Around India in 80 Trains

Prologue

25 November 2009

London had never looked so grey. From the eighth-floor windows of TIME magazine’s Southwark offices the city’s skyline was spiked with cranes, aerials and chimneys unfurling charcoal plumes. Even Westminster’s spires, normally bouncing back glimmers of winter sun, had disappeared under the late-November fog.

Shivering beneath the air vent I turned back to my computer and scrolled through an article detailing how India’s domestic airlines could now reach 80 cities. Intrigued, I printed out a map of the country and pored over the airline routes. They were impressive, but nowhere near as much as the railway network, which ran the length and breadth of the country, embroidering the tips of its landmass. I scanned the map, taking in the extent to which the railways covered the country. It was almost 20 years since my family had tried to move back to India to settle, but after spending two traumatic years in Madras we had made a hasty retreat home to England. India and I had parted on bad terms and little more than the occasional family wedding had succeeded in tempting me back.

As I stared out at the skies, sombre at 10am, India’s sunnier climes were an inviting prospect. I had barely stretched a toe beyond Madras and Hyderabad where my extended family lived, and always knew my curiosity about the rest of the country would get the better of me. So far every trip back had involved frog-hopping from one relative’s house to the next, having my cheeks pinched, marvelling at my cousins’ increasing waistlines while they frowned at my bones, and flying out as fast as I had arrived, with a suitcase full of murukkus. But I had never seen India as a tourist. If I was to go back and give it a real chance after 20 years, what was the best way? Leaving a gargantuan carbon footprint behind 80 flights was hardly the right way to go. As I traced the railway lines with a finger, an idea began to form in my mind. I called out to my colleague across the desk.

‘Willy-Lee, what do you think of travelling around India in 80 trains?’

He glanced at the diagonals of rain spattering the windows and put on an oversize pair of Dior sunglasses, flipping his scarf over one shoulder.

‘You should so go.’

That evening I stayed late after work and trawled Amazon for travelogues on India’s railways. While there were almost 3,000 books relating to the history, modernisation, finances and, of course, the British hand in building the railways, few were personal accounts. Both Rudyard Kipling and Paul Theroux had covered segments, and Michael Palin had endured a few journeys in his version of Around the World in 80 Days. But with the exception of Peter Riordan, a journalist from New Zealand, it seemed that nobody had recently written about a solo journey around India by train. As I gathered my things and waved to Willy-Lee, who was transcribing an interview with Dame Vera Lynn and staring mournfully at the clock, I wondered whether there was a reason for this: were the railways too dangerous? Maybe those who had tried to circle the country by train had fallen ill, been mugged, or died along the way before anyone could hear about their adventures. Still, the thrill lay in the uncertainty of it all.

Of the two years I had spent in India, my fondest memories were of the trains: tucked up in a cosy, curtained cabin aboard the Pandian Express to visit my brother at his boarding school. I could close my eyes to the heat and horrors of Madras and open them as the Palani Hills rose through the dawn haze. Trains were my escape, my ticket out of the city. They allowed me to curl up in comfort as my surroundings slipped away. Unlike air travel, a cramped, clinical affair conducted in recycled air, causing bad tempers and bad breath, train travel invited me to participate. I could sit in the doorway, thundering across rivers instead of pressing a forehead to a grimy oval window, watching them snake silently below. Since 1853 when the British waved off the first passenger train from Bombay to Thane, the network had rippled out across the country earning the nickname, ‘The Lifeline of the Nation’. Trains carry over 20 million passengers every day along a route of 64,000km, ploughing through cities, crawling past villages, climbing up mountains and skimming along coasts. Eighty train journeys up, down and across India would, I hoped, lift the veil on a country that had become a stranger to me.

