly to me.

Two hours out of Delhi the concrete bustees dwindle and are replaced by miles and miles of windowless jhuggis with corrugated tin roofs and mud walls, unbaked bricks and buffalo dung. Most are so low to the ground that only children can stand up straight inside. In many of the yards women squat in the hot sun compressing cow dung into little pies which are then stacked in yards for use later as fuel for heating or cooking fires. Each quarter acre plot has its little shack and 8x9 back yard facing the rails. Most have the obligatory cow tethered to a stake. With such a surfeit of cows wandering around loose in India, I wonder at first why these are tied up. Then it occurs to me that it’s probably a good idea to keep a thousand pounds of ambulatory beef roped to a tree when your house is chiefly constructed out of mud and buffalo shit. I wonder how dry the stuff has to get before it stops attracting flies. Haven’t these guys heard of gingerbread?

Note: Not every inhabitant of the bustee is a ragged beggar or migrant worker. Often, clerks and low level management execs inhabit the rickety tar paper shacks for the sake of economy. It’s not unusual in the early morning hours to see men in finely tailored suits with alligator skin attachés emerge from these shacks as they leave for their job at the brokerage.

There is a changeless quality in the passing scenery. It appeals to me in a way I am not yet able to fully quantify. Gazing out at scenes which in all likelihood looked the same five hundred or even two thousand years ago, I, a Westerner, tend initially to equate it all with scenes from the Bible, not the Gita. Endless stretches of Indian landscape pass by without a sighting of a telephone line, a tractor, an electric light or any technology more modern than fire or the wheel; just banana trees, apple orchards, green rice paddies, sugar cane, bamboo, blue-green agavé cactus and farmers bumping down dirt roads on bullock carts. Like most people I am often apprehensive of change. In this bardo where things rarely change in any appreciable way, I find myself in a state of high-grade contentment, sitting on the floor of the train with my legs hanging out the door in the warm dusty breeze, doing absolutely nothing. Aldous Huxley who traveled extensively through India, described himself as “an unrepentant addict” to the vice of “high speed tourism” comparing the balm of long Indian train rides to opium, a mindless euphoria unsurpassed by any cinema.

∆∆∆

Before leaving for India I wondered if I would see any wandering ascetics. It turns out there are holy men popping up everywhere — you can’t swing a dead cow without hitting a sadhu.

∆∆∆

I’m feeling decent; just have to remember to keep up the water intake. While acclimating to the heat, I have during these first few hours on the train, been nodding in and out of consciousness as if I were trying to shake off the effects of major anesthesia.

Now, further away from New Delhi the little country stations are increasingly overrun with monkeys. When I comment on this to Mr. Birla he immediately calls a Monkey Alert which sends everyone scrambling to move their possessions further away from the windows. Monkeys and junkies have much in common, not the least of which is the compulsion to snatch anything providence drops in their path, regardless of value or the lack thereof. Nothing makes Cheetah feel more exhaultedly chimp-like than grabbing Granny’s eye glasses and flinging them out the window into the path of the oncoming Tippu express — there are even stories (likely apocryphal) of monkeys resetting train railings and causing derailings and other unplanned detours. Next stop is Hapur. The tranquil country air and the soft light falling across the land are so inviting that I want to just get out and lie down in the grass, listen to the crows caw. Next stop Kankathi.
∆∆∆

A khaki cop, smartly shouldering a scuffed and pitted Enfield bolt-action rifle, enters, nods politely and seats himself. He takes no notice of the three young boys hanging from a handrail outside my window, taking turns peeking into the compartment. Not thieves or troublemakers, just curious kids out for a joyride in the countryside. Some stations further on, the afternoon has faded away. The boys have jumped off to catch trains back to where their families are waiting — all the boys but one. When I finally catch him looking in, our eyes meet and he smiles. He’s singing the refrain from the 60’s pop tune Kiss ‘em Goodbye : Nah na nah na nah na na - hey hey goodbye. It sounds strangely mournful coming from this young Indian boy with the vagrant daylight dying in his eyes. At the next station a chai-wallah is coming down the platform and when I turn to ask the boy if he’d like some chai he’s gone. As the train is pulling out of the station I see him again, clearly now. He’s fifteen or sixteen, wearing a green Move With Motil T-shirt. His left leg and foot are a twisted mess. He limps along purposefully, walking-stick in hand, smoking a beedi. It’s easy to see the kid is a worker, and will never be a beggar.

