Around India in 80 Trains (36 page)

‘I need to change my shirt before I go home or I’ll get such a hiding from my mother.’

He tugged at my rucksack and I gave in. On his way to the toilet he had seen me sitting in the doorway watching women thrash laundry in the river, and refused to let me stay put.

Eleven of Pramod’s colleagues sat squashed into one compartment, elbows resting on each other’s knees and shoulders, chatting, reading and teasing one another. Not wanting to impose, I perched on the edge of the side berth opposite a girl wearing a nose-ring the size of a five-pence piece. Her eyes sloped upwards with tails of liner running parallel with her eyebrows. She looked like a Kishangarh painting.

‘What are you reading?’ I asked.

She held up the red cover with both hands. ‘
Two States
. Have you read it?’

I nodded.

‘Like it?’

‘It was fun, but a bit over the top. People can’t be that bad.’

She slapped my leg. ‘My God, that is
just
how they are.’

‘Really?’

‘Yah-yah. To-tally. My mother is from Chennai and she studied in Delhi. Same problem she had there. Ex-act what you find, you find in these pages. Hillll-arious.’

Pramod’s friends began to flip through my logbook, pushing each other’s heads away like puppies at feeding time. He reached for my Moleskine notebook, scribbled in it and slid it back in one smooth motion. I turned away and flipped to the page where he had written in swooping curls:

‘
Don’t get personally

if they are laufaing.

They are enjoing
.’

I smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t mind. In fact I’m going back to the doorway for a while. I picked up my camera as Pramod shook his head and fingered my scarf.

Heaving open the door, I squatted down as train number 53 hugged the curves of the hills. Streams of water spilt down crevices, appearing from a distance like silver wire weaving through the rocks. The express train clanked along the rocky terrain then skimmed across the bridges as olive green bodies of water shifted quietly below, while the breeze turned to gusts that wrestled with my hair. Palms flanked the banks like bending windmills, parting to reveal whitewashed villas and workers in vests.

A yell broke the reverie and two policemen appeared behind me. One shouted in Hindi while the other banged the door shut. Once they had clumped through to the next compartment I feigned ignorance and handed my coffee cup to a little girl with two plaits and a paunch who was waiting for the toilet. Pulling the door open again, I looped both arms around the handrails and breathed deeply as the sun began to swirl behind a film of cloud, a grey-blue ball looking for a place to reappear. A sharp bend brought the police marching back and the girl thrust back my coffee, not wishing to be implicated. They spat more Hindi at me, pointed their sticks and growled, until Pramod claimed responsibility for my behaviour and the door was slammed for good.

‘Come and sit down,’ he pleaded. ‘Just a few moments ago, someone fell out of the train.’

On the approach to Londa, an ominous glow fired the clay-covered ground. It was a tiny station and it cleared as fast as it had filled. Soon there was nobody but a cloud of mosquitoes fighting for my attention. In my haste to make it to Londa, I had made one fatal error: I had not checked the return train timings. Towards the end of the platform, a sweeper was clearing paper plates from a doorway and I asked him when the next train returned to Goa. He held up two fingers.

‘In two hours?’

He shook his head and flipped his hand forward.

‘Two o’clock?!’

It was now just before 7pm and I had almost seven hours to wait alone. The sweeper gestured for me to follow him as he led me to a waiting room whose only other occupants were a cockroach and a pair of gekkos transfixed by a naked light bulb. Desperate for the toilet, I nudged open the door with a toe as the stench of mothballs and urine wriggled up my nose. Crouching in the dark, moisture dripping onto my back, I hurried out and found the seat with the fewest paan stains, where I sat, hugging my rucksack to my chest.

What a fuck up.

I fished out my book and began to read, but being alone does not last long. A figure appeared in the doorway. He watched me for a minute or two while I pretended not to notice. He crept in and stood with his back to me, facing the platform.

‘You are alone.’

It was more an observation than a question.

‘I’m waiting for a train.’

He nodded. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To meet my husband.’

‘Oh. Why is he not here?’

‘He works in Mumbai.’

‘He is allowing you to be here alone?’

‘I’m going straight to meet him.’

‘What does he do?’

I kept reading and slipped my ring to my fourth finger. He looked down.

‘You are looking very nice.’

I kept reading but now goosebumps peppered my skin.

‘Am I making you uncomfortable?’

At that moment the sweeper’s broom swished by the doorway and it took spasms of restraint not to leap on the little man and kiss his grey stubble. The inquisitor sloped off.

‘Are there any hotels near here?’ I asked.

The sweeper picked up my smaller bag, swayed his head around and began to walk off at a pace towards the station exit, so I followed. Wherever he led me, it had to be safer than Arserape Junction.

It was the worst hotel room in India.

Mould marbled the walls and if I stood in the middle I could just reach both sides with my fingertips. A child’s desk wobbled in the corner by a low bed slung with a baby’s blanket, a human outline creasing the sheets. Just below the ceiling a rectangle had been cut out of the wall—either to fit an air conditioner, or remove corpses—and a light bulb had already hanged itself from a thread of wire.