There was just one issue to address: I needed a travelling companion. India was not the safest place for a single girl to travel alone and while I was prepared to go by myself, some company was preferable. While hunting for the right candidate, I began hankering after books featuring Indian train travel. As I lay in bed one night reading Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, I realised that Phileas Fogg only decides to embark upon his journey after reading an article in The Daily Telegraph announcing that a section of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway has been opened between Rothal and Allahabad, thereby reducing the time taken to circle the globe. The birth of the Indian Railways had clearly been an integral addition to global travel. My eyes began to close as I reached the point where Fogg’s manservant, Passepartout, wanders into a temple, not realising that Christians are not allowed in: ‘He looked up to behold three enraged priests, who forthwith fell upon him; tore off his shoes, and began to beat him with loud, savage exclamations.’

Yawning, I wondered if things were still the same. I was not religious in the slightest, but remembered English friends being made to wait outside certain South Indian temples while we nosed around. Slotting a bookmark into the page, I flipped off the light and turned over, suddenly jealous of Phileas Fogg. As much as his hapless companion was becoming more of a hindrance than a help, at least he had someone to accompany him. My search for a travel buddy had proven useless, that is, until the following morning.

By some twist of fate, an email arrived from a friend of a friend. He had recently taken voluntary redundancy and was planning on travelling around Southeast Asia using his pay package. As an added bonus, he was also a part-time wedding photographer, and wanted to expand his portfolio with travel photography. Over scrambled eggs and coffee we discussed the trip. He was easy-going and smiled a lot. Pleased to have a ready-made project to walk into, he offered to accompany me for the full four months. We parted ways and I headed to the Tube, confident and happy that I had found the right man for the job.

In Around the World in 80 Days, Jean Passepartout claims that his surname has clung to him due to his natural aptness for going out of one business and into another and has abandoned his own country of France for England. Passe-partout—the French phrase for ‘all-purpose’—seemed the perfect nickname for my new companion. Twelve years ago he had abandoned his own country of Norway for England, and had now left a job in sales to pursue a career in photography. Less manservant and more travel buddy, his remit now extended to being my personal bodyguard and friend for our journey around India in 80 trains.

A week before Christmas, on one of London’s most glorious winter mornings, Passepartout and I found ourselves outside a little office on Wembley Park Drive. Low sunshine flashed off windows trimmed with icicles as we stamped powdery snow off our boots and went in to meet Shankar Dandapani, the UK representative of the Indian Railways. The room was hung with a magnificent map of India and posters of Rajasthani moustaches and pagris. It was furnished with three school desks with flip-up tops, at which the three of us sat in a row sipping tea—Shankar in the middle. He picked up the piece of paper on which I had listed a series of trains and turned it over inquisitively while I sweated under my roll-neck dress.

‘What is this?’ he asked.

‘A list of trains.’

‘There are only nine.’

‘I know. We were hoping you might be able to recommend some others.’

‘Are you doing 80 individually named trains, or 80 journeys?’

Passepartout and I looked at each other like a pair of dunces.

‘I suggest you do 80 journeys, or it could become difficult to find individual trains to cover certain areas.’ Scanning the list, he recoiled, then turned over the page and began to draw columns that he titled ‘scenic’, ‘toy train’, ‘luxury’, ‘Rajdhani’, ‘Shatabdi’. ‘Okay, so you have already organised the Indian Maharaja train yourself, so I suggest the following …’

Within two minutes the list had grown to almost 50 trains long. We  leant in, watching with amazement as Shankar annotated a number of the journeys with ‘waterfalls’, ‘beautiful from Goa to Londa’ and ‘nice interiors’.

‘Have you done these journeys?’ I asked.

‘Many,’ he replied, handing over the paper. ‘Right, 50 is enough for now. You can work out the other 30, most of which will be connectors between each of these.’

Finally, Shankar issued us with the most important equipment for the journey: two 90-day IndRail passes. They were parrot-green, as flimsy as tissue paper and so outdated that the original price read $300, and now contained a slash across the middle, with $530 written over the top in Biro. The passes were only available to foreign tourists and allowed us to travel on any train in second-tier class or below. All we had to do was make reservations at the station or online. Once they expired, we would have to buy tickets for any remaining journeys.