Just past the station the train picks up speed and as we round the bend flocks of egrets and cranes lift up from a lotus covered pond, pale stars begin to emerge. A group of children, emerge through a cloud of pale dry earth kicked up by the cattle they are driving back to the home fields for the night — they stop at the crossing to watch our train go by. Just when I've forgotten the boy I’m reminded of him by a puff of beedi smoke drifting back to me from the open window in the next compartment. Breezes shiver through stands of slender bamboo sending waves of red dust rising up to powder-coat the slice of sun now sinking into the rice paddies. Cookfires appear on the horizon like stars in the meadow. Bending forelegs first, wild oxen are laying down in the fields, a sign perhaps, that rain is imminent. So drawn by the stillness, I am no longer on a train. Maybe . . . I never was.

∆∆∆
Sitting up . . . nodding out . . . I wake again to look out at the brightest moon I have ever seen. Its reflection glides along the blue-mirrored surface of rice paddies tenanted with sleeping birds. It’s an enchanted lunar-landscape but my eyes won’t stay open.

∆∆∆

It's times like this I regret my lack of formal education. I've never had a proper history with words — never possessed a painter’s vocabulary. How to adequately express the beauty of the countryside? I am as Rilke said: “In the presence of something so intensely real that all our rational categories are useless.” India is better than dreams, better than words.


∆∆∆

The next time I awake I look around the compartment. My traveling companions have fallen silent, evidently every bit as travelworn as myself. The train has halted in a station, there’s not a soul on the platform. The stillness is broken only by the purging of air brakes and the idling engine of the locomotive. I doze off again only to be awakened by a hand reaching in through the window; long fingers curl, gripping my shoulder, then touching my face. It’s nothing; just a blind man trying to find his way aboard the train to Benares. I lean against the wall with a folded up towel tucked under my head and continue with my nap.

∆∆∆
The sardarji seems increasingly pensive and has been getting up regularly to take walks along the corridor, perhaps to stretch. He’s a big guy. Later, when the Birlas have finished their dinner, Mrs. Birla begins to warm up to me. Her husband has told her I’m an American journalist. Still, by standards of Hindu society I lack pedigree. But Baba has pleaded my case to his wife and she has seen fit to make allowances for my eccentric appearance because I am a journalist. Women in general here — most especially in the north — tend to be acutely brisk, barely courteous when approached, until one’s credentials or specific purpose have been certified to their satisfaction — it’s only proper.

During a lull in the conversation the hefty metal window slips from its catch, comes guillotining down and I pull my elbow away from the sash just in time to save myself a trip to the hospital. My fellow passengers respond with an enthusiastic thumbs up.

Note: Railway food: Kill or cure? Taste? Pretty tasty! Big surprise; it’s really okay. Never having developed a taste for it I don’t really know the etiquette of eating Indian style. Feeling very self-conscious I peel the burnt-brown tinfoil from the tops of the little stacked trays, eating everything, licking fingers, embarrassed to find the rice in the bottom tray after eating all the dal and vegetables. Later I would learn how other railway prepared foods, such as eggs or vegetable cutlets, could be a major crapshoot, easily turning your stomach rancid for days.

My sardarji is Jat Singh, a farming caste which includes Sikhs and Hindus alike. Tonight he is on his way to a Punjabi farming district in Harayana to visit his older sister. In 1975 when Indira Gandhi was murdered by her Sikh bodyguards, Hindu rioters in Delhi murdered nearly three thousand Sikhs and left some twenty-five thousand homeless — all in the course of four days. The Sardarji’s brother-in-law, a mali (gardener), had lived for twenty years in Delhi cultivating a garden which supplied all the flowers used daily for the pujas of the wealthy Hindu family who employed him. During the riots he was set upon while trimming the family’s prize rose bushes. After pouring kerosene on him, the mob, using long sticks, pushed and prodded the flaming gardener into the middle of the street where he wouldn’t inadvertently set ablaze any properties owned by Hindus. Following the riots the Sardarji invited his sister to come live with him and his wife but she would not be persuaded for fear of being a burden.

