Around India in 80 Trains (8 page)

‘What did you do?’

‘I just got on it. Like anything, you try it first and then learn how to do it later. I went to the shop, got on it and came home. Only I didn’t know how to stop it, so as I neared my house I just turned it on its side and stepped off it.’ He wrenched both fists across to his right, closed his eyes and went rigid.

A buzz began to grow in the carriage as the remaining guests gathered for dinner, jabbering over the clink of gins and crunch of pretzels. Many ITV reruns of
Murder on the Orient Express
had taught me that a train like the Indian Maharaja was a five-star cruise on wheels, the preserve of retirees, rich grannies and dapper little Belgian men with moustaches. But this was a pick ‘n’ mix of passengers: a young Swiss couple in matching outfits; three Japanese ladies with an oversized interpreter; Bob and Jane from Devon, who loved tea and
Test Match Special
; Dan and Maisie from New York, who dressed like Don and Betty Draper; and a Russian group made up of two pairs of newly weds and one spare mother-in-law, who arrived in football gear and wore bath slippers in the dining car. The consensus among the guests was that they had won the holiday on a television show. Aside from the staff, I was the only Indian on board. As we made our way towards the dining car an Englishman with carefree hair appeared in the doorway. James was a journalist from
The
Times
. Drew Barrymore had been on board the week before, and he was writing a piece about the resurgence in popularity of luxury trains even though she had apparently left after just two days.

Bob and Jane were already seated at a table, examining a bottle of wine, and waved us over.

‘Come on, join us fogies,’ Bob smiled. ‘We won’t bite and we’ll try not to bore you to death.’

We slid in as he filled our wine glasses. He peered closely at the bottle and began reading the label, ‘
Herbaceous, crisp, and dry, with hints of green pepper and a touch of spice at the finish
. I wish I had the job of writing these blurbs’, he continued, ‘I’d have so much fun with them: “a smooth aroma of vanilla and blackberries with an undertone of wet dog.” Having said that, this really isn’t bad at all.’

My only memory of drinking wine in India was five years ago at a hotel bar in Hyderabad when I had ordered a glass of red wine that tasted marginally better than cough syrup, and when the bill came, had cost more than six Bacardi Breezers put together.

‘I’m very impressed,’ Bob said, poking his nose into the glass. ‘It’s very drinkable and apparently isn’t produced far from here. Fancy, Indian vineyards, whatever next.’

From across the aisle an Indian man spoke up. Perhaps he had been hiding in his cabin during orientation, but here was a new addition to the group. Suhel worked in sales for a travel company in Delhi and had reached his target before any of his colleagues. His reward was a trip aboard the train.

‘The Sula Vineyards are quite close by.’

‘Where is this?’ Bob asked.

‘A little northeast of Mumbai.’

‘How long have they been there?’

‘Actually it was started in ’99 by a Mumbaikar. He went to Stanford then worked for two years in Silicon Valley.’

‘Techies and CEOs are your finest export, aren’t they?’

Suhel laughed. ‘Yes, but many graduates are going and coming back now.’

‘Is there a huge wine-drinking contingent in India? I should think it would only be in Mumbai and Delhi.’

‘I think they sell some two, maybe three million bottles each year.’

‘Ridiculous, isn’t it?’ Roger had turned around in his seat and was listening over the booth.

‘What is?’ Suhel asked.

‘Your elite are more bothered about promoting wine-drinking than sorting out the masses.’

‘But the wine industry is a rural industry. It is based in the countryside and provides employment to rural workers. It’s good for us to find resources in India itself.’

‘Still, it does seem a bit nuts talking about wine production when half this country doesn’t have water.’

Suhel put down his fork. ‘And what do you propose. Tell me? Always people want to criticise but nobody gives suggestions. Why should India always mean poverty?’