‘Take good care of them’, Shankar warned, ‘if you lose them, you can’t be issued with replacements. And have fun!’ he added, as we waved from the doorway.

Outside, we looked at one another and laughed nervously. Passepartout held up Shankar’s paper and examined the list. ‘Wow, I think he just saved us from turning this trip into a total disaster.’

Christmas and New Year came and went. Despite the high numbers of January de-toxers, the upstairs section of The Crown & Two Chairmen in Soho was jammed with well-wishers waving us off. Almost 40 friends crammed in around beer-covered tables. If this had been my birthday, six dependable friends would have turned up on time. Another seven or eight would have arrived in stages throughout the night, while the rest would have texted me with last-minute cancellations. Outside the steamed-up windows it was snowing heavily. Tubes would inevitably be cancelled and buses delayed, yet the overarching possibility that I might die in a train crash had brought everyone out of the woodwork. At least I knew my funeral would have a good turnout.

Beaming at faces I had not seen for months, I clutched a handful of Good Luck! cards and strained to hear conversation over the din. A pair of cold hands pressed my hot face from behind and my friend Sarah clambered over a few bags and coats, unwinding her scarf, and slid into the seat next to me. She sat upright like a meerkat, glanced around, then hunched her shoulders and whispered:

‘Is that the photographer over there?’

I looked across to where he was chatting with his friends. ‘Yup.’

‘Cute.’

‘Not my type.’

‘What, tall, blonde-ish Scandinavian isn’t your type?’

‘No, it’s not that. I just don’t fancy him at all. He’s absolutely lovely, but that’s it.’

Sarah raised an eyebrow and yanked open a bag of McCoy’s. ‘Whatever, you’ll email me in a month and tell me I was right.’

‘I will not.’

‘Well, you’ll Facebook me then.’

I poked a crisp at her. ‘I know everyone thinks that’s going to happen, but it’s not. I just don’t see him like that. In fact, the main reason I’m happy to go away with him is precisely for that reason.’

‘Which is?’

‘I’ve saved up, I’ve worked really hard to figure this out, and I don’t want it ruined for something frivolous.’

Sarah gave me the kind of smile reserved for naughty kids. It had a hint of I-don’t-believe-you at the edges, but she relented. ‘Anyway, you might not have any ideas, but I wouldn’t say the same for him.’

‘Well, that’s certainly not my plan,’ I assured her, then changed the subject. ‘Anyway, I’m really going to miss you.’

‘Yes, I’m sure while you’re hanging out of train doorways, your thoughts will be of me sitting at my desk in East Acton opposite Sexist Chris talking about "scones and jem".’ She finished the end of her pint and gave me a big beery hug. ‘Have an amazing time, love.’

As the evening went on, family, friends and old colleagues flitted in and out of the pub depositing large glasses of malbec under my nose. By the time I and a loyal group of stragglers tumbled out into the snow at closing time, it was safe to say that we were more than a little tipsy. Icy air tweaked the end of my nose as I swayed happily across the road amid the yells, hoots and arguments over the nearest kebab house. The troopers traipsed up Dean Street towards a club where someone claimed to be able to get us all in for free, while others slunk off to the Tube. Passepartout decided to call it a night.

‘See you at the airport, then,’ he smiled.

The snow crunched underfoot and the sky glowed orange as I rocked back onto my heels and reached up to give him a quick hug. Red wine plumped my veins and snowflakes landed on my eyelashes as he turned to kiss me. It tasted of his cigarettes.

Shocked, I pulled back, as he gave me a lop-sided grin before turning and walking up the street. Suddenly sober, I closed my eyes as huge snowflakes fell all around. One word filled my mind: shit.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

1 | All Aboard the Insomnia Express

On 11 January at 5:33pm precisely, the Chennai-Kanyakumari Express pulled out of Chennai Egmore station and began its 13-hour journey to the southernmost tip of the country. We were not on board.

