The Lunatic Express (13 page)

Joppy understood and opened a cabin for me, said I should sleep there tonight. It was tiny—two bunks not quite six feet long, the cabin only four feet wide. Instantly there were ten faces at the window peering in. I felt bad, but I did it anyway: took out my sarong and hung it over the window. The cabin was dim. Sauna-like. Airless. And it felt like the greatest refuge on earth. I was a freak in a village so far removed from the world it was almost inconceivable. No cell phones. No Internet. No roads to get here, no roads from here to anywhere else, just a big green mass jungle rising behind the village where, a man on the ship had told me, were “men without religion.” It was hard to understand my own reactions, feelings. I wanted to embrace it, revel in it, take a little house and live here and get to know it. And once again I wanted to flee from the village as fast as possible. Part of it was simple: I’d been raised in such a different environment and I was used to so much personal space and privacy. But I couldn’t help feeling there was something else, too, something deeper that I was just beginning to figure out—that as I pushed further out into the world alone and surrounded by otherness, amid people so deeply connected, I wanted that, too. The very gulf between me and everyone staring at me made me feel that much more alone and hungry for a genuine connection that I wasn’t getting constantly moving through the world.

That night Joppy took me to dinner in town. We ate in a concrete room with a single bare lightbulb, rice and fish and cabbage and hot sauce. “When I was first arrested,” he said, “the Seamen’s Mission paid for a lawyer, and many people from a church came to see me. But then it stopped and I was alone. When I got out and back to Jakarta I made a promise that I’d never drink again. Bad things happen.” That idea of aloneness again; Joppy had come back to Buru, married; now he had a family here.

After dinner we strolled up and down the street. The dark was deep, impenetrable beyond the weak bare bulbs of shops selling shoes and T-shirts and sarongs, and rice and mangos. Stars sparkled brightly overhead, millions of them. Girls walked arm in arm. Boys held hands. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed again, and it wasn’t people staring this time. The night had given me a cloak of anonymity; people couldn’t tell the strange “mister” was in their midst until I was nearly upon them. It was hard for me to imagine flourishing outside of a major city, and these days even a remote American farmstead was hardly remote, so many places interconnected by the web, highways, telephones; they were how I thought of and defined the world. But there were millions and probably hundreds of millions of people around the planet who lived in tiny, remote places like Leksula. Nothing but sun and sea and sand and jungle. And each other; people were so connected to each other in this little world. I was such a loose atom, ricocheting around the world. Walking with Hendro, he’d said, “This is my brother. My aunt. My cousin. My sister.” Their world was this, right here. These shops. This sand. This harbor. These people. And Leksula was big; it had a concrete pier! The villages of Buru were tiny outlying worlds as removed from Facebook and the economic meltdown as Mercury and Pluto. That we were all out there simultaneously struck me as incredible. I myself had parroted the cliché that the world was getting smaller every day, but walking through the darkness of Leksula it didn’t feel that way. It felt vast. Huge. And I was very far from home.

H
ENDRO WOKE ME
up at 6:00 a.m., knocking on my cabin window, one eye peering through a crack that the sarong failed to cover. “My aunt wants to invite you for coffee, Mister Carl!”

I washed my hair and body in a bucket and we walked into town, children in red skirts and white blouses walking to school. It was so quiet, nothing but the sound of their voices and laughter. We walked through town and at a big, well-kept house, Santoso—the man from the ship with the ring and Pertemina baseball cap—was drinking coffee on a wide verandah. He rushed out. “You must come and sit and meet my brother. He is the headmaster of the high school.”

Hendro and I sat down at a table covered with a yellow plastic tablecloth, and sipped coffee with Santoso’s brother and sister. Santoso reached over and held my hand. It was a disconcerting sensation, this strange man holding my hand in his. My American instinct wanted to pull it away; it went against everything I knew. But it also felt nice. Warm. Welcoming. It just
was
—the most elemental of human connection, laden with no expectations. An embrace, and no one else even noticed it. We said goodbye after coffee, and I followed Hendro through town. Birds chirped. The sound of voices on the breeze, since there was no traffic, no sounds of mechanization at all, and we came to a long one-story building with jalousied windows, gardens. This was the high school, Hendro took me into the headmaster’s office, the school’s English teacher came in, and we visited on a sofa, Hendro and the teacher translating.

