Around India in 80 Trains (15 page)

At the bottom of the stairs the crowd was already four-people deep. At the back of the platform a man was cutting and serving slices of papaya, the colour of sunsets. Bottles of chilli powder lined the side of his stall which reminded me of the guavas my grandma used to eat with lemon juice, salt and chilli powder, so I bought a slice and rejoined the crowd. A full 2-m gap stood between the crowd and the edge of the platform, so we darted in front and parked ourselves in the space. After the Goan coffee incident, this was the second foolish move of our trip.

A ‘tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick,’ drew nearer, and train 20 came into view. The crowd tensed in anticipation, like a row of runners waiting for a starter pistol. When the nose of the engine reached the platform and the sound of braking and creaking grew deafening, moustaches and sweat-sodden polyester shirts appeared in the doorways, looming larger and higher before they suddenly leapt into the air from the moving carriages and hit the ground running. Before the train had stopped, hordes of men rained down upon us, with monsoon force, while the rows behind began to heave forward, reaching over our heads to grab the doorways and haul themselves in. The papaya was knocked from my hand and slithered down my leg. Once again, the rule was simple: attack or be attacked. Crushed between satchels, stale armpits and wet skin, spitting out mouthfuls of coconut oil-flavoured hair, we managed to push forward and fell into the middle of the carriage.

Bent double and wheezing, I saw that beyond the human barrier at the doorways, the carriage had spare seats. The crush was just another one of India’s little mysteries. Sitting down, I wiped the papaya from my knee, where a fly was rubbing his legs with glee, and looked around at fellow passengers. Their angst was always short-lived. Moments earlier they had shoved, kicked, and elbowed each other in the face. Now they sat, shoulder-to-shoulder, snoozing, stabbing at phones or staring at me. I stared back. Most became bored and looked away. One brought out his phone and took a photo. It was fair enough. If we could waltz around photographing their daily life, why shouldn’t they?

As we neared CST the crowd had dwindled and I was now standing in the doorway, both arms looped around the pole, invigorated by the blast of air. But something looked wrong. The train had come into the station and was already sailing by the platform when pockets of men appeared, inching their way towards the edge, crouched low, satchels over shoulders. Before the train had stopped, they took flying leaps into the doors, desperate to bag seats for the train’s next journey. Those last seconds became a blur, but Passepartout was rugby-tackled by a mouse of a man wearing bell-bottoms. He threw himself through the doorway while I ducked my head and rolled onto the platform, hoping my skull would not be stamped, if it even survived the impact. Checking for blood and bruises, we brushed ourselves off and gripped hands through the crowds with an air of triumph. So that was rush hour.

After the previous night’s bone-crushing venture, I boarded the women’s carriage to the airport to collect Ed. Ed was my oldest school friend whom I had known since I was eight. He was passing through India on his way to Australia and I could not wait for him to arrive so we could find a tourist bar, drink Hoegaarden, eat kebabs and gossip. Passepartout was sleeping off a few Kingfishers so it was a perfect opportunity to experience a women-only carriage. Since our arrival in India I had been stared at continuously as though I had a fist growing out of my head. It did not bother me, as I knew it was out of curiosity, not rudeness, and Passepartout was always on standby as a deterrent to wandering hands. But this time I was looking forward to peace and a chance to read a book without constant questioning and non-consensual frottage.

With a copy of
Five Point Someone
in one hand and a bottle of water in the other, I sat down by a window and a girl in a burka sat down opposite me. As soon as train 21 jerked and moved off, she pulled down the face cover, put her feet up on the seat ahead and opened a copy of
Marie Claire
. Having not quite understood the Hindi dialogue during
3 Idiots
I was keen to discover the real story. Neha and Hari, the two lovers, were blatantly on the verge of being caught, when a scream tore me from the book.

Two women were pushing for the same seat even though there were plenty available further down the carriage. A Punjabi lady, like a pudding in a purple salwar kameez, wedged her buffalo-sized backside into the seat, butting the other out of the way. Her rival, a wiry, dark-skinned hawker, with a terrifying expression, had boarded carrying a basket of hair bands, grips and bows, and now used it to bang her on the head. Purple Pudding leapt up and pushed the hawker so her basket fell sideways, tipping the contents all over the floor. I put my book down and turned around to take in the action. As Pudding turned to go back to her seat, the hawker reached forward and yanked her plait. Two other women who had nothing to do with the fight, joined in. It had now developed into a full-scale bitch fight, with a couple of offshoot scraps. There was much slapping, along with more hair-pulling and jabbering.

Thrilled, but eager not to be drawn into the madness, I turned away and did what any nice English person would have done: I pretended not to notice. Before taking up my book again, I caught the eye of the girl opposite me who had pulled her burka back over her face and was laughing uncontrollably behind it. The hawker, realising she was outnumbered by angry women with fleshy limbs, squatted down in the middle of the aisle trying to retrieve bunches of ribbon unravelling across the carriage and ranted to nobody in particular. It was a sorry scene and no one moved to help her gather her things. I caught a reel of pink ribbon as it rolled past and gave her a handful of clips that had scattered under the seat. She smiled and shook her head, revealing a beautiful set of teeth that gleamed like the floral-shaped stud in her nose. At the next station, a crowd had gathered and the women began to trip and fall in through the doorway before the train had stopped. I peered through the bars and saw the stampede stepping over a girl sprawled on the ground. Eventually she picked herself up and adjusted the jasmine in her hair before coming on board. So much for the peaceful journey.