Having failed to reserve tickets in time we were sitting at a friend’s kitchen table a few miles down the road in Chetpet, nursing two bottles of Thums Up and wondering what to do. Taking trains in India involves a process wholly different from taking trains in England. At home it is not uncommon to arrive at London Euston 10 minutes before a Virgin Pendolino departs to Birmingham New Street, slip a credit card into a machine, grab a ham and cheese baguette from Upper Crust, and hop onto the train with a saver return ticket in hand. The booking system in India opens 90 days in advance and is instantly flooded with reservations, building up endless waiting lists—particularly during festivals and through the wedding season.

This, we knew.

But our plan for the next few months was to have no plan. India is not a country that lends itself well to organisation and punctuality, so to try and incorporate any system to the contrary is like trying to force a square peg into a round hole and will only result in frustration or an arterial embolism. However, it was now the festival of Pongal, the Tamilian equivalent of harvest time, and trains in the South had been booked up for weeks. Fortunately Indian Railways has a useful system in place for latecomers, emergencies and the disorganised. It was into this last category that we fell. Two days before a train departs, a handful of remaining ‘tatkal’ tickets is released at 8am on a first-come, first-served basis. They include a small surcharge but are so sought after that people camp out in queues overnight, or lurk online at 7:59am, fingers poised over the ‘Quick Book’ link.

The first destination on our list was Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of the railways—and the country—where the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal all meet. A total solar eclipse was expected by noon on 15 January, and astronomers had indicated that Kanyakumari would be a prime viewing position. Passepartout was desperate to photograph the spectacle, which meant that we needed to head to the station in a few hours to begin queuing for tickets that we had no hope of securing.

We were currently staying in the home of Imthiaz and Sweetie Pasha. They were my parents’ closest friends, who were nothing less than surrogate parents to me, so I trusted they would offer some sound advice—without laughing at me for my failure to book the first train. Reaching across the table, I picked up the internal phone and dialled up to their room. Imthiaz answered:

‘Yes.’

‘Uncle Imthi, it’s me.’

‘How are you, dear?’

‘We have a bit of a problem, I can’t get those tickets to Kanyakumari and I’m …’

‘Leave it with me, dear.’

Click.

The next morning, over a breakfast of papayas and egg dosai in the garden, I spied Subbu, the resident Jack-of-all-trades, hovering at the corner. He approached as though trying not to wake a sleeping dog and handed over two tickets to Nagercoil, a short train ride from Kanyakumari. He saluted and crept backwards, shaking his head, then ran down the driveway. It turned out that after I had spoken to Imthiaz, he had made a phone call to Subbu, who cycled to the station. There, he paid an opportunistic auto rickshaw driver to stand in the queue while he came back home and slept, returning at 8am to buy our tickets. Since my last dealings with India, it seemed that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

In 1976 my parents left Madras and arrived in South Shields in the north of England as a couple of newly married junior doctors. Two children and 15 years later, my dad was lured back by unfulfilled promises, returning with us to Madras in 1991. Leaving behind a life of semi-detached suburban comfort and a bay-window view of the Derbyshire Dales, he now awoke to a balcony view of Elliot’s Beach and rats eating sandalwood soap in the bathroom. He drove to work in a borrowed 1960s Fiat, taking a packed lunch of Amul cheese sandwiches in a kid’s Virgin Atlantic shoulder bag, once filled with my crayons and colouring books.

Thrilled by the sunshine, beach apartment and mangoes for breakfast, I joined an elitist school, aged nine. Mocked for having an English accent, laughed at for wearing the wrong shade of blue school skirt, and walloped for contesting the Indian penchant for mugging and vomiting up reams of text, I soon realised that the honeymoon period was over. One day, while waiting outside the staff room, I overheard the teachers discussing my mum—‘that firang woman who wears T-shirts and jeans and drives her own car’. It made me sad.

