Around India in 80 Trains (14 page)

Train 14, the Trichy-Nagore passenger train arrived late into Nagapattinam, a small fishing town in Tamil Nadu that had been badly hit by the tsunami. There was no particular temple of interest, but I had heard they did the best prawns in South India. It was also home to an old house belonging to my dad’s family, which sadly, along with the prawns, I could not find. Across the road from the station was a string of stalls selling fried chicken wrapped in sodden newspaper. It was deep-fried earlier in the day, then refried in a smoking karahi, flavoured with car fumes and garnished with grime from the cook’s nails. Clutching a steaming bag and a bottle of Thums Up we found the hotel and flopped down in front of a Tamil film featuring a man with big hair and red eyes wielding a pole at a man with small hair and red eyes. Passepartout was sulking.

‘Is anything the matter?’ I asked, fishing out the burnt crumbs from the bottom of the oily bag and wondering if I should go out and buy another. ‘You’ve been rather quiet for the last couple of days.’

‘I’m just really surprised, that’s all.’

‘By what?’

‘You. I never thought someone with your intelligence would be as closed-minded as you are.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘I’m shocked that you could condone someone like that fraud, and think that it’s okay to exploit people.’

‘Oh God, not this again.’ I scrunched the bag into a ball and hurled it against the door. ‘I didn’t say I condoned him, just that if someone chooses to believe in something it’s not your business to criticise.’

‘Yes, and I’m shocked that someone with your intelligence can’t use your brain to think, rather than believing in what you do. If you hadn’t stormed out of there, I would have.’

‘I was pissed off with you for swearing in my face, shouting in public and not being decent enough to just stop the conversation when I asked you nicely. We have very different views about religion and clearly won’t see eye-to-eye about it, so for the rest of this trip I don’t want to talk about it.’

His reluctance to comment on the ‘imaginary friends’ conversation on the Indian Maharaja, and his constant search for
The Greatest Show on Earth
by Richard Dawkins, now made perfect sense. He was, what he called, a militant ‘devout’ atheist, a description that even A.C Grayling, a renowned atheist, had likened in its impossibility to ‘sleeping furiously’. I was not. I was born into a nominally Hindu family, enjoyed rare steak and would have liked to see proof of the existence of a higher power, but that was where it ended. Rites, rituals and following religious doctrine meant nothing to me. Religion was a personal affair and the choice of an individual as long as it brought no harm to another. Passepartout demanded that I justify my faith, which was none of his business and it led me to the conclusion that he and I should no longer discuss religion and sour the rest of the journey.

The morning train journey from Nagapattinam to Trichy passed in silence. The passenger train journey from Trichy to Chennai also passed in silence, as did our time on board the overnight Charminar Express from Chennai to Hyderabad and the Mumbai Express from Hyderabad to Mumbai. At this stage, I no longer cared about the journey, it was the destination that really counted. As the white dome of CST came into view, we arrived in Mumbai on 15 February, on the morning of my unhappy 28
^th
birthday.

6 | Super-dense Crush Load

Mumbai was like a thousand cities poured into one. Stepping onto the platform felt immediately different. You could sense it on your skin and taste it in the air. This was India in its most concentrated form. Delhi was teeming and vast, but its pockets of green offered space to breathe and time to stroll. Mumbai raged unharnessed: if you strolled you would be trampled, or at least knocked over by a cyclist. Even the tendency towards idling was noticeably absent. In Mumbai, everyone meant business and the feeling was addictive. This was our second visit to Mumbai and as the tide of commuters swept its way through the halls of CST, dragging us with it, a familiar thrill heated up my blood—or perhaps it was just an early symptom of malaria. Mumbai was a city of dreams and a city of nightmares, of hopes and of horrors—and I hoped to find the latter on the spaghetti trails of its commuter trains. After one month of smooth rides and few delays, it was time for a journey that would spice things up a little.

So far everyone we had met had issued the same warning: ‘Do not in any circumstance attempt to ride the local train, it is not for novices,’ which we interpreted as an open invitation to do just that. Mumbai’s commuter train network, or the ‘locals’, is notorious for passengers compressed in the open doorways, grazing the roof with their fingertips, inches from certain death. During rush hour, a nine-car rake designed for 1,800 standing passengers can often carry up to 7,000, known as a superdense crush load. It was a suicidal exercise in survival that seven million of Mumbai’s workers were forced to endure on a daily basis—almost the population of Greater London. The vulnerable nature of their close proximity had made commuters the perfect target for terrorists, who attacked in 2006, hiding explosives in pressure cookers that killed at least 180 people and injuring more than 800 in a series of seven coordinated blasts at rush hour.