“How glad I am you have come to Leksula,” the headmaster said, placing a hand on my knee. “What has brought you here?”

It had a formality, we were two heads of state meeting on some official state visit, two representatives from far-apart worlds.

“I am a journalist and I want to see the world,” I said. “Not just the parts where everybody goes, but the faraway parts.”

“And what do you think of it?”

“It is beautiful and quiet,” I said, “and it feels very far from home, even though your school looks very much like a school in America.” This last point was only a little bit of a lie—all schools did kind of look the same, after all. “And,” I said, “I have been received most graciously with such hospitality.”

He smiled. Nodded.

They took me for a tour; we peeked into tidy, spare classrooms with students sitting at desks in rows, and passed two poor boys standing by a flagpole in the courtyard, each balancing on one foot. “They’re bad,” Hendro said. “Always late.”

A horn sounded, the
Star
announcing its departure. I had to go. Again.

The teacher and headmaster shook my hand, thanked me profusely for visiting the high school and Leksula, and Hendro walked me back, through the tropical heat and stillness and dogs and little garden plots. I felt embarrassed by my celebrity and by the generosity and curiosity of Hendro, Santoso, and the headmaster. To me I was bringing so little to them, offering them nothing. Why show me the high school? Why take time out of his day to sit with me? Why hold my hand? Why be so kind to me? I bore no gifts. I could give them nothing. But Hendro spoke English, and spoke it well; the high school offered English—it was the language of power and of the world, of opportunity and the future—and I was its representative who’d just dropped in one afternoon out of nowhere on the
Amboina Star
. It was hard for me to imagine going so gaga over an Indonesian dropping into town, almost anywhere in America. It wasn’t like we’d been studying Indonesian for years without ever seeing a real Indonesian. It wasn’t like we’d all dreamed about going to Indonesia—Jakarta as the most beautiful and biggest city in the world! Hendro lived in a tiny village on a remote island, idealizing everything his village wasn’t, and I was an emissary of that ideal. The whole concept humbled me.

“You must come back again, for longer,” Hendro said, beaming, on the deck of the
Star
as we stood surrounded by twenty passengers. “When you come back,” he said, “we can find you a house in the village.”

S
OON WE WERE OUT
on the water again, nothing but sea and sky and crowded ship and village after village. This time a big swell was coursing in toward the beach, and the
Star
rolled heavily. A child vomited repeatedly, the puke running down his father’s leg and foot, a man with teeth as black as old wooden boards from betel-nut chewing, as my fellow passengers stared listlessly in their nausea. Overhead, frigate birds circled round and round, and flying fish glided over the wave tops. “Up in there,” said Alex, the second engineer, pointing to the verdant mountains of Buru, “there are cannibals.” He touched his arm knowingly. “They eat you.”

Toward dusk, great gray clouds moved overhead and we left Buru and headed out to sea and rolled and pitched in a darkness without stars, a wood-and-steel speck in a vast ocean. It was in conditions like these, on nights like this, that ferries went down and disappeared, lost forever along the capillaries of a still-large planet.

Mumbai: The city’s cattle class train commute has put a big question mark over the future of a brilliant sixteen-year-old girl. Raushan Jawwad, who scored over 92 percent in her class X examination a few months ago, lost both legs after being pushed out of a crowded local train near Andheri on Tuesday
.

—Times of India,
October 17, 2008

SEVEN
The 290th Victim

“E
VERYTHING IN THAT BOOK
is true,” said Nasirbhai. It was almost 100 degrees, the humidity of the Bay of Bengal pressing down, and he was wearing a white dress shirt over a sleeveless undershirt, pleated black slacks, and black oxford shoes. Small scars were etched around brown eyes that studied me from a wide, inscrutable face; a big stone of lapis studded one finger, and a silver bracelet dangled from his wrist. He had a barrel chest and his hands hung at his sides, ready, waiting—never in his pockets. He looked immovable, like a pitbull, like a character from another time and place, and in a way he was. “That book” was
Shantaram
, the international best-selling novel written by Australian Gregory David Roberts, who’d escaped from prison in Oz and found his way to Bombay two decades ago, where he’d become deeply involved with its criminal gangs and Nasir—who always carried the honorific
bhai
, “uncle.”