I was sad when Pal-Ma, the old milk lady with red-rimmed teeth, was beaten up by the drunk man upstairs and when posters of Rajiv Gandhi’s blown-up body were plastered all over town—a collage of his bald spot and Lotto trainers. I was scared when a man tipped a severed human head out of his lungi onto the local police chief’s desk, and when the retired colonel across the road—who had offered to rig a cable at night to steal the neighbour’s Star TV connection—watched us through a blind on his balcony when my mum was out. I missed home.

I missed getting out the wooden sledge in winter, which our neighbour had carved when we were tiny. I missed drinking water from the tap. I missed the warm hamsters we had left behind. I missed watching Simon and the Witch after school. I missed the taste of McVitie’s Chocolate Digestives. I missed seeing my parents smiling. But most of all, I missed my big brother. Too old to catch up on nine years’ worth of Hindi lessons, Rahul, aged 13, was soon sent to an American international school in a desolate hill station, where clouds came into the dorm rooms, and anybody’s parents could turn up and teach. One morning he awoke to find a rat had chewed off the sponge from his Sony headphones to line its nest. But we were not the only ones struggling to acclimatise.

My mum paid bribes to have a gas cylinder installed in the kitchen, waited eight months for milk coupons and endured Hollywood car-chases around the city, tailed by men wanting to buy her Mercedes or borrow it for their daughters’ weddings. And across town, my dad faced his own battles. At work, during moments of quiet, he occupied himself by taking swabs of air conditioners in the intensive care unit, the specimens returning from the labs with diseases he had only ever read about as a student. His findings were responded to with little more than a shrug and a ‘so what?’. But after discovering that the hearts of deceased patients were being illegally removed and sold on, and the holes stuffed with cotton wool, he drew the line. This was not a country where he wanted his family to live. In 1993, he repacked his boxes and his brood and left for good.

Returning to Madras was like being reunited with an ex-lover. On the surface we were friends, but while wounds may heal, their scars run deep. We had seen little of each other since 1993 and in that time Madras had adopted a new name, expanded its waistline and grown into a monster of a metropolis that I barely recognised. But like an ex-lover, it still smelt the same. On the drive from the airport, a heady mix of diesel, waste and noxious fumes from the Cooum river was occasionally delivered from evil by top notes of sea air and jasmine swinging from the rear-view mirror. The Honda’s headlamps bounced over bundles of bodies asleep by the roadside and my heart tightened. By the time I dragged my bag into my room, my hair was stuck to the back of my neck, my skin was clammy with grime and studded with mosquito bites. India wastes no time in extending its welcome.

To understand India you have to see it, hear it, breathe it and feel it. Living through the good, the bad and the ugly is the only way to know where you fit in and where India fits into you. Once upon a time we had clashed. But we had both grown up and changed. India in particular was now undergoing a seismic shift, swaying in a constant state of flux where everyone who arrived or left—or who had always lived there—was forced to reassess their relationship with the country. India Version 2.0 was now up and running. Indians championed their nation as a global superpower, expounding its potential to overtake everyone as the fastest-growing economy. Yet for all its advances and progression, this was still a country where, in a village in Orissa, a 2-year-old boy could be married off to a dog called Jyoti to ward off evil spirits and ease the bad omen of his rotting tooth.

With Subbu’s blessed tickets in hand, Passepartout and I finished breakfast and set off to Landmark to buy a map of the railways and a stack of pins to pepper the proposed route. Landmark was one of my favourite bookshops which sold embroidered notebooks and jewelled pens and was crammed with shelf after shelf of multicoloured spines. It was where I used to buy Archie Double Digests as a kid. Sweetie had come along in a cloud of Bulgari and was pacing in the aisles, desperate to see a new film called 3 Idiots based on the book, Five Point Someone, by Chetan Bhagat. It had just come out at the cinema and was enjoying rave reviews, so she needed to see it to keep up with the chat at her bridge games.

‘Come, darling!’ she urged, waving a frayed map of the railways in my face. ‘This will do.’

