Around India in 80 Trains (5 page)

The connecting passenger train was empty and took over half an hour to reach Kanyakumari, despite the town being less than 15km away. Barefooted, bearded pilgrims wearing little more than black or saffron dhotis and beads jammed the roads that led to the seafront. They paddled in rock pools, bathed in the surf, then wandered in and out of the Gandhi memorial, where some of the Mahatma’s ashes were once stored. As the sky began to grey, they wound up their dhotis and lined up on walls wearing luminous cardboard glasses. They had come from the Sabarimala Sree Ayyappa temple at Sabarimala in Kerala where an annual celestial fire, believed to have healing powers, glowed over the hills near the shrine.

Passepartout and I perched on a wall and were soon surrounded by a family chewing stalks of sugarcane the size of flutes, carpeting the ground with husk. The toddlers climbed into my lap pressing sticky palms to my sweating face and neck and sat down to watch the show. It was now 1pm and the day had almost turned into night. A hush fell over the crowd as the sea rolled beneath the ball that was now, no more than a white ring, blazing against a thunderous sky. A chill raised goosebumps across my arms as I unwrapped the ribbon from around my leather logbook, a gift from Passepartout, and flipped to the middle of the clean-smelling parchment. Here I began to make a list of train names.

Two down, 78 to go …’

2 | Guantanamo Chic and the Perils of Wearing Shoes

One in six people in the world is an Indian, yet when Indians spot another anywhere outside the motherland, we stare as though we expect to be the only ones. Rarely does a smile pass between the two teams, but from afar, a mutual screening process is put into immediate effect. Shaved off the moustache? Progressive. Wearing tweed and a flat cap? Overdoing it. In essence, the process is to ascertain: who the
hell
are you? Indians are also the only ones to go out of their way to make each other’s lives as difficult as possible, as a visit to an Indian embassy will illustrate. By contrast, Indians living in India beeline towards anyone of interest, curious and keen to offer help. But with the proficiency of a pickpocket they extract details ranging from your salary and star sign, to your brand of mobile phone and any unusual birthmarks. Monesh was no different. He crossed the platform at Trivandrum Central and wandered over to us.

At first a smile shone through the darkness, then a strip of white teeth approached. A South Indian moustache sat above them, like a thatched roof sloping over whitewashed walls. The smile belonged to a man wearing beads, a saffron dhoti and a matching scarf flung around his shoulders, much on trend with what the
Daily Mail
had once labelled ‘Guantanamo Chic’. In one hand he held a rolled-up poster in a cylinder, and in the other, a smaller hand belonging to a miniature version of himself. Monesh and his son Ksheetij were also pilgrims from Ayyappa, now taking the train to Mangalore to visit the Mangaladevi temple. It was a boys-only trip. The Ayyappa temple, although one of the few Hindu temples open to all castes, creeds and faiths, does not permit menstruating women, so Monesh’s wife and daughter had stayed at home. He pointed to where two elderly men sat watching our exchange, their ear hair twitching with interest.

‘This is my father and wife’s father. Where is mummy-daddy?’ he asked.

‘My parents? In England.’

‘Father allowing you being here alone?’

I nodded. He looked appalled, but beamed all the same.

‘Why you are going to Mangalore? You are having brother-sisters there?’

‘No, no family, but we’re catching a train from Mangalore to Madgaon tomorrow afternoon.’

‘You are visiting with friends?’

‘No, no friends either, we’re just travelling through to catch the next train.’

Monesh’s look of confusion was now replaced by one of pity. He put his hands on his hips as Ksheetij danced around his feet, hiding between the folds of his dhoti.

‘Tomorrow, you come with us. Mangaladevi temple is very beautiful and very special place. I would like to take you around also with Ksheetij.’

Ksheetij paused his dance for a moment and peeked up from the folds. Temple bells rang a warning in my head. Chummy invitations were ten-a-penny and more often than not, resulted with the obligation to part with a lot more than a few pennies. Awkward silence swelled in the darkness, then popped as train four, the Mangalore Express entered the station, flooding us with relief. Monesh peered at our tickets.

‘Your bogie is not coming here. It is
that
side of the platform. Come, we will show you.’

Ksheetij strapped on my small bag as I panicked, struggling with my rucksack. Monesh waved the cylinder in the air like a tour guide and began to weave through the crowd of passengers, porters, dogs and idlers. Ksheetij, whose head barely reached waist-height, twirled his way between knees and legs, my backpack twirling away with him. I broke out into a sweat. My laptop, phone, money, passport and rail pass were all winding their way out of sight, but private-school etiquette restrained my instinct to rugby-tackle the 8-year-old.