“We met in the 1980s,” Nasirbhai said, standing on a corner in Colaba, one of Mumbai’s oldest neighborhoods and its tourist epicenter, the streets lined with vendors selling tobacco and sandals and newspapers and bangles, pedestrians as thick on the sidewalks as attendees at a rock concert. Roberts was famous now, a Mumbai legend, and through a friend of a friend had connected me to Nasirbhai, who agreed to take me deep onto the commuter trains of the most crowded city on earth, where the day’s simple commute was a matter of life and death. “Traveling on these trains is very risky because they are so full,” Nasirbhai said. “But people must be at work, they must not be late or their boss will fire them. They
must
get to their destination, so they lean out of the doors, hang on to the windows, climb on top of the train. They risk their life to get to work every day.”

By population, the city—just nineteen miles across, with 19 million souls—was bigger than 173 countries. The population density of America was thirty-one people per square kilometer; Singapore 2,535 and Bombay island 17,550; some neighborhoods had nearly one million people per square kilometer. A never-ending stream of Indians was migrating to Mumbai, which was swelling, groaning, barely able to keep pace. In 1990 an average of 3,408 people were packing a nine-car train; ten years later that number had grown to more than 4,500. Seven million people a day rode the trains, fourteen times the whole population of Washington, D.C. But it was the death rate that shocked the most; Nasirbhai was no exaggerating alarmist. In April 2008 Mumbai’s Central and Western railway released the official numbers: 20,706 Mumbaikers killed on the trains in the last five years. They were the most dangerous conveyances on earth.

As we threaded through packed sidewalks and streets toward Chhatrapati Terminus, still mostly known by its old British name, Victoria Terminus (or VT for short), Nasirbhai talked about his life and meeting Roberts. “I was a big man then,” he said. “Fighting every day. Drugs were my business. I sold hash and brown sugar.” Usually when he sold drugs to foreigners, Nasirbhai did the deal and the transaction was over; dealer and buyer went their separate ways. For some reason, however, he and Roberts toked together. “I don’t know why. Destiny. I loved him. And then he started doing brown sugar and I hated him.” The rich smell of garbage and shit filled the heavy air, and Nasirbhai guided me like a child, between lines of traffic and careening buses. “If you’re not like me you cannot live in this city. You have to be tough.” Roberts, like so many foreigners, eventually disappeared, and Nasirbhai didn’t hear from him for fifteen years. He continued to live off the streets and deal drugs. Then, in 2000, he was arrested. Set up. “I sold a lot of drugs to Bollywood stars—I grew up with them, with superstars, including Fardeen Khan,” the son of the late legendary director Feroze Khan. For his deals, Nasirbhai used a taxi driver he trusted. The driver had been arrested for selling heroin a few days before, and, under pressure, had agreed to cooperate with police. By the time Nasirbhai met Fardeen on May 4, 2001, police from the Narcotics Control Board were waiting. “We were just making the deal”—Nasirbhai had nine grams of cocaine—“when a car came up in front and another in back. They jumped out with guns. Fardeen hit the locks, said, ‘What do we do?’ I said, ‘nothing, there is nothing we can do. They have guns.’”

The Bollywood star was released from prison in six days. “His father got him out,” said Nasirbhai, who spent eleven months in Mumbai’s notorious Arthur Road Prison. A few years later, Roberts suddenly reappeared out of nowhere. A ghost, returned. And he wasn’t running from the law anymore, smoking dope and shooting heroin in his veins. He was free, rich, and famous. “It was my destiny; I do not know what I did to deserve this. He told me to stop selling drugs and to reinvent myself. He paid for my house, my daughter’s wedding, my kids’ school, and now he pays me to work for him, only him. He is a man of his word and he saved me. First he became my friend. Then my brother. Then my boss and Godfather.”

VT was like a huge funnel, sucking and channeling the hordes inside; sixteen ticket windows lined the walls, each with a line snaking fifty feet; all of India was here, lying on the floors, walking, running, selling, buying. The line moved quickly.