‘It’s from 2002.’

‘Doesn’t matter, all your tracks will look the same.’

‘I’m not sure that’s a very good idea,’ I argued, as Passepartout glanced up over a copy of In Spite of the Gods with a look of disbelief.

‘Darling, after one train I guarantee you people will come home.’ She tried to stifle a giggle, then gave up and howled with laughter into her dupatta.

With an outdated map of the railways under one arm, a stack of books under the other and a growing sense of nausea, we left Landmark and embarked upon our first Hindi-film experience.

Sweetie and her friends had arranged to meet for a catch-up. A cinema seemed a strange place to do this; the Madras Club or perhaps a Café Coffee Day would have been a more suitable choice. And yet it seemed that everyone else had had the same idea. Throughout the first half hour members of the audience chatted away to one another, and a few phone calls were made in the row in front. Nobody batted an eyelid. As Kareena Kapoor came floating onto the screen in all her pale-skinned, green-eyed beauty, the audience cheered, clapped and whistled, a few phones reappearing to take photographs. During the interval people disappeared for coffee, spied more friends and began to climb across the seats for a gossip over ice cream. My Hindi was basic at best, but both Passepartout and I had followed the pantomime nature of the film with relative ease until the cast switched from delivering a baby via a webcam, to appearing in Leh, involved in a discussion over mistaken identity. The film ended with a song and dance rendition of the theme song, Aal Izz Well! and we filed out of the cinema hoping that the song title would set a precedent for the journey to come.

The following evening was the eve of departure. I was jittery as hell, nibbling my nails and nipping back and forth to the loo in a panic. I sat down on the lid and glanced around the marble bathroom, taking a mental photograph. It would be a while before I would see toilet roll holders, embroidered hand towels and old copies of Femina. But the more pressing concern was Passepartout. During the flight over I had brought up the kiss.

‘Can’t blame a guy for trying,’ he grinned.

‘Look, we’ve got four months together and a tough job ahead of us, I don’t think this is a sensible route to go down.’

‘Don’t worry I’ll behave,’ he promised, fiddling with the seat back.

I raised an eyebrow.

‘I promise,’ he added, before going back to his book.

Since then he had said no more and I now decided it was no longer worth worrying about. I washed my face, swiped a couple of toilet rolls for the journey and went off to find Passepartout who was in the kitchen, entertaining the staff with photos of Mishko, his cat. I did not have the heart to tell him that they were more amused by him, than Mishko.

We spread out the outdated map across the dining table as a warm fog of mutton biryani and saffron drifted in from the kitchen. The map gave itself up to a session of slow but determined acupuncture as we stuck pins into areas with subjects of interest: the solar eclipse in Kanyakumari; a classical dance festival in Khajuraho; the rat temple in Deshnok; the world’s first hospital train in Madhya Pradesh; commuter trains in Mumbai; the Osho ashram in Pune; temples in South India; tea estates in Assam; and Dwarka, Udhampur and Ledo—the western, northern and easternmost tips of the railways. Just as I poked a pin into Delhi to mark the railway museum, the door opened and a member of staff ushered in my old school friend Bobby, followed by his entourage.

‘Hey, we’re going to a wedding. Coming?’ he asked.

‘Whose wedding is it?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know the girl, he knows her,’ he said, pointing behind to a friend who was on an unnecessarily loud phone call. ‘Come, we’ll all go.’

‘We can’t show up uninvited to a wedding.’

‘What’s there? We’ll go, have some good biryani then go to one more at the Taj Connemara for a drink.’

‘You can’t leave in the middle of someone’s wedding!’

‘That girl’s father is a recovering alcoholic, they won’t serve liquor at the wedding. Connemara is a Punju wedding, nicely they’ll stock the bar,’ he slobbered.

Bored friends often wedding-hop in the evenings. It is a cheaper alternative to going to a bar, then a restaurant, followed by a club. It does not matter whether or not you know the bride and groom, they are unlikely to know at