The Lunatic Express (14 page)

Then, suddenly, an explosion, a riot, a volcanic eruption, a struggle balancing on the edge of life and death.

The train was slowing. People burst from the doorways and leapt into a crowd that was surging forward toward the very same door. The struggle was short and violent; you pushed, were pushed. Your body feels a crushing weight, a powerful wave at your back. You cannot stop or even pause. But your feet cannot move fast enough. You shuffle your feet forward, try to keep them under you. Your only hope is to grasp the door, a pole, a handle. Anything. There is punching. Elbows sharp in my kidneys. I see a man palm another man in the face. I am nearly at the doorway. The man in front of me falls—his body is being pushed, but his feet can’t move fast enough—they get stuck at the step up onto the train. Another man falls onto his back—this is how people are trampled to death—and I am next. I grab the edge of the door to steady myself, to resist the surging weight and wall at my back, to pull into a place where there is no room. The men will be crushed. The crowd is a spasming muscle. One of the downed men shouts. Somehow, hands reach down and pull them up. A shoe is left behind; it will never be recovered. And then we’re in. Tight, from hips to shoulders. I cannot move, but I must. To stay in the doorway is to risk death at the next station when the next violent pulse comes. “In ten years,” Nasirbhai said, “you will need helmets and football pads just to travel to work!”

It was now dark, after 8:00 p.m., and I felt exhausted. “Come,” Nasirbhai said, “I have some friends I want to see. They’re all bad guys, but they’re my family.” We jumped off the train in the Muslim neighborhood of Mumbra, grabbed an auto rickshaw, and navigated through a swirling phantasmagoria of humanity. Goats. Donkeys. Beggars cross-legged in the streets as cars and rickshaws and motorcycles careened and inched around them. Women in full black burqas. Fish sizzling on grills and dangling carcasses and dust and noise. “Ten years ago there was nothing here; Mumbra was a village,” Nasirbhai said. “There was a single bullock cart and you had to make a reservation if you needed it to take you anywhere.” Now there were one and a half million people living in four square kilometers.

We emerged from the rickshaw at a concrete apartment building, and I followed Nasirbhai down an alley of rubble, the building completely dark, without electricity. We wound through narrow concrete halls and up concrete stairways, and came to a one-room apartment full of shadows and dancing candlelight. There was one chair, a television, a mattress pushed up against the wall, and a poster of Mecca, and three men sat cross-legged on the floor. One of them was old, with a single tooth, wearing a skullcap, and was called Nima—grandfather, said Nasirbhai—introducing me to his son-in-law’s father and his sons. As they talked in Hindi, someone brought out a chillum—a hash pipe—and a ball of moist Kashmiri hash, which Nasirbhai rolled and mixed with tobacco in the palm of his hand, back and forth, back and forth, and packed it into the pipe. “I don’t drink or smoke anymore, since my mother died. It makes me bad; I want to fight.” He took a square of white muslin, wet it, squeezed it, and wet it again and squeezed it tight and wrapped it around the mouthpiece and we smoked, except for Nasirbhai, the pipe passing around, as a little girl wandered in—the old man’s great-granddaughter—and plunked down in his lap and two generations of the family got stoned together, and the hash was good and sweet and the talk and language rolled and I wondered where I was and how exactly I’d gotten here and the world seemed so varied and rich and beyond my comprehension. We smoked a couple more bowls, the pipe passing round and round, and by the time Nasirbhai and I were back on the train heading downtown, it was nearly empty, just a big steel tube clacking and rattling, the wind hot and smoky at the door, fires burning on the tracks illuminating the dim shadows of hundreds of people walking and squatting in the night.

N
ASIRBHAI KNOCKED ON MY DOOR
at six-thirty the next morning in order to hit the morning rush hour. “Come,” he said. “I have been up since five and we must have breakfast and tea.” We entered a café full of round wooden-legged tables topped with thick marble slabs, the walls covered with mirrors, the waiters all in dhotis and caps, with beards. “This place is very old,” Nasirbhai said as we sipped tea. “It’s been here since I was a boy and it is just the same.”

We spent the morning fighting the crowds on the Church-gate line and, near noon, Nasirbhai took me to St. George’s hospital, around the corner from Victoria Terminus. “Let’s find some bodies,” he said, “some victims of the trains, and you can see for yourself.” That seemed weird and impossible, but he insisted, said he had a friend at the hospital who’d help. The hospital was a huge block of stone, built by the Raj in 1908, with arched windows open to the dust and heat. We stood in an open hall—hushed—as ceiling fans beat the humid air and the twittering of birds wafted in. A man sat in a wheelchair, his head swathed in bandages like a character in a movie; another man lay on a stretcher. Nasirbhai talked to people, stalked the halls and said his friend wasn’t here—he had been injured on the train! It seemed a joke, but Nasirbhai didn’t acknowledge the irony. “But don’t worry,” he said. “I am known and people will see me and come.” Which people did, approaching him and whispering in his ear, until Nasirbhai barked “Come!” and took off out the front door.

