Around India in 80 Trains (43 page)

By 5pm we were back in his living room, flushed, giggling and flicking through his wife’s copies of
Femina
magazine while he emptied every bottle of whisky in the house. Pradeep was jiggling around in his chair, desperate for us to meet his wife and children, but Ranjit beat him to it by extending an invitation to the estate managers’ social club. Having been turned away from the Gymkhana Club in Chennai for wearing flip-flops on the verandah, I was worried about our scruffiness, but arrived at the club to find one barman, an out-of-tune piano and a carom table on a plinth.

On the way back to the Circuit House, Pradeep swerved into his own driveway, bundling us out of the jeep and into his home to meet his wife, two daughters, mother-in-law and seven puppies. After two cups of tea we got back into the jeep and carried on to the home of his wife’s parents where we were given two more cups of tea. My bladder could not handle any more relatives so eventually the jeep sped back to the Circuit House for the night.

The next morning we boarded train 71, a passenger train to Ledo, the easternmost tip of the Indian Railways. In 90 minutes we would have completed the four corners of Indian Railways’ geographical diamond (if we ignored the confusion at Dwarka). Nirmal had instructed Nakul to accompany us, but nobody batted an eyelid as he squeezed onto the end of the row of kids and fruitsellers, clutching his rifle with one hand and picking at his ear with the other.

For the first 20 minutes the train collected women on their way to vegetable markets, or men who were their own vegetable markets, carrying sets of scales over one shoulder and sitting on the floor, measuring their wares. Here the contrast button was set to high. Overnight rain had washed the scenery clean and now the grass gleamed beneath a Riviera-blue sky and bundles of blossom throbbed with colour. As fast as the train left one town, it came upon another until it began to squeeze through the tightest of passages, pushing by the backs of homes as children grimaced on doorsteps, their mothers oiling their hair. Men in vests read the morning papers, and women aired laundry, ignoring the voyeurs peering over their walls. Hooting and clanging, the train curved around a row of houses coloured like jelly beans, below which sat an amputee on the edge of the track selling fruit in twists of paper. He waved up at the windows as the train thundered past, inches from his face. For all the talk of the new India, the old is never far away.

As we reached the end of Mother India’s fingertip, China to the north and Myanmar to the south were closer than mainland India. Just inside the open doorway a sapota seller with sores on his ankles squatted with his wares and pulled out a wad of money from his basket. Unaware that anyone was watching, he unravelled the notes which wilted with dirt, and counted the pitiful amount. Closing his eyes, he pressed the money between his calloused palms and brought them gently to his forehead. At that moment it became clear why the Indian Railways had earned its name as the lifeline of the nation.

19 | The Temple of Doom

With the exception of the Indian Maharaja and the Golden Chariot, we had bypassed luxury travel and largely opted for second- and third-tier for overnight journeys and general class during the day. For our journey from Tinsukia back to New Jalpaiguri to catch the toy train to Darjeeling, Anusha had convinced us to stump up the extra fee and had booked us into first class, ignoring my protests with a blank stare and convenient deafness.

‘Always you are travelling in these classes. See, my book is filled with your journeys.’ She flicked through her logbook. ‘So boring.’

‘I know, but they’re comfy enough.’

She stared at her screen. ‘I am booking you in first-class cabin, it’s very nice.’

Anusha was eligible for the award for weakest sales pitch, but at this stage in the journey a little luxury would not hurt, and besides, she was right. Among the many trains, we were yet to travel in a first-class cabin, so train 72 was a treat. As we squeezed through the doors of the Dibrugarh Rajdhani Express like two packhorses weighed down by books, bags of tea presented by Ranjit and scarves presented to us at every home we had visited, we came upon a problem. Passepartout had been allotted a berth in a cabin of four while I was in a cabin of two with a businessman named Frank. He had made himself at home in a pair of blue flannel pyjamas and bed socks and looked dismayed when I pulled open the door.

‘Oh good grief.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Are you in this cabin?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Then I have to move.’

Offended, I put down my bags. ‘Why?’

‘A man and a woman are not allowed to share a first-class cabin if they are unknown to one another.’

‘Oh. Well I don’t particularly mind. I’m only going to climb up and go to sleep.’

He sighed and pulled out his bags from under the seats. ‘Well I don’t have a problem either, but those are the rules. Where is your friend?’

‘In the next cabin along.’

‘Then I will have to swap with him.’

Thinking back to the journey from Delhi to Chennai, I found it strange that it was acceptable for me to travel in a cabin with three strange men, but not just one. Frank shifted his bags out into the corridor, pressing his back to the wall and holding in his paunch as Passepartout slid past and joined me. Muttering and sighing, Frank poked his head back in to collect his knitted hat and then bade us goodnight.