‘And in that case, why didn’t you take the Punjab Mail from Mumbai to Delhi instead of the Indian Maharaja?’ I asked Roger, then noticed James’s pen flicking across his notepad, and decided to shut up.

Rolling his eyes, Roger turned back to his meal as Suhel shrugged at me and grinned, poking his biryani with a fork. All around gloved waiters moved like mime artists, twirling plates above their heads and taking wide steps around each other. A thali arrived with a turret of biryani in the centre and a pappadum that opened like a lotus, revealing diced salad. I dived in feeling sorry for Passepartout who was stirring a bowl of pineapple yoghurt, unable to cope with anything solid. Once the last plate was wiped and the final drop drained, we swayed back to the suite for an early night before the morning arrival into Aurangabad to visit the caves at Ellora and Ajanta. An orchid, damp with dew, lay on the duvet next to a card inscribed in gold:
God bless the inventor of sleep, the cloak that covers all men’s thought
. It was a quotation from Cervantes who had obviously never tried to sleep on an Indian train. For the next two hours, it snaked crazily along the tracks, my neck jolting into an early onset of spondylosis. Abandoning sleep, I opened up my book to see if King Thebaw was settling into his new home any faster than I was. Passepartout, meanwhile, had turned the colour of mint chutney.

Sleep must have crept up on me, as I awoke to a tinkling of glass and flipped on the light to find the cabin in the midst of a mutiny. Two wine glasses were rolling around on their sides, a bottle of Merlot was hurling itself against the wall, and the cabin door was sliding back and forth in a rage. After pulling a sock around the bottle and wedging it between the wall and a chair leg, I slid the glasses into a drawer, shoved a screw of paper into the doorframe, and flipped off the light. The train chose that moment to glide to a halt. A romantic milky light seeped through the gaps in the curtains and I eased them back in search of a glowing moon, only to find a bent halogen street lamp and a man rearranging himself on the platform. Just before six, Benoy tapped at the door and placed a tray of coffee and biscuits on the bed while Passepartout hugged his toilet bowl.

The breakfast car was as lively as a cemetery. Cyril and Marie were poring over the menu and beckoned me over to explain
chana puri
(chickpeas with fried Indian bread). Intrigued by the bacon, sausages and ham, I opted for all of the above and Zayan, a dreamy-eyed waiter with dimples, flapped a napkin across my lap.

‘Eggs, madam?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Poached fried scrambled boiled benedict omelette madam?’

I settled on a scrambled egg flecked with chives and watched as the Bagshot Bumpkins prodded forks at a plate of
usal pav
(spicy sprouts curry with Indian bread). Just outside their window, four beggar children had lined up and were pressing their faces against it.

‘Rather off-putting,’ Roger’s wife Cath moaned, heaping a spoonful of sugar into her coffee.

Roger eyed the row of small faces. ‘Just ignore them, dear.’

‘I can’t, they’re staring at me!’ she exclaimed, shifting in her seat. ‘Do you think they can see me?’

On a day-to-day basis, nobody really notices poverty. People go about their business, chins up, eyes fixed forward, hiding behind tinted windows or in air-conditioned homes. Beggars, pavement dwellers and sick children carrying sick babies are just a part of the landscape. On the other side of the train, a row of ladies with jasmine dangling from their plaits waited with wedding-sized garlands and a silver tray of coconut, sandalwood paste and a pot of kumkum. A flame flickered in the centre on a piece of camphor. Four dancers carried a palanquin on their shoulders upon which a bare-chested child was sitting in a dhoti, wearing a papier mâché head of Lord Ganesha and holding an umbrella above his head. He looked like a mannequin. As each passenger descended the steps, bellies like Ganesha, they were draped with the flowers and their foreheads swiped with red, a ritual that continued for the next seven days.