We padded down the steps, walked around the hospital and down a cobblestone alley that turned into a crowded row of shacks and houses running alongside the hospital. Big black crows hopped and cawed; mangy dogs covered in scars, with drooping teats, lolled in the sun. Smoke. The reek of garbage. Geese and roosters pecked at the heaps of trash. We came to an eight-foot-high concrete wall, mottled black with mold and soot. A steel gate, crooked on one hinge, lay open. The flagstone courtyard of a small concrete building with a corrugated roof piled with broken chairs, the limbs of bare trees, a couple of rubber tires. Those big black crows everywhere. Watching. Waiting. Cawing. This was the hospital’s mortuary.

Two men were sitting on a wooden bench. Nasirbhai strode up to them and spoke in rapid Hindi. “Sit down, Carl,” he said, introducing me to Santosh R. Siddu and his son, Sanjay. Santosh, fifty-five, had a long brown face and a prominent, almost Roman nose, a thin mustache. He wore unhemmed plaid shorts, battered flip-flops, and a Nike golf cap atop his gray and orange-colored hair. His son was twenty-five, and sported a pair of hip, rimless glasses. Nasirbhai dug into his pockets and pulled out a chillum and a round pea of hash, and the Siddus passed the pipe around in the heat and sun and eerie cawing. When we were done Nasirbhai said, “They do the postmortems for the hospital and they will tell you anything; you can ask them anything and they will show you anything.”

I followed Santosh inside: the room was twenty feet square, unpainted concrete, black with age and mold. Two marble tables stood in the middle; haphazardly spread across one of them, and on shelves in a corner, were plastic jars. “Spleen,” Santosh said, pointing to one that looked like a sponge soaked in blood. “Intestines. Heart. All of these are filled with body parts.” A white enamel tray held a stainless-steel hammer and chisel, a pair of scissors. They had dark stains, bits of something. I had a feeling of dread; it felt hot and cold at the same time. “We have a minimum of two or three bodies every day from the trains,” Santosh said. “Maybe seventy-five percent are unknown, and sometimes the bodies are so destroyed we can’t tell much. Sometimes suicide, sometimes they’re drunk, sometimes they are old and get jarred so much in the crowd they have a heart attack.” A goose honked and poked its head into the room. Death—raw, banal death—hung in the air. So much ceremony surrounded death, gave it meaning, raised it to sadness and glory, and nowhere was that truer than in India. Except this felt like I was seeing the man behind the curtain. One minute you were riding a train to work or to hang out with your family, the next you were cut up on a marble slab in a hot, dirty concrete room. Dead. No glory. No future. A piece of meat. Santosh poked around in a corner piled with papers and pulled out a log book. “Today Balkishan Kakoram. Forty-seven years old. Hindu. He was traveling and fell. He is railway postmortem number 290.” That was, the 290th victim within eight to ten kilometers of the hospital this year. He had died an hour and a half before our visit. “The station sweepers take the body and the railway police bring it here.” In the last twenty-four hours there had been four deaths. One had lost his arm, two their heads.

Santosh led me out of the room, to a tiny antechamber with a corroded steel door with a refrigerator-like handle. He pulled it open. The smell of death made me gag. I almost vomited. A dark room. Bodies lay on shelves. A crumpled, bent, contorted figure lay in a pool of liquid on the floor. Meat. Human meat caught in the mad wheels of the daily grind. A commute that chewed you up and spit you out, so mammoth an assembly line of human movement going so fast that not everyone could keep up.

The crows cawed. Santosh shrugged. “One of them, a man, his whole right side is gone; his liver is gone.”

A call came; a doctor was heading over from the hospital to watch Santosh perform the postmortem on Balkishan Kakoram. He threw on a plastic apron and some rubber gloves and we went outside. He finished quickly. Fifteen minutes later he came out and we squatted in the alley and drank tea, and father and son smoked another bowl of hash. Three small boys played a game of cricket with a chipped bat against the mortuary wall. “He went for his job and didn’t reach his office. The train came into VT station at nine-thirty this morning and he jumped off but he jumped the wrong way and his ankle got caught and he broke it and fell and hit his head.” Father and son were close; they leaned on each other, bumped bodies, held hands, draped their arms around each other. And they lived next door to the gruesome place. “He fell hard; his brain was full of blood.” Sanjay was twenty-five and would take over from his father, who’d been conducting this grim business for twenty-eight years. “I can do ten a day,” Sanjay said, taking a long draw off the pipe. “But some bodies come in decomposed and there are many maggots and gangrene and my father has to do it. I can’t. The bodies smell so bad I faint.”