Unlike the blue vinyl of the other classes, the charcoal-grey berths had the softness of car seats, and like sponge, sprung up when pressed down. There was even space to lie spread-eagled on a bolster pillow and soft red blankets. Dinner arrived on full-sized plates with polished cutlery, which we finished, placed outside the door for collection, and then fell over in the morning. The class may have been upgraded, but the service was still the same.

As expected the toy train from New Jalpaiguri was fully booked, so we took a minibus up to Darjeeling cramped next to two honeymooners who slept for the full four-hour journey while a leaking roof dripped rain onto their foreheads. Outside, the sky had darkened. Indigo clouds descended on the horizon and pale plumes floated into the valleys, obscuring the outlines of the mountainous humps hemmed in with tea bushes. Halfway up the hill the headlamps failed and the driver opted to drive in the blind spot of the car ahead, using its headlamps to guide him, while ploughing oncoming drivers off the road.

Sheets of rain blew sideways on arrival in Darjeeling. Water tumbled down the road in rapids as we trudged uphill through poorly lit alleys to the sound of hammering on tin roofs. Arriving outside the hotel, we waded through mud slithering past and fell up the steps, just as the rain stopped. But it was too late. All our things were drenched, the tea leaves stewing among my socks and T-shirts. There was no heating, so wrapped in towels and bed sheets we made our way up to the restaurant where a fire burned in a corner and wooden tables were lined with diners hunched over steaming bowls of chilli noodles
.
A bowl of meaty
thukpa
and a frisbee-sized piece of sweet, deep-fried Tibetan bread brought the pulse back into my veins before we slid mournfully back into wet trousers and made our way down to the town to buy some dry clothes.

‘The last thing I want to do is to load up with more clothes before going home.’ Passepartout complained, skidding over muddy verges in the darkness, following the direction of voices from below.

‘And the last thing I want is for you to catch pneumonia and for me to have to put up with your whingeing for the last few days.’

He grinned and helped me down the slopes as we emerged at the back of a stall in the middle of the night market. Much like the market in Siliguri, the stalls were hung with tracksuits, fake fur jackets and cardigans, at least two decades out of date. It was now the first week of May and shoppers were buying up balaclavas and earmuffs as though a Siberian winter was en route.

‘Paaaaaanties!’ sang a man waving around what looked like a pair of doll’s knickers. Sifting through the stack on his table, trying to find some dry underwear, I held up the least offensive-looking pair under a hurricane lamp. They had a picture of a cowgirl on the front and as I turned them over the vendor snatched them from my hand.

‘These no good. You fat!’ He ripped open a packet that I had thought were T-shirts and threw a pair at me. ‘Take!’

Passepartout found a couple of long-sleeved tops that looked more like leggings, and I bought a pair of comfy-looking trousers that would have fitted a hippo. With our new autumn/winter haute couture we made our way back up to the hotel for a cup of Darjeeling tea.

James Shakespeare had been right: the toy train took just over seven hours to descend to New Jalpaiguri. He had also informed me that I would want to kill myself by the time we reached the bottom, so to be on the safe side, we opted for the joyride, a two-hour journey that looped around to Ghum, the highest point of the railways. Launched in 1881, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, nicknamed the ‘toy train’ was the first of the hill passenger railways in India and many of its original features remained intact. It looked like one of Thomas the Tank Engine’s little blue friends, trundling into the forecourt. Steaming from its chimney, as though exhausted by the children tumbling out of its doors, all it lacked was a pouty face.

Eight children, eight adults and two babies shared our carriage, clapping and singing their way through as many Bollywood songs as they could remember while Passepartout and I leant over the back of rainbow-striped seats, watching the engineers shovelling molten coals. Train 73 travelled along the main road, passing cars and sliding so close to the edges that passengers could reach the eggs and bananas on roadside stalls.

‘Dead body! Dead body!’ one of the children shouted, pointing as a procession of mourners made its way alongside the train.

After the previous night’s downpour, Darjeeling was now washed and wide awake, the snow-covered Himalayas sparkling in the distance. As the train approached the Batasia Loop and began to curve along the edge of a drop, I peered down into the valleys, taking in the panorama. Homes, hotels and shops looked like precariously balanced building blocks, stacked one above the other, with trees popping up in between like green lollipops. At the beginning of the trip, the seas swirling beneath the solar eclipse in Kanyakumari had been the first of many extraordinary sights. Now, staring at the white crags of Kanchenjunga glowing in the sunshine, after what had felt like a journey to the ends of the Earth, I could barely believe that one country could lay claim to such extremes of beauty. Despite missing trains, sleepless nights, long waits, being jostled in queues, surviving stampedes, fighting against illness and exhaustion, these moments made the journey worthwhile.