Around India in 80 Trains (18 page)

‘Hello, rice-grower,’ he grinned.

Ed choked on his cigarette.

In the centre of the resort was a general meeting place where a group of helpers sat dotted around to answer any questions from new arrivals. One looked like a younger, gentler version of Woody Harrelson and had a genuine smile, so we introduced ourselves and joined him.

‘I’m Narendra.’

‘What’s your real name?’

‘Narendra.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘I’m from Germany.’

‘So what do your friends in Germany call you?’

He paused. ‘Helmut.’

Helmut, it turned out, was a camp version of Woody Harrelson, who ran a garden landscaping business in Essen. His first trip to the ashram, aged 21, was in 1992 when he came for three days. He left eight years later.

‘What are you looking for?’ he asked, resting a clammy hand on my arm. His breath smelt of pomegranate. Now we were here, it was worth pulling out all the stops and bending the truth.

‘Well, my parents are pressuring me to get married, but I just don’t think I’m ready … and it’s tough when you straddle two cultures …’

‘Oh …’ he began, waving his hand round and round as though he had heard it all before, ‘… you are in the right place’.

He gripped both my hands and jerked them as he spoke.

‘You
find
your
self
here.
Be
how you want,
with
whom you want,
when
you want. It’s a beautiful way of life. You have no constraints, no conditioned expectations. If I wake in the morning next to my partner and I look at her and think, “I no longer want to wake next to you,” it is ok. It is so liberating.’

Ed had been listening quietly. He leant forward, touching Helmut on the wrist.

‘I just wondered, how much of the fees go to charity or local projects?’

‘Well, you know, it’s so expensive to run the resort. The electricity alone is a crazily huge bill every month and also to maintain the beautiful grounds is very costly.’

We thanked Helmut, who encouraged us to volunteer and placed a healthy kiss on Ed’s neck as we all three hugged and held one another closely.

Across the compound the Kundalini Meditation session was about to begin in the Osho auditorium, a 28m-high, sound-proof, air-conditioned pyramid, built to house scores of meditators. Keen to take part, we scooped up our robes and raced over as entry was forbidden even five seconds into the meditation hour. Stragglers were running across the bridge to the pyramid, designed deliberately across a stretch of water to remind people to leave their minds on one side before going in. Just as we reached the door, Perm stepped out from the shadows and, like a Power Ranger, crossed both arms in the air to show that we were no longer allowed in. Spotting another door at the end of the corridor, Ed ran down, wrenched it open and before she had time to react, we slipped inside.

Two hundred pairs of feet bounced lightly on the floor of the enormous hall, causing the entire room to vibrate. It was a pleasant feeling and the idea was to allow the sensation to enter through your feet, until you eventually became the shaking. This soon became a bit dull and I was glad when the second stage began, which involved dancing any way your body wished to. As the third stage began, which involved ‘witnessing whatever was happening’—inside and out—I sensed something behind me. Turning around I witnessed a blindfolded girl kicking and thumping at the air, wrenching at her blonde hair. She went through a routine of punching to the right, then kicking to the left, before grabbing fistfuls of her hair and yanking her neck from side to side. Ed had moved away from her and was lingering nervously by a pillar. For the last 15 minutes we lay down in silence and I dozed off amid a symphony of farts. As we left the auditorium and wandered back across to the main compound, I felt quite calm but no more so than when I had first arrived. Feeling peckish we stopped at a self-service café for a croissant and a cup of coffee. From the varieties of marmalade, fig jam and tahini, I picked out a jar of Nutella and spooned a dollop onto my plate before licking the spoon clean and looking around for a place to leave it. A server walked past as I waved the spoon, snatched it from my hand and shoved it straight back into the jar, forbidden germs and all. Ed almost had a seizure.

Dusk was falling and the mynahs were muttering quietly to themselves as the sky took on an eerie orange glow. A stream of followers floated past in white, their maroon robes nowhere in sight. It was almost time for the highlight of the day, the Evening Meeting of the White Robe Brotherhood, which the leaflet described as ‘a unique opportunity to experience alertness with no effort
’
. Ed and I arrived back at the main gate and, experiencing alertness to the first auto rickshaw, flagged it down with no effort and sped away as fast as its dinky motor could go.

8 | The Crazy White Man in the Cupboard

Serendipity had so far graced us with her presence when it came to stumbling across quirky trains. First Delhi museum’s toy train, then the Deccan Queen, and now, as we crossed the overhead bridge in Pune Junction, a multi-coloured train awaited our arrival. After the hasty departure from the Osho ashram, we decided to leave Pune earlier than planned and the only train to Delhi running on a Tuesday, with last-minute tickets available, was the Pune-Nizamuddin Duronto Express. It chopped a whopping six hours off the 26-hour journey, which may not have seemed like much, but it was always the last few hours that triggered involuntary rocking and made the compartment feel like a padded cell. We were due to arrive into Delhi just after 7am, so there was barely time to wake up and get off, let alone wake up and moan. Train 26 was less than six months old and was part of a new fleet launched by Mamata Banerjee, the railway minister. Shatabdi Express trains are currently the fastest trains on the railways, but the Durontos—which meant ‘quick’ in Bengali—ran a non-stop service between each station, cutting down overall journey times.

Among the row of trains lined up below the bridge, the Duronto was impossible to miss. It looked like a metallic version of
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
. Fuzzy strokes of green, yellow and orange covered its outer walls with a pair of blue runner’s legs painted in the middle, indicating the speediness of the new trains. The Duronto Express looked as though a bunch of toddlers had been given licence to scribble all over the carriages with wax crayon, but it later emerged that the vinyl wrap had been created by Mamata Banerjee, based on her own artistic designs.