“She sits around in her yard all day talking to the chickens or just to herself. No-one ever comes to visit her. So she talks to the chickens to keep from losing the gift of speaking.”
We talk late into the night; all the other compartments in our car have their lights off. Later in the corridor on the way to the bathroom I slip past Sardarji as he’s taking a nip from a bottle of some sort of Indian liquor. I pretend not to notice. Later we all agree to finally put out the lights and let Mrs. Birla sleep. As I’m putting down my sheet and blowing up my pillow, Sardarji pulls out a little blue plastic travel bag and says:
“Don’t sleep hungry.”
“I just ate two hours ago,” I tell him.
“Railway food,” he says with a dismissive, not-fit-for-a-dog look on his face. He zips open his blue plastic travel case and pops the lid on the tiffin carrier. We both pause to sniff at the pungent aroma rising from the containers.
“This, Punjabi food.” he says as he opens the little containers filled with basmati and vegetables prepared by his wife. One quick whiff and already my eyes are watering. Anticipating that his wife wouldn't have packed a knife and fork I hang my bottle of mineral water out the window and wash my hands before touching this farmer’s repast. The food is pungent as hell with miles of flavor. One by one he unfolds and hands to me, moist little puri that go down like silk; which is a good thing because he won’t let me stop eating them. He keeps handing me food until I’ve eaten more than half his meal.

In the middle of the night I wake up and go to the bathroom and take my first dump on an Indian toilet which not to put too fine a point on it, is two footpads astride a hole in the floor. I manage to drop my load in the shaking and bumping compartment without shitting on my pants cuff — I’m overjoyed. When I return to the compartment the train is just leaving the station, the Sardarji’s bed is empty. Mr. and Mrs. Birla are fast asleep on their bunks. The night sky is streaked with cobalt clouds washing away in the southern slipstream as it rushes back to Delhi. Between the windows, where the wall curves up to meet the ceiling, the blue nightlight glows like a sapphire bindi jewel above two rusty eyes; the four little ceiling fans are whirring in their cages. I lie down sleeping soundly until 4:00 when the Birla’s get up to leave. Baba leans in from the corridor and takes my hand in his. “Lock the door Bhai, and pay no attention to knocking” he says, and then they’re gone. While waiting for sleep to come again my head is filled with fantasies about dacoits stopping the train and robbing it. I sleep peacefully.

At 5:15 the sky is beginning to pale over spectral wetlands shrouded in drifting mustard-colored fog. Gradually, discernible shapes emerge from the darkness as the Indian countryside re-creates itself one more time. Palms and banana trees are gathered at the side of the trackbed, perhaps to watch the train pass — maybe they’re waiting to cross the tracks when no-one is looking.

People speak of the convenience of super-duper maha-express trains but I find myself treasuring each station we stop at. They’re like pages in an Indian picture book. In a few hours when I wake again I will be greeted by an already hot morning and the skyline of Banares – the city I’ve dreamed of for so many years.

Hal

Very nice. I wouldn't worry about your lack of formal education. You have a way with words.

eager beaver

i agree that train journey from pathankot to kangra valley is worth everything that is said

Indizen

Jammu to Udhampur by train is a great, scenic, tranquil journey.

unclelach

Thank you Keshava for your diary account. I think most visitors to India find the railway journeys some of the most entertaining parts of the India experience.

Whenever I'm in a mood of missing India I search Youtube for video clips of New Delhi station. The resounding "May I have your attention please...." is heard not only in delhi but nationwide. I'm immediately returned to all the excitement and anticipation of starting out on an Indian train journey.

Marcia

Hi folks
I was checking from the very beggining to figure what is the best place to post the report about my trip to India. Please confirm if this is the correct place Then i can finally post it

Hugs
Marcia

__________________
Do more than exist. Live.

Hal

Marcia

Ok.. i am gonna do it right now

Hugs
Marcia

Ali-Monbeam

What a wonderfull read...

thanks Keshava

__________________
(~) <.....Place holder for a small animated cow.

Marcia

thanks Ali !

My pleasure to share my experience

Best wishes!

bharatsm

Wow... well said. I am from Karnatak, traveled around a bit.. and the same fascination fill me too! Every time.. without fail!
I wish journeys would never ever end. Travelling is very expensive though.. and that is the bottom line.

What a wonderful piece! Loved reading every word of it. Thank you very much for sharing this beautiful work of art..

anupmathur

Keshava, that was a delightful read!
Would love to read more.