Another round of the pipe; Nasirbhai knew his stuff, knew how to make people talk. “But it is hard, you can’t bear it,” said Santosh. “Any normal person would faint within minutes.”

“We drink together,” said Sanjay.

“I must eat after a postmortem,” said Santosh. “Meat. Lots of meat and drink!” They jostled each other, laughed loudly. But it was a mask. “Without drink,” said Santosh, “you cannot do this job.”

“When I travel on the train,” Sanjay said, taking a long hit off the pipe, “I am very cautious.”

I
T WAS TIME FOR ME
to leave Mumbai; I wanted more crowds and decided I’d push on to Bangladesh via a train to Kolkata. Nasirbhai said he’d get my ticket, and late that afternoon I hopped on the back of his motorcycle and we ripped through the streets of Colaba. Every streetcorner had groups of men and boys lounging, sitting on cars and motorcycles and curbs, and Nasirbhai roared from corner to corner, pausing, talking, introducing me. There was an army here, just sitting and waiting and watching, and soon Nasirbhai had them getting me a ticket. I paid in advance, and he said my ticket would appear at my hotel that evening. “Don’t worry,” Nasirbhai said. “You will get your ticket. They wouldn’t dare not come through.”

Which they did, and at five the next morning I threaded past rows of bodies wrapped in blankets and scarves lying on the sidewalk, to VT. The waiting room was a mass, a formless huddle of color and sleeping bodies. There were hundreds, all packed close into a square, touching; since Indonesia I had this increasing picture of the world as a place with masses and masses of people huddled together, touching, always touching each other. Nobody seemed to mind; they expected it, felt comfortable with it—craved it, in fact. I had asked for fourth class, but it turned out my ticket was in third, technically known as non-air-conditioned three tier, which was an open space of eight bunks. The train was battered, dented, scraped, with bars on the windows and swept clean, as all things in India are. I showed my ticket to people and they pointed me onward, until I found the right place, which was soon filled with five of us, as men chained and padlocked their bags to steel wire rings beneath the bottom benches. We pulled out at six on the dot and fifteen minutes later hit another station, where more people piled on, three women in yellow and purple saris, with a small barefoot girl, squeezed onto the bench next to me. A man asked to see my ticket; suddenly he started yelling at another man sitting on a bench with his legs extended. He yelled back; an explosion erupted; the man grabbed the seated guy’s knapsack and threw it to the ground, grabbed the guy’s lapels, pushed him violently. They both sat, fuming, and the young one said to me, in English, “This is ridiculous!” We passed fields, the shiny brown backsides of people relieving themselves, some of the 600 million Indians without toilets. Cattails. The sky white. Rice fields between dikes. A searing, dusty wind blew in through the window.

Someone shook my shoulder. I woke with a start, lost for a minute, unsure of where I was. The conductor, in a black blazer and white pants. “Ticket,” he said. I handed it to him. He studied it. “Your ticket is not right!” He pointed to the man who’d had the violent outburst. “I will reaffirm and return,” he said, marching off. Fifteen minutes later he came back. “Your ticket is affirmed,” he said, “but it is not for here. You must move.”

I pulled my bags from under the bench. People stared, as I squeezed and bumped through crowded aisles down six cars.

“Are you Washington?” said a man with a gray mustache, glasses, and gray pinstriped slacks, his bare feet wiggling in the air.

My ticket said where I lived instead of my name.

“You are late, but you are welcome!”

I squeezed in. Directly across from me sat a young couple, she in gauzy saffron sari and shawl that covered her hair, with a gold nose ring; he with a small beard and thick, heavy lips. They eyed me suspiciously, four brown eyes burrowing into me. The train rattled and shook, the noise roaring, wind pouring in, sometimes thick with the smoke of burning trash and burning fields. Goats munched on stubble. Cotton fields and bullock carts, a now blue sky, the endless fields and villages of mud brick of the motherland passing by hour after hour. A stream of beggars slid, skidded, and shuffled by. A man with no legs. A boy with no toes, his foot just a formless round ball. A man with no eyes in a soiled dhoti, led by a withered-looking woman singing a haunting melody. When the man with the mustache gave a coin, so did I. Chai sellers. Sellers of newspapers and magazines. I quickly became covered in dust and grime. At noon a man in a uniform came by and rattled away in fast Hindi. “Do you want lunch,” asked Mustache.