The Rambagh Palace this was not.

I shut the door and a shower of plaster greeted me from above. Bolting the door, I curled into a ball on the bed. It was almost 9pm.

By 11pm my eyes were dry and blinking and I needed the toilet. Tempted to use the bin rather than risk opening the door, I tipped it towards me and found a wad of human hair at the bottom. Easing back the bolt, I peered around the door and looked down to find a man in khaki flat on his back with one hand in his trousers, lying next to a thali filled with half-eaten wigwams of dal and rice. He had lost interest midway through both activities and succumbed to sleep. The corridor was lit like a dungeon and I could just make out another man on the floor cradling a bottle of what could have been kerosene. I padlocked my door and tiptoed around them, trying not to detonate a landmine of potential rape.

On my return, both were still comatose. Slipping back into the room, I bolted the door and leapt onto the bed, taking a spring in my shoulder blade. Finally I began to doze and the power cut out. This was it: this was the night I was going to die. Nobody knew where I was. I did not know where I was. Fishing the photo of Shirdi Sai Baba out of my bag, I lay on my back, pressing it between sweating palms in the hope that I might see another sunrise.

Suddenly I flicked it away and sat up. No God or saint was going to save me unless I saved myself. Swinging my legs off the bed, I loaded up my bags and threw open the door. The men had gone. Stumbling down the stairs I lunged for the door, tripping over a body that lay like a rug across the threshold. Yelping, the man jumped up in a fog of dirty rum, scratched and yawned, then fumbled for a key. Yanking up the grill, he rearranged himself as I fell out into the street, shattering the midnight stillness, and ran in zigzags down the hill towards the light of the station.

16 | God Bless the NHS!

‘May I tell you something ma’am?’

‘Of course.’

‘You are selfish.’

A horn blasted through the air and a sea of sinewy necks swept past balancing baskets, boxes and other bits of battered luggage tied with string. A battle had broken out, roaring its way towards the severely delayed Bilaspur Express as it came to a halt. A trio of sadhus pushed me sideways in their haste to clear away the puja area they had built out of boredom. Taken aback, I stared at Sandeep who faced me, expressionless, but for a growing upward curve of his bottom lip.

‘So’, Sandeep continued, ‘are you wanting to go to your AC carriage, or to come to the general class?’

‘I’m coming with you. I want to know why you think I’m selfish.’

Since I had left Londa on the Hubli Link Express, a cluster of trains had pushed the number up considerably. The Mandovi Express from Madgaon to Ratnagiri had marked 55, followed by the Shatabdi to Mumbai. A local from Jogeswari to CST had brought the total to a respectable 57, and earlier in the day I had arrived on the overnight Kolkata Mail from CST into Katni, a junction in Madhya Pradesh, which made fifty-eight. A passenger connection to the relatively unknown town of Umaria was due within a couple of hours, so I had squatted by a wall with a copy of
Heat and Dust
and a ladoo. As I was finishing the last pages, a man had arrived on the platform and patted me on the head. He wore a black topi, several rows of beads and had an orange beard that flamed like a gulmohar tree. He began to unpack his holdall. Carefully unrolling what looked like a tightly wrapped bed sheet, he appeared to be preparing for an afternoon nap. But after inspecting every inch of the sequinned cloth and grunting in approval, he flapped it like a dhobi, swept it around his back and onto his shoulders, and began to dance a little jig. Waving the sheet behind his head, he cackled and his face cracked into wrinkles as he shimmied along the platform, until I realised two things. Firstly, that he was quite mad, and secondly, that my train had departed from the platform behind me.

While waiting for the next connection, Sandeep and I had begun chatting. Sandeep was a 25-year-old engineering student from Puri, in Orissa, who never ate food cooked outside his house and wore trousers so tight that impotence was inevitable. He was odd, but my affinity for oddness had grown over recent weeks and I entertained any opportunity to indulge it. Now the delayed train had arrived, I trailed after Sandeep who sailed ahead on a cloud of smugness. Squeezing through the doorway of train number 59, I picked my way through the carpet of crossed legs, conscious of the aura of angst that hung around my sweating body. Sandeep was sitting by the window, his powdered face a perfect circle of pale grey, his side parting slicked into place.

‘Go on then, tell me why I’m selfish.’

He raised his index finger. ‘How long were you talking to me on the platform?’

‘About half an hour.’

‘It was almost twice that time,’ he replied, baring an alarmingly white set of teeth and now holding up a pair of fingers fitted with gold rings, both embossed with an image of Lord Krishna.

‘Why did you ask then?’

He ignored me.

‘In that time that I was standing and talking to you, you did not ask me to sit down.’

That was it.

I had not asked a grown and able-bodied man to sit down on a bench that had space for two extra people, after I had made room for two mothers with babies.

‘If you wanted to sit down, why didn’t you just sit down? I like stretching my legs in between journeys. For all I knew, you wanted to stand.’