Around India in 80 Trains (7 page)

Poor Passepartout was on sick leave and remained foetal in the upper berth, sleeping off the effects of the tap water, while I settled down in a doorway, bathed in the lemon glow from mango groves and palm trees flanking the tracks. During the previous five journeys I had watched in horror as he swung out of doorways, his clothes snapping in the wind, but soon realised it was the only way to travel. As train number six clattered across the Panval Nadi bridge near Ratnagiri, a nauseous thrill swirled in my stomach as I peered between my knees at the drop. A sheet of water stretched to the horizon and I thought of King Thebaw, one of the few characters in
The Glass Palace
based on a real person. In 1885, he and his family were exiled by the British from Burma to Ratnagiri, where he lived out his remaining years in a rundown palace. The palace still remains in Ratnagiri and I imagined the king standing in his bedroom window every morning, looking out through his binoculars across this expanse of grey-blue water, watching for boats and signs of visitors.

‘Ma’am, chicken lollipop, ma’am?’

An elderly man carrying a washing-up bowl full of foil-wrapped chicken legs stopped and placed his load on the floor. As he shifted the pile around, steam rose from the centre and the smell of summer barbecues floated up. I bought a couple and the vendor stayed squatting behind me, counting his notes.

‘Very beautiful the sea.’ He clasped both my hands together and shook them. ‘But ma’am, careful not palling.’

He looped his finger up and then down, outlining the path that Wile E. Coyote normally took off the edge of a cliff, and then laughed at his own joke, wheezing as he picked up his load.

‘Very punny … but not safe,’ he added, sending a ball of foil out of the door before disappearing through to the next carriage.

We were less than a week into the journey, but I was already beginning to feel at home. Having had my fill of sea views, I gnawed the remaining gristle off the bones and looked around guiltily before tossing them into the water below. Private-school etiquette was already dwindling. It was only a matter of time before spitting and shitting in public would become the norm. Back in the compartment Passepartout was still bundled up in a pile of sheets. It was warm on board and I began to feel restless, so curled up in the sunshine and dozed off.

‘Shoes … they’re not good for your feet … don’t wear ’em too often.’

An Aussie accent dominated the conversation in the compartment behind us and I sat up. Two Swiss girls were hugging their rucksacks, intrigued by the nymph storyteller sitting cross-legged in his berth, explaining the negative aspects of wearing shoes. Rick was in his late 70s. He was white-haired and wiry, with eyes like chips of blue china that gleamed against his orange skin. His hair was trimmed close to his scalp and he wore a muslin shirt that hung open to his soft belly. Pleased with the growing audience, he patted the seat next to him and continued to describe the origin of the scar on his left leg, which involved a midnight escape from a forest ridden with spear-wielding rebels and what sounded like an allied army of midgets.

‘All metal’, he said, running his finger up his shin, ‘and a small plate in here too,’ he added, tapping the side of his head.

He was the sort of person who revelled in the scepticism shading his audience’s faces, but if he eventually revealed himself to be an android, I would feign nonchalance. The train stopped at Thane and the Swiss girls got off. Rick jabbed silently at the window, his face twisted into a ridiculous grin.

‘First ever Indian train. Built by you folks. Ran from Bombay to Thane in 1853.’

Rick was travelling up to Mumbai to meet his wife after a three-month stint trekking around India by himself. She was launching a book and had been touring Southeast Asia while Rick rode the railways. A chai vendor clanked past and he raised a finger in the air, fishing a 10-rupee note out of his breast pocket which hung somewhere around his waist.

‘I’ll have another please, and one for the little lady, and don’t try pulling any of that shit on me again.’

The vendor placed his vat on the floor and allowed two spurts of milky water to fill the paper cups, smiling sheepishly.

‘Six rupees, he told me! Six? It’s never six. It’s always five. Naughty bugger.’

He finished the tea in one slurp, winced and tapped my knee.

‘You know how to work out train numbers, eh?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, for example, we’re on the 0104 from Madgaon to Mumbai. The Mandovi Express that goes the other way is the 0103. Also, the first digit indicates which region you are in. Konkan Railway is “0”.’

‘How do you know that the one going the other way isn’t the 0105?’

‘Because they refer to them as going “up” or “down”. If a train is travelling away from its home station then you say it’s going “down”. But if it’s going towards its home station, then it’s going “up”. We’re going up, so it has the higher number. But having said that, there are so many exceptions to the rule so don’t take my word for it. Like the rest of this country, don’t try to find method in the madness. Anyway, have fun, Pom. I’m getting off here.’

We were just pulling into Dadar Central and Rick jumped off the berth, picking up his canvas bag, and strolled off in bare feet. The Yoda of train travellers had no need for shoes after all. I moved to the edge of the seat and watched him from the window. As the train jerked and moved on, he stopped and fished a pair of loafers out of his bag, threw them onto the ground and stepped into them.

I started gathering my things as we neared Mumbai when Passepartout surfaced with the confused look of a hamster coming out of hibernation. He tidied up his sheets, lined up our bags and grinned. A new buoyancy took over, the buoyancy of arrival. It brings with it a renewed sense of being that blossoms just before the end of a journey. No matter how long or tiring the journey, the bothersome bits are shelved and forgotten in those final minutes. Impending arrival shifts the traveller’s mindset into hopeful optimism that a new and unexplored phase is about to begin.