Nasirbhai barked a few words and out spit two tickets for fifteen rupees each—about twenty-five cents. We threaded and bounced through the jostling crowds, passed through a bank of inactive metal detectors into the vast departure hall, a vaulted, corrugated roof on cast iron pillars. Built by the British Raj between 1878 and 1888, it echoed Victoria Station in London. “I will show you my style of traveling,” Nasirbhai said. “But first, chai.” It was a constant ritual. Over the next three days, on seemingly every corner, every train station, Nasirbhai and I paused for the sweet milky tea, served in thin, hand-formed clay cups vigorously thrown to the ground or smashed into a bucket when we were done.

“Listen,” he said, as we sipped our tea and a tide of people swept past, “It is very difficult to get inside a train, and once you get in it is more difficult to get out. Sometimes you have to get out three or four stations ahead because you won’t have a chance later.” Many Mumbaikers had commutes of two and three hours each way in and out of the suburbs. A long time to stand up, many had taken to riding the train the wrong way first, to the beginning of the line, where they might get seats. “But sometimes the train changes its route! They get stuck on the wrong train and have to start all over again! And sometimes you get so dirty from the train you feel ashamed. Sometimes it’s so crowded you have to hang outside and there is a very small place between the train and the poles and you hit the poles and you’re fucked. But what can you do? You must reach your job, man. It is fucking terrible.”

We finished our tea, threw the cups on the ground, and strode down the platforms, six for the Central Line and one for the Harbor Line, some with waiting trains. Nasirbhai’s eyes darted back and forth like he was scanning for roadside bombs. “Follow me,” he said, dashing in the door of a waiting train and out the other side, to change tracks. “You’ve got to watch all the time. There is the right place to stand and the wrong place; you can get pinned with your hands up on the straps and you can get pickpocketed—people have a lot of practice. You have anything in your pockets? Camera? Wallet?”

I didn’t; one of my cardinal rules of traveling was never to carry anything in my back pockets, and I kept my cash divided between the two front pockets, my passport and credit cards and most of my cash strapped to my leg.

“Be careful. You stay close to me. They will look you in your eyes. I meet them and say, ‘Fuck you, man.’ Do what I do, okay?” Sometimes, he explained, when it got really crowded he jumped in the cars reserved for handicapped riders. “And even that is crowded, jammed. People say, ‘You look good, man. Show me your [handicapped] card.’ I say, ‘You show me yours first.’ Fights happen, man. People get killed for their seats.” From his years on the streets Nasirbhai saw the world offensively, a place full of opportunists and thieves and danger lurking around every corner. He was a boxer on the ropes, his guard up every minute. The crowd was a current piling up on the platform like at the wall of a dam—saffron and crimson saris and men in blue jeans, and beggars shuffling on their knuckles. “With this crowd, the pickpockets come,” Nasirbhai said. “They work the crowd. But listen, they don’t have magic! They cannot stand far away and make your wallet or phone come to them. They must touch you. So never let anyone touch you anywhere in the world. The beggars are trained. ‘Hello, hello,’ they’ll say, and they’ll feel your pockets. They’ll bump you once. You don’t do anything. They’ll bump you again, and you don’t do anything—you think it’s an accident. But they’re watching your reaction; the third time they’ll take your wallet or your phone.” In the crowds, hanging on the straps, he warned, opportunists might try to block me with their elbows. But they’d never get Nasirbhai. “My eyes and my brains are how I make money. I can tell: he’s a pimp; he’s a robber. I have that judgment.”

We pushed to the edge of the platform, the crowd building. Waiting. Anticipating. A train came. The crowd shifted; it was one entity. We shuffled to the left, we shuffled to the right. Where would the doorway stop? And before it did, sudden chaos—like the hike of a football on the line of scrimmage. One organism full of individual parts, we scrambled and pushed. The faces were hungry, desperate, and I grabbed the door’s rail and pulled myself onto the train. “And it’s early, man!” said Nasirbhai, laughing, when we squished in. “Come, follow me.” The vestibules were wide and big, but I followed Nasirbhai, squeezing past hot bodies, into the corridor between seats. The trains were industrial, no attempt made for comfort: metal floors, metal walls, metal benches facing each other in groups of two, bars on the windows, hundreds of handles hanging from the ceiling. Nasirbhai pushed me between the windows. It was his spot; there, standing with my ass in one person’s face and my crotch in another’s, my side to the wall, no one could pickpocket me, and fresh air streamed in through the window. Nasirbhai looked triumphant.