Ellora is like a secret township in the hills. Each wall and pillar, carved with faces and fingers, hips and breasts, pays homage to patience and perfection. The Kailasa cave contains a courtyard and a three-storey gallery and was designed to represent the abode of Lord Shiva. It is also carved from one single rock, and here we found Bob, his Handycam strapped around his wrist, trying to dodge schoolgirls playing hide-and-seek. He stopped, put his fists on his hips and squinted up at a parakeet peeking inside the head of an open-mouthed lion.

‘Bloody hell, this is just incredible.’

He ran his fingers over the curves and dips of the carvings, tracing the dents and chips of once gentle faces. His wife Jane wandered over with her binoculars to watch the parakeet, who had found his friends and was flapping around them in a frenzy. She was a round-cheeked lady who adored birds, wore a different shade of pink every day and winced whenever the Bumpkins approached. In truth, there was only one main offender. Colonial Cath had bleached curls that spiralled around her oversized head and clumped together to reveal patches of sunburnt scalp. She marched alongside the tour guides, from where she could offer a running commentary on her observations. By and large, she seemed not to understand that this was India and not the Peak District.

Mr Gupta, a hollow-cheeked guide wearing a fishing jacket and a look of pure boredom, began an explanation of how the combination of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain caves was designed to demonstrate religious harmony, and led the group across to a wall where Goddess Lakshmi sat cross-legged. A lake of lotus flowers lay carved before her, like a stretch of hungry mouths.

‘She is the goddess of wealth and prosperity’, he droned, ‘you may know her as she is closely linked to Diwali.’

‘Golly, this would have a National Trust tea room back at home,’ Cath sniffed. Mr Gupta smiled politely.

‘Do you celebrate Diwali?’

‘Oh yes, we know Diwali. We do celebrate it as we have a lot of you back at home.’

Cath was oblivious to my presence but took quite a shine to Passepartout. That afternoon at the Ajanta caves she lingered behind him, following him from one cave to another. She had applied lipgloss and eyeliner but somehow managed to look worse. After watching him adjust his lenses to the darkness, her mouth slightly open, she wandered over to him holding out her camera and bellowed, ‘Can you turn an old woman on?’ Meanwhile quartets of bandy-legged men wound up and down the steps transporting women on palanquins. Their limbs trembled beneath the lumps of sweating dough, perspiration trickling down their muscles. Roger was sitting on a wall, as the palanquins passed, watching a crew of langurs snacking on each other’s ticks. I ventured over to throw them a few broken halves of Krack Jack biscuits.

‘It’s amazing isn’t it’, he said, ‘that they spent all that time building shrines to what are nothing more than imaginary friends.’

‘I wouldn’t call them imaginary friends’, I replied, ‘whether or not they’re real, they represent virtues.’

‘But they aren’t real.’

‘I know they’re not. But I don’t think it matters.’

‘You don’t think it matters that they worship millions of make-believe people?’

‘They’re different aspects of one entity. If they admire qualities depicted by parables, then so what?’

‘It’s falsehood. Finding peace without rational, scientific thought is nothing more than self-deception.’

‘The stories carved into these walls show human nature in a way that can’t be captured by scientific theory.’

‘It’s just a manifestation of delusion.’

The rock-cut wonders hardly seemed like a waste of time. At the very least, they had created employment for the masses, encouraged artisans, and resulted in architecture of ineffable beauty. Roger sat tight-lipped as the langurs began to play with themselves—a pastime they reserved for when they had an audience—so I caught up with Passepartout and relayed the ‘imaginary friends’ conversation. He looked down at his camera and adjusted the lens.

That night after kebabs and a merlot,
Octopussy
was screened to set the mood for Udaipur. As Roger Moore leapt out of his gorilla costume onto the top of a speeding train, chased by a sword-wielding Sikh in a blue turban, I wondered why Passepartout had been so quiet. Since the comment about the imaginary friends, he had withdrawn and spent all afternoon with his camera. I flipped off the light, pulled the duvet over my head and dreamt that Colonial Cath had turned into a gorilla and was throwing blue kebabs at me.