3 | A Royal Affair

A hairy arm covered in glass bangles appeared by my leg and a large hand tugged my rucksack. It withdrew, then as an afterthought, shot out again to give my knee a quick scratch. Peering over my book, I looked down and saw that the wandering hand belonged to a hijra who wanted some money. While we were buried in our books, a number of hijras had mushroomed around the bench where we sat at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus: a carnival of powdered faces, sequined saris, anklets and tomato-red lips surrounded us, covering the platform with handbags, food carriers and bedding.

Hijras are a vulnerable community of eunuchs and hermaphrodites, huddled together in their plight beneath one umbrella of transgendered ambiguity. Many eunuchs within the fold result from forced surgery and despite claims to the contrary, fewer than one in a thousand hijras are born a hermaphrodite. They flimsily embrace womanhood with garish make-up, cheap jewellery and low-cut blouses stretched around their broad backs. Shunned by society, they are nurtured within their own community where they survive in bulk as India’s third gender. But like a fraction of the country’s downtrodden, they have learnt to manipulate their situation to their advantage and impose themselves wherever they go, often on the railways.

Our new friends had parked close enough to make their presence felt, but remained at a safe enough distance that we could watch them combing each other’s hair and reapplying kohl, without being asked to pay for the show. Or so I thought. As I dragged my bag out of the Knee Scratcher’s reach, she clapped her hands together—rubbing one across the other as she did so—and flipped a curse at me, muttering and pulling out a tiffin carrier from her sack. It was not the most auspicious way to begin a journey.

At that moment a royal blue engine with gilded borders glided along the platform. Train number seven, the Indian Maharaja-Deccan Odyssey had finally arrived. He paused in silence before heaving a sigh and coming to a halt. Not a soul emerged, but a door opened and a red carpet rolled out like a tongue cooling off on the platform. The hijras’ over-plucked eyebrows arched with curiosity. Whispers passed between the group and their earrings swung as they craned their necks to steal a glimpse through the blacked-out windows. Worried that the train might creep away with the stealth of its arrival, we gathered our things, much to the hijras’ distress, and picked our way through their outstretched arms, accompanied by their yells. Another door swung open and a head appeared, fitted with a boat-shaped hat, stolen from a medieval queen. Benoy, it turned out, was our personal butler for the next seven days.

Air conditioning tightened my skin inside the carriage as the door slammed shut on Mumbai’s stickiness and noise. Beaming and bowing, Benoy led us past a gallery of hand-painted miniatures, to cabin B in Salon Verul—otherwise known as the presidential suite. He tried to wrestle the unimpressive bags from our backs, but looked secretly pleased by our lack of matching Gucci luggage that his colleague was struggling with on the platform.

The Indian Maharaja-Deccan Odyssey was a relatively new member to the royal family of trains. His predecessor, the Palace on Wheels, still rolled his old bones up and down Rajasthan’s tracks, but had succumbed to age. Reports suggested that his skin was peeling, his insides were damaged and the sparkle in his eye had dulled. Inside the suite, it was clear that the younger model was a picture of health. Fluffy carpet sprouted from the floor and a white duvet hugged the double bed that filled the room. At the head, four pillows puffed out their chests, their corners tweaked into place and a snip of hibiscus lay in the centre of the bed with a note, saying:
Welcome aboard a journey to the depths of your soul
…

After playing with both flat-screen televisions, skin-flaying showers and a forage for appropriate clothes, we each grabbed a handful of grapes from the living room and made our way to the bar area, passing a gym and a massage room playing Chinese restaurant music. The sound of a Yorkshire terrier being trampled met us at the carriage entrance and a waiter stepped out from behind the bar to hold open the door. A noisy trio sat on a sofa: both men wore beige trousers and deck shoes and slopped their beer with each bark of laughter. The lady wore a linen shirt that revealed a fleshy pink triangle at the neck, adorned with ugly beads that hung like freshly speared testicles. She threw back her head and the canine yelping began again. I checked my ear for blood.

‘Oh Roger, you’re terrible!’ she giggled.

‘Well, if I want chicken tikka masala, I shall jolly well ask for it. Although we’ll have to get them the recipe from England first!’

Roger laughed at his own joke, spilling more puddles of Kingfisher, which were quickly mopped up by a waiter with a magician’s supply of napkins up his sleeves. The trio had just arrived from a week in Panjim in Goa, but lived next door to each other in Bagshot, in Surrey.

A sensible distance away sat the couple from the suite next to ours. Cyril was a retired cardiothoracic surgeon in his 80s, with a naughty face and eyes that laughed in place of his mouth. His wife, Marie, had an Audrey Hepburn elegance and wore her dark chocolate hair tucked girlishly behind her ears. They lived in Sydney, but gallivanted around the world, travelling up the Irrawaddy river, playing golf in China, or filming lemurs in Madagascar. Marie and Passepartout clinked their glasses together and sank into conversation, while Cyril chased a king prawn around a plate with a toothpick and winked at me.

‘So you two nippers are our neighbours?’

‘Yes. Now let me double check’, I replied, not wanting to commit a faux pas, ‘you’re from Australia …’

Cyril nodded.

‘… and Marie’s from New Zealand …’

‘… and every month we meet in the middle for violent sex,’ he finished, clapping his hands and jumping off his seat.

‘Oh, Cyril, don’t be so silly …’ Marie murmured over her wine.

He mock-flinched and his eyes disappeared into crevices.

‘I once did a big trip like you. I bought myself a motorbike. Didn’t know how to ride it, but where’s the fun in that?’