Ed arrived looking far too clean and spruce for a ride on a commuter train and had brought a worryingly high number of bags. As we waited on the platform at Andheri, a dwarf marched past pulling a suitcase behind him, the same height as he was.

‘Ooh, can you hire them?’ Ed asked.

It was his first time in India and the best method for survival was to throw him in at the deep end. Fortunately, train 22 emptied at Andheri so we found seats and travelled back into the city undisturbed, with the exception of a troop of hijras who boarded a few stops later and sat in the aisles touching up each other’s eyeliner and tapping at Ed’s foot.

Struggling with the bags down Colaba Causeway, we passed a restaurant that had placed a sign in the window for the chef’s special: ‘Roast Tongue in Garlic Potatoes Served Dry’. Ed wretched.

‘Love, I was looking forward to proper good curry,’ he said, looking disappointed.

Colaba Causeway was a favourite with tourists and a prime spot for locals looking for iced coffee, chindian food, pizzas and pastries. It was also home to Leopold, the café made famous by the book
Shantaram
. During the day it buzzed with activity: cycle rickshaws kerb-crawled behind tourists buying feathered earrings and browsing bookstalls, art lovers roamed from one gallery to the next and packed dhabas drew chaat lovers from the pavement. At night a different group came out to play. Taxi drivers milled between airport trips, chowkidars dozed on stools and fathers gambled in circles over bottles of dirty spirits, their families asleep on charpoys and mats. Luckily for Ed, we had already scouted out Olympia Coffee House’s keema pav, and a pair of Indian restaurants near the hotel, called Sher-e-Punjab. They appeared to be run by the same management and were across the road from one another. Both restaurants did excellent keema and parathas. One served alcohol, one did not. The first was popular, the second was not. Above all, they showed the IPL cricket and were jammed full of Indians throughout the day, which was always a good sign.

Before leaving Mumbai, there was one last train to take. Technically it was not in Mumbai and involved taking train 23, the Koyna Express, to get there. A toy train ran from nearby Neral, 86km from Mumbai, up to Matheran, an unpolluted, woody hill station, the smallest in India, hiding along the crags of the Sahyadri mountain range. It was discovered in 1850 and had originally been used for viewing Mumbai’s shipyards. Matheran, whose meaning lay somewhere between ‘wooded head’ and ‘jungle topped’, was apparently reachable only by the tiny train which ran on two-feet narrow gauge lines and had the sharpest curves out of all of India’s hill railways. The first fact turned out to be a lie. Matheran was also reachable by taxi, which became our only option after we stopped to feed Marie Light biscuits to a quivering puppy at Neral junction and missed the morning departure.

Taxis only climbed as high as a car park of monkeys leaping from bonnet to bonnet, and then visitors had the option of completing the uphill journey on horseback. None of us wanted to ride, preferring to walk along the rusty red train track in a dutiful homage to
Stand by Me
. From the size of the track, no wider than one side step, the train was minuscule. Matheran had an entry fee of
`
25 per person, to be paid at a ticket hut before setting off on the track leading to the town. I approached the window and handed over 30 rupees. Reaching down, the vendor snapped up the three tens and pushed back my ticket along with a chocolate bar and no explanation. Confused, I peered down and was about to protest when the puzzle pieced itself together. He had no change and the chocolate was worth five rupees. I wondered how far the bar could move into circulation if I tried to use it to buy a cup of tea on a train. I broke it into pieces and fed it to the monkeys who bounded along behind us, grabbing at our bags, trying to fish out the remainder of the biscuits. Fed up with their stalking, we threw them a bag of Lay’s crisps that they tore open, devoured and then licked clean. It only made them keener to stick with us, seeing us now as a mobile tuck shop.

On the way up, a number of single chappals lay buried in the rocks and grass. This was not the kind of terrain for a barefooted climb and we wondered why they had been abandoned. At the top of the hill a baby train sat waiting by a forecourt. A list of timings showed that the last train departed at 16:25 so we vowed to leave an hour to queue for tickets, or to be precise, an hour to join the scrum.

Breathing deeply in Matheran cleared the fog from my blackened lungs. Although the ground looked like the surface of Mars, trees shaded the streets and the absence of cars and buses meant the air was free from dirt and noise but for the squeals of children on horses and families running around with ice cream and fudge from Prince Chikki Fudge Mart. It was more a village than a town, or a giant playground covered in horse shit. After lunch and a nose through Varanasi Handicrafts, we wandered downhill towards the public gardens that had a real playground and views over the valleys. It was evident why the British had used Matheran as a summer getaway. It was now mid-February and there were no western tourists, only Indian families and young couples hand-in-hand.