Ed waited dutifully with the bags while we trawled the list of names stuck by the door to our carriage. Having left it late to book tickets and sent Passepartout to the station to do the honours, we had three confirmed seats but only one confirmed berth. This was no reflection on Passepartout’s skills when it came to filling in forms and standing in queues, but his ability to bat his eyelashes and look helpless was largely inferior when compared with what I had now developed into an art form. In too many ways being a woman in India was still an enormous struggle, but I had gradually come to realise that if defiance and feminist force did little more than to make men laugh, then the only way to sidestep difficulties was to manipulate the situation.

Passepartout and I were double-booked into one sleeper which was not a huge problem, but Ed was sharing seat 41 with a ‘Mr Harpal Singh, 61’. This was the first time in 26 train journeys that our waitlisted berths were not confirmed and it came at a time when we were travelling with someone unaccustomed to Indian trains. After cheating someone else out of tickets in Coimbatore, our karmic fate had finally come round.

To his credit, Ed had survived Mumbai’s commuter trains, which many Indians refused to take. At rush hour he had stood sandwiched between skinny chests and bouffant hair, clutching his bag. His eyes bulged and he occasionally let slip shouts of manic laughter. It seemed to be the only way to deal with impossible situations, and as a British Airways air steward, he had substantial experience in handling obnoxious travellers. Ed’s shock absorbers had scored highly, but a 20-hour journey to Delhi was a test of stamina and endurance. Maternal responsibility took over and I felt it only right to ease him into each new situation, especially as he was visiting me in my motherland, so I began a cagey description of how Indian train journeys could sometimes be rather drawn out and uneventful. ‘Bit like Chinese water torture, then,’ he had said, and gone back to watching
Gossip Girl
on his iPhone. Incidentally, the Duronto Express from Pune to New Delhi proved to be neither drawn out, nor uneventful.

Once the train was on the move it seemed wise to find Harpal Singh and stake Ed’s legitimate claim to one half of the seat, at least until night time, when the stand off would begin as to who got to sleep in the full berth. Unfortunately his seat was in the adjoining carriage, away from ours, which would make it difficult to shuffle people around. Scouring the numbers on the walls, I arrived at seat 41. It was occupied by a Sikh gentleman sitting cross-legged and picking at his foot. A mound of dead skin sat at the side of one heel and he looked up and fixed me with a pair of bloodshot eyes. An attempt at bartering would be futile. Harpal Singh, 61, was the last person in the world who would fancy sleeping top-and-tail with Ed and I doubted Ed would want to share his makeshift chiropody clinic.

The train ticket examiner, or ‘TTE’ came through the carriage and declared that the train was full and no spare berths were available. He flared his nostrils and gave his moustache a tweak before carrying on to the next over-crowded carriage to bear more bad tidings, trailed by a trio of seatless passengers with 500-rupee notes slotted between their fingers. Defeated, we settled into the single berth, which Passepartout had given up so Ed and I could share. He then disappeared to the doorway where he struck up conversation with Virender Verma, whose nametag read BED ROLL ATTENDENT, in the hope that he may be able to pull a few strings at night.

Outside the open doors, warm wind whipped by as the train thundered past the dry Maharashtrian landscape. Swinging off the edge of the step was a well-built twentysomething wearing mid-calf shorts and sporting a carefully trimmed goatee. Edwin was originally from Cochin, but lived in Pune and travelled to Delhi for work. This 20-hour journey was his twice-weekly commute. Never again would I complain about the Jubilee line. Edwin was one of many regular commuters between Pune and Delhi, relieved by the launch of the Durontos, which made his life that little bit easier. Tickets were also cheaper than the regular Rajdhani trains that normally did the run. Edwin was assigned to the berth directly above us and did not mind sharing his seat with two others during the day, even if it meant putting up with Ed’s Europop and the pack of melted Twix bars he had brought over on request, now smeared into the seat.

Five hours had passed since our breakfast of omelette and ketchup sandwiches and Ed had begun to roll the ends of the Twix wrappers, squeezing out the melted chocolate like toothpaste, when a member of staff came through handing out packets of salt and pepper. Neither could be eaten, but they ignited hope that food would soon be along. Moments later he came through again and distributed packets of Amul butter and a couple of breadsticks. A lady in the opposite compartment gnawed through her breadsticks like a gopher, then ate the butter separately, rubbing it along her gums with one finger. On the third occasion, the server brought a box of chilli tomato soup and Ed visibly relaxed as it steamed in his hands.

So far we had mainly travelled on express and mail trains where food was not included in the price of the ticket, so soup and breadsticks was a luxury. A lunch of mutton curry, dal, rice and rotis arrived on plastic purple trays and I pulled out my Osho robe to use as a tablecloth. Ed said his robes had freaked him out, and he had refused to pack them into his suitcase, preferring to kick them into a corner of the hotel room. Edwin rooted around the bottom of his bag and produced a bag of fried fish, which he offered up. He then revealed that it had been packed in Cochin and I politely declined. My stomach had toughened, but I knew better than to play with fire—even if it smelt delicious.

Meanwhile, Passepartout had struck up a deal with the bed linen man. Virender had gone, and with the coast clear, an older attendant had agreed to let Passepartout sleep in his cupboard, setting the ambitious starting price of 500 rupees. He was an unshaven man, with hanging jowels covered in white stubble, and a shrewd opportunist. Between each carriage was an area with a sink, two toilets—one western and one Indian—and a set of metal cupboards containing bedding. Western toilets housed a porcelain pot and were to be avoided at all costs. The seat was either broken or missing and at least one long mustard stain slid down the side. Indian toilets were classic holes in the ground that were cleaner and much easier to use during train travel, but both stank. Aside from obvious pollution, the open toilets also contributed indirectly to railway collisions. Acid from waste falling directly onto the tracks caused premature corrosion of the metal, weakening them long before their time.