Around India in 80 Trains (27 page)

No third-party was available, so with a leap of faith I crept back to share the good news with Passepartout and crawled back under the covers to enjoy an extra two hours of sleep. Contented snores from the professor made me wonder whether he and the rest of the passengers had some sort of inbuilt sensor that had alerted them to the delay.

I awoke to the sound of singing and put the pillow on my head. But the singing was lovely: deep and melodious, harmonised by a nasal ‘carfeeee, carfeeee, chai-carfeeee’ coming up the aisle. It was 7am and the scene was in full swing. Passepartout had cleared away his bed and was sitting up clutching a coffee and a book. His eyes were two tiny creases in folds of puffy skin, and he had a look of bemusement on his face. The professor was singing with his eyes closed. He leant back against the wall, waving his chubby forearms: a Punjabi Pavarotti caught up in his own morning reverie.

As the train drew to a halt in Chandigarh, the morning sun was already warming the air and the platform activities were well underway. Coffee huts rattled up their shutters, steam rising from slim glasses. Porters swooped down on those with smart luggage, barefooted kids were washed under drinking-water taps and the professor was standing in the middle of a group of students chattering like mynahs. When I was at school, Indian teachers, no matter how appalling, demanded by default a fearful respect from pupils as their God-given right. But on observation of the throng of young adults around their guru, it was clear that the aura of respect and admiration that hung around this gentle professor was well-earned. He turned and saw us.

‘Miss Monisha and Passepartout, you take care and I will call you when I am in London.’

Waving back, we watched as the professor and his stream of followers made their way down the platform and out of sight.

12 | Toy Trains and Afternoon Tea

‘Bastards. The Koh-i-Noor was not
presented
to Queen Victoria, it was stolen by her. Along with all the other loot they plundered.’

An Indian lady, with an accent from deepest Harrow, smouldered in front of a glass cabinet in the Jewel House at the Tower of London. A few months before leaving England, I had made a visit to examine the object of the heist, whose return Prime Minister David Cameron was soon categorically to refuse, during a state visit to India. Shaking her head, the lady turned to me. ‘My foot was it a gift,’ she muttered, while the queue of onlookers bunched in front of the Queen Mother’s crown, where the Koh-i-Noor sat winking in provocation. In 1846 the British had emerged victorious after the First Anglo-Sikh War, and drew up the Treaty of Lahore, inserting a 186-carat footnote, which gave them possession of not only key Sikh territories, but also the largest diamond in the world.

After a comfortable stay, the British were not averse to taking more than just the complimentary toiletries: their imperial kleptomania extended to robes, duvets and anything else that was not nailed down. As Cameron later explained, returning the diamond to India would start a trend: the British Museum—a monument to plunder—would soon be empty. However, considering the nomadic diamond had passed as the spoils of war through the hands and pockets of maharajas, Mughal emperors and shahs, the Koh-i-Noor was at least now safe and sound and available for the world to gape at. Had she stayed in India, it was more than likely that she would now be sitting on the ring fingers of at least 20 Delhiite Punjabis.

Griping over the return of the Koh-i-Noor boiled down to little more than Indians being difficult for the sake of it: an elbow in British ribs, lest the actions of their forefathers be forgotten. Remnants of British presence were firmly entrenched in Indian life, embraced when convenient and sniffed at sporadically—over cucumber sandwiches at the Gymkhana club. Along our planned route, one Indian town had earned a pin in the map for its staunchness in remaining as English as weak tea and football hooliganism. Shimla was a ridge along which the British Raj had built its official summer capital, a Little England from which to escape India. Not only was the hill station still a favourite of Joanna Lumley-types reminiscing over summers in ‘Shimler’, but reaching the town involved taking a toy train from nearby Kalka: built in 1903, the train still ran on 2ft-6inch narrow gauge track and passed through 102 tunnels and over 864 bridges—a well-loved slice of British leftovers.

The Himalayan Queen Express to Kalka was due to depart from Chandigarh at 10:35am but was delayed by almost an hour, which meant that we would now miss the toy train’s final departure of the day. However, I had now learnt that in India there was always an alternative option. It could cost one greased palm, a shifty uncle, or take double the time and a dozen phone calls, but there were no dead ends. Rather than squatting on the platform in a panic, a more fruitful way to pass the time was with an omelette sandwich, an
Archie
comic and a couple of coffees in the station café. It was barely bigger than a walk-in wardrobe and housed two tables and a fridge that wheezed and trembled in the corner. Passepartout was already seated at one table, clutching his thermos in one hand and a bottle of Nescafé in the other. In an attempt to have black coffee, he was trying to explain the concept of boiling water to the waiter, who was gazing at him with an expression that hesitated between fascination and compassion for the mentally subnormal. He listened without a word, his head cocked to one side, eventually picking up the thermos and strolling into the kitchen. He reappeared less than one minute later and made a figure of eight with his head. Passepartout unscrewed the lid and stuck his finger in, his face flickering with resignation.