Harrowing images of trying to call the British Embassy with no phone, and buy a new rail pass with no money, while weeping into a logbook I no longer owned, became too much, and I sprinted the length of the last three carriages, arriving outside our compartment to find Monesh and Ksheetij holding out my things. Sweat dripped down the backs of my legs and collected at my feet in a warm puddle of guilt. The duo checked that we were comfortable and promised to meet us in the morning. I nodded and thanked them both, knowing that amid the morning melee, we would not see them again.

‘Yeah, Lucy said they dragged him onto t’pavement outside t’club and threatened to lamp ’im. Apparently our Pete were quivering like a shitting dog.’

‘What ’appened?’

‘Oh he were all right in the end, think they got bored and left ’im to it.’

The delicate nuances of Lancashire lexicon floated around the corner as I prised the lid off a container of fried rice. Intrigued, I poked my head into the next compartment where two tanned students were chatting. They looked up.

‘Hiya, y’all right?’

‘Sorry, just eavesdropping. You sound just like a friend of mine from Accrington.’

‘Accy?! I’m from Rossendale, me,’ the boy replied.

Paul and Claire were from Rossendale in Lancashire and had been travelling around India for six months, about to move on to Thailand.

‘You’re not from round these parts, are ya?’ Paul asked.

‘No, we’re from London. I haven’t seen very much of India before, so we’re doing a bit of a marathon train journey for the next few months.’

‘They’re great these trains, aren’t they? I ’ated it when I first got ’ere. I were ready to go ’ome straight away. But you get used to it and you start to love it.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘We’ve just come off ‘imsagar Express. Sixty-seven hours from Ja-moo to Trivandrum.’

‘That’s impressive.’

‘Yep, jammed into a compartment with this family that had mum, dad, nan, granddad, about eight kids, goats, dogs, you name it, the lot. But I love that. You don’t get that at ’ome.’

‘Dogs and goats?’

‘Families travelling everywhere together. They’ve always got their nans and granddads with ’em. They proper take care of them ’ere.’

‘It’s a very Indian thing.’

‘I wish my poor nan ’ad that kind of care. She gets so bored living on ’er own that she phones up ambulances to come round. Then when they show up expecting to ship ’er off to ’ospital she’ll open the door all cheery, “Hiya boys, y’all right? Fancy a brew?”’

‘So where are you off to next?’

‘Up to Mangalore and then on to Goa. I know it’s dead cliché, but we’ve proper trekked about and we need a bit of beach. And I think Thailand’s a bit wet and mingin’ at the moment.’

‘Well, have fun.’

‘You too. It’s a shit’ole India, but a nice shit’ole.’

I went back to my seat and smiled at my neighbour. Prabaker was dressed in white, like a Gymkhana club waiter and had blow-dried his bouffant into
Saturday Night Fever
perfection. As he replaced a gold Biro into his breast pocket I noticed that his right thumb sprouted a smaller thumb. He laid his shoes side by side as he got ready for bed and smiled back.

‘To where you are going?’ he asked.

‘Mangalore, and then Madgaon.’

‘Very good,’ he pointed to Passepartout who was now reading in his berth. ‘Husband?’

‘We’re not married.’

He shook his head and made a strange, almost apologetic sound.

‘Myself I am going to Kozhikode.’

He pronounced the name as though coughing up a fur ball. From Kanyakumari, Passepartout had been desperate to take the Himsagar Express all the way up to Jammu. The train, its name a hybrid of ‘Himalayas’ and ‘sagar’—the Sanskrit word for ‘sea’—travels from the ocean to the mountains, and is the longest journey on the Indian Railways. It spans 3,715km, making 66 halts in 71 hours. However, the Vivek Express, due for launch the following year in November 2011, was soon to outdo the Himsagar Express by 564km. Three days of non-stop travel would have taken us from one end of the railways to the other, and presumably, to the end of our friendship. As a compromise we had boarded train number three, the Himsagar Express at Kanyakumari but hopped off three stations later in Trivandrum.

Under Prabaker’s watchful eye, I looked down at my food and read a few lines of
The Glass Palace
, flicking off grains of rice that flecked the page. I glanced up briefly. He was still smiling, his spare thumb twitching ominously. At the berth-lowering hour, his feet disappeared through the gap in the overhead curtain. Passepartout was now asleep and I wriggled under the weight of the blankets in the side berth and nodded off. At around 5am a hand crept under the blankets and made its way up my leg. I sat up, my knees retracting into my chest. It was dark and the train was rocking from side to side in silence. Everyone else was asleep. I sat still for a minute then decided the MSG in my fried rice was causing hallucinations. Sealing the edges of the covers around my legs, I turned over and a hand came to rest on my backside. Ripping the curtains apart, I saw Prabaker standing in the aisle, unchaining his briefcase from under the seats. He made his way to the toilet and I leapt out and shook Passepartout awake. Dazed, he agreed to swap berths, snoring within minutes as I climbed into his bed and pulled the curtain shut, praying Polydactyl Prabaker would try to fondle the tired and grumpy Norwegian.