The train rocketed through Mumbai, north toward the suburbs. It stopped every few minutes and a mad rush ensued at the doorways. A stream of beggars moved through, including an exotic, sharp-featured woman with skin like mahogany and long black braids woven with marigolds and a red bindi the size of a quarter on her forehead. She wore a tight gold sari and a gold ring in her nose. Nasirbhai gave her a coin and I followed. She blessed us, touching our foreheads. There was something strange and beautiful about her. “A man,” said Nasirbhai.

A man and little girl squeezed through and came to rest, standing, at the end of the bench. Nasirbhai touched the shoulder of the man seated on the end. He ignored Nasirbhai, who tapped again, harder, motioned with his hand to move. Nasirbhai had the look; you didn’t mess with him. The man moved, the woman next to him moved, the whole organism squished more closely together to produce another six inches for the girl to sit.

Nearing Dadar station, we began working our way back toward the doorway. Nasirbhai pulled me tight against the walls; we were in a dense crush, the doorways open, people hanging out. “You get ready,” he said. As the train slowed, people ran up toward the doors, started grabbing the handles and swinging in—but there was nowhere to go, we were packed and already pushing out—and before we stopped the edges piled out, and we lunged and leapt onto the concrete. “I had a friend,” Nasirbhai said, as we headed to a tea stand, “who chewed tobacco. He had to spit and when he leaned out to spit, his head hit a pillar and it was his last spit.”

We moved to another platform over a bridge and steps that were shoulder-to-shoulder with people. Sometimes, Nasirbhai said, men just walked up and down the stairs in the crush feeling women. “They go up and down ten times. I don’t understand it, but women, they get fucked. In India, if there weren’t red-light districts, women would not survive.”

We boarded again, this time staying near the open door.
DO NOT LEAN OUT OF RUNNING TRAIN AS IT IS DANGEROUS AND CAN BE FATAL
, read a sign. Which was like telling the ocean not to leak into a wooden ship. I leaned out, feeling a constant pressure on my back, a wall pushing against me that required resisting at all times. Electrical poles whipped by just six inches away. We cut through slums and past crumbling buildings, black with mold and dripping open pipes, makeshift tents of plastic tarp and string and old tires a foot from the train whipping by. Men and women dozed on charpoys—wooden beds—and cooked over open braziers two feet away.

At Thane station I noticed two battered and dented aluminum stretchers leaning against the wall outside the stationmaster’s office. “We have an average of ten deaths a month within seven kilometers of this station,” said Miland Salke, Kandivali’s deputy stationmaster, below a hand-lettered sign:
LIST OF HOSPITALS AND UNITS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF KANDIVALI
. He shrugged, waggled his head. Today, he said without emotion or amazement, there had been three accidents. Just outside of the station a man had walked up to the tracks and then, at the right moment, laid his head down on the hot steel. He died instantly. A suicide. At 1:00 a.m., nine hours before, the last Western Line train of the night slid into Kandivali Station and cut a fifty-five-year-old man into two pieces. He was trying to cross the tracks. And a few hours later, as another Central Line train pulled into Thane, the crowd ejected a young man out the door. I could feel it, had just felt it as we’d pulled into the station like a watermelon seed squeezed between your fingers. He, too, died instantly.

It was now rush hour, and after another round of chai we prepared for battle. Passengers ten deep waited on the platform stretched out over 100 yards, the women—a riot of swirling purples and blues and golds, of black braids and golden bracelets and bangles and nose rings—in their own group, angling for the “ladies’” cars. A train came—they came in fast. It was full, packed, not an inch to spare. The crowd became one again. A thing. It moved forward. Left. Right. Slowly at first; you couldn’t know, after all, where the open doorways would pause.