A Sikh gentleman at the other table was wiping up the last of his curd and I asked him to write down the Hindi phrase for ‘boiling water’. He wrote
ubalta pani
, in Hindi, on the back of a receipt for a Hot Millions meat burger, which I then scribbled into English and pushed across the table to Passepartout.

‘Learn this if you want to have black coffee for the rest of the trip. It has the equivalent power of “Open Sesame”.’

An eruption of activity outside the door indicated that the train had arrived earlier than expected. Fighting through the tsunami of limbs and luggage, we boarded the chair car train, number 44, arriving half an hour later in Kalka. At the top end of the station, a row of carriages, like a string of garden sheds painted vanilla and peppermint green, was lined up on a platform: the toy train was still waiting for delayed passengers to arrive. Thrilled not to have to suffer a bus or taxi ride, we sought out the ticket inspector, who was obscured by a mob of fellow latecomers looking to worm their way on board. Although the train was heavily pregnant with passengers, carriage C was entirely empty. But much to the stragglers’ chagrin, it had already been reserved for a delayed tour group.

As the minutes crawled by, the inspector endured varying degrees of harassment: parents dispatched offspring to tug at his sleeves; boyfriends used big-toothed girlfriends as bait; and one couple simply climbed on board, stacked their bags and began to unfold leathery puris. The inspector poked his head through the window.

‘Pleeeeezgeddown!’

Tucking his clipboard under one arm, he climbed into the carriage and a trio of schoolboys followed him in, leaping onto the seats and waving at their friends who were hovering on the platform, swinging bags strapped across their foreheads. They soon followed. I was beginning to love all of this and moved around the group to get a better view of the show.

‘Getttt ... owt!’ The inspector swiped at the couple, then clipped the ear of a boy whose parents appeared to have combed his hair through with ghee. Tying up bags and with a half-hearted hunt for chappals under the seats, the couple sauntered off the train. It was almost 40 minutes since the scheduled time of departure to Shimla and faces were now poking out of the windows and doors, hands slapping the sides of the carriages as though geeing up a racehorse. For a train climbing 96km at an average speed of 19kmh, the journey would prove a task for the restless.

Over the din, a swarm of baseball caps and straw hats arrived and the inspector almost fainted with delight. He sprang like a ballerina across the platform, and met the group with bows, directing them towards the carriage with pirouettes of encouragement.

‘Please-please-come-sit-sit … heh-heh … please-please … heh-heh …’ He fell over himself as the delayed Australians clambered aboard, with all the grace of ogres climbing into a dollhouse. The carriage rocked and sank beneath the motion. Once the group was seated, arms hanging from the windows like slabs of boiled pork, I turned to the inspector. He examined his list and shook his head. He had too much integrity to fall prey to a pair of Disney eyes. Pointing silently to the station exit, he flicked his index finger to the left. To the bus stop it was.

For the price of a Kit Kat we were soon on board a bus farting black clouds up the hill towards Shimla, and now it was my turn to sulk. As much as I loathed car journeys in India, bus trips unearthed one particular childhood trauma. During the Madras days, I used to catch the school bus, part of a fleet of death traps owned by a conglomerate of vegetable sellers in Besant Nagar. Each contained one row of sponge seats that ran around the inside of the bus, which was fitted with the suspension of a trampoline. My friend David, when not retrieving his balls from his stomach, was employed to hold the door closed during journeys. One afternoon, on the way home, the back of the bus had dropped from beneath me, my knees flying back over my head, as metal slammed into the ground, sending up sparks and scraping the tarmac like a furrowed field. Hauling my nose up to the window, I saw the rear wheel rolling into the path of a Maruti 1000.

Hesitating, I stood watching the other passengers climb aboard. The bus sounded like something from
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
but its wheels seemed secure, so I climbed on reluctantly and shuffled up to a window. A woman with a wicker basket, two carrier bags and a box tied in twine tumbled into the seat next to me, filling the immediate surroundings with the stench of marigolds and burnt camphor. She smelt like a temple. Her hair had been scraped back with such enthusiasm that her powdered cheeks stretched into a do-it-yourself facelift, while her sock-covered toes gripped a pair of chappals like a North Indian geisha. Passepartout sat a couple of rows behind reading a copy of
80 Questions to Understand India
with his earphones wedged in. Not long after the bus departed, it rolled into a traffic jam. Less than three minutes had passed when the men began to stand up in their seats, sigh and climb down for a better look. They smoked with one knee up on the walls, held hands, or skidded down the slopes to pee in the trees.