Mumbai’s local trains were certainly not for the fainthearted. Footage of locals floating around on YouTube included a man falling from the doorway, as the cameraman yelped in shock but continued to film. Other clips showed passengers riding on the roof or stretched across windows, like Spider-Man in flares and flip-flops. On two separate occasions, unidentified luggage left behind had been opened up to find, not explosives or forgotten aloo parathas, but the body of a woman: one pregnant, inside a suitcase on a platform; the other tied up in a sack and wedged under a seat. Discovering dead bodies was low on our list of priorities, as was falling out of the door, or falling victim to pickpockets and eve-teasers. But ultimately it was just a ride on public transport. How bad could it really be?

While flicking through a magazine left behind on the train from Hyderabad, I had come across an article about a spa in the suburbs that had recently begun offering a form of icthyotherapy. This was just one paradox of Mumbai. Most of its residents could not afford shoes, while the remainder would happily pay for imported fish to nibble dead skin from their cracked heels. The spa was in the High Street Phoenix shopping mall near Lower Parel, which presented the perfect excuse to test out the trains.

At midday we returned to CST. With its pencil-point turrets, archways and Victorian Gothic architecture, the sprawling structure resembled a cathedral rather than a railway hub. Originally named Victoria Terminus after Queen Victoria, its colonial ties were snipped in 1996 and it was renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, after a Maratha warrior, though it was still fondly referred to as VT. It was now also listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Beneath the stained-glass windows, swooping arcs and shitting pigeons we scoured the signs for the train to Parel, from where it was a short walk to the mall. Lower Parel was on a different line, but chopping and changing was a little ambitious for the moment. A driver who had stepped down from his engine to stretch and scratch, flashed a smile and pointed to his train to tell us to board.

The carriage was wide and clinically clean, with rows of miniature ceiling fans blowing in sync. Lacquered seats waited patiently to be filled and a lady sat reading in a corner. She looked up, acknowledged us and went back to her book. It was like being on a London Tube, but friendlier—and infinitely more hygienic. Train number 19 remained empty until it began to move, at which point a number of men leapt in with ninja stealth, slicked their side partings back into place and sat down clutching carrier bags. This was not how a Mumbai commuter train was supposed to be. Covering the roof was a series of hooked metal handholds that gave the creepy feeling of travelling in a human abattoir. Passepartout stood in the middle of the carriage, swinging from one and gazing at the slums rolling past the doorway. Our cold war had ended after he booked a surprise birthday apology at the Trident in Nariman Point, a victim of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. After five weeks, the first sight of a bathtub, the feel of fluffy robes and a flat-screen TV had calmed all anxieties and we left rejuvenated, taking the tea bags, apples and coffee and lingering in the lobby until the 24-hour internet had run out, along with the receptionist’s patience.

Nonplussed by the pleasant journey, we arrived at Parel and made our way through a fruit market, foggy with the warm fumes of jackfruit, and hopscotched across several dug-up sections of road to High Street Phoenix. It was a monster of a multiplex that housed names from Canali and Marks and Spencer, to Armani and Accessorize—which sold the same stripy knee socks I had bought in High Street Kensington at Christmas. Clothes shopping in India had come a long way since the mid-1990s trends of Vibe, Weekender and Benetton.

Upstairs, the spa was filled with giggling therapists in loose trousers, tickling one another. Dispersing in an instant, they bowed deeply taking us into a back room with trickling water, a CD playing bird sounds and a tank of fish darting around waiting to be fed. Sensing food was on its way, they spread back like synchronised swimmers and then shot forward, wriggling their way between toes and clinging to both heels. It was as though hundreds of electrical charges flowed through my soles, which was strangely relaxing, until I realised how insanitary it was to stick my feet into a tank of water filled with numerous varieties of toe skin. I withdrew my now, slightly smoother feet. Passepartout was enjoying a foot massage and as one last indulgence we stopped briefly at McDonald’s for a McChicken sandwich, which after many weeks of dosai, uttapam and idlis was like heaven in a sesame bun.

It was still bright and there was plenty of time before the evening rush began, when traffic became too gridlocked to cross the roads without ducking dangerously between lorries and roaring buses. We arrived at Parel station where an overhead clock read 17:35.

Rush hour.

Mumbai’s light skies and chattering birds had been misleading. Thinking it was still late afternoon, we were now face-to-face with the one thing we were told to avoid. Sickly excitement washed around my stomach.

Hundreds of people swarmed across the footbridge and thundered down the stairs to the platform, but swerved off to the left and right before they reached the bottom. The reason was soon clear. Halfway down the stairs, in the middle of a landing, an elderly lady with her hair pulled into a walnut-sized bun had spread out a square of dirty cloth. Her chappals were placed to one side and she sat cross-legged, cleaning her teeth with one finger. She faced the oncoming masses with an air of enviable nonchalance. In the same manner that cars avoid cows that hold up traffic, everyone curved around her, but not one person raised a question or their temper. Pigeonholing in India is futile; for every rule there are one hundred exceptions. But Indians exercise great levels of tolerance—mainly of each other’s idiosyncrasies. Their astounding levels of acceptance go some way to explaining how millions can live in such close quarters without daily outbreaks of civil unrest.