[1983]
India, one of the greatest railway nations in the world, is peculiarly visible from its railway trains. I have the idea that much of Indian life is lived within sight of the tracks or the station, and often next to the tracks, or inside the station. The railway is part of Indian culture. It was one of the greatest imperial achievements, and now – a larger system than ever – it still has the powerful atmosphere of empire about it.
People sometimes wonder how the vast overpopulated subcontinent manages to run, and even to prosper. The chief reason is the railway. Trains have been running for a hundred and thirty years, but – dusty and monumental – they often seem as ancient as India itself. In Pakistan they look like part of the landscape. An old reliable network of track brings hope to beleaguered Bangladesh.
I had happy memories of these trains, and after a ten-year absence I wanted to return and to trace a line from the Khyber Pass in Pakistan, and through India, to Chittagong in Bangladesh. I wanted to take as many trains as possible. It was to be neither a vacation nor an ordeal, but rather a kind of sedentary adventuring – an imperial progress on the railways of the old Raj.
From the corner seat in a railway car it was possible to see an enormous amount of this land; moving east from the stony cliffs of the Northwest Frontier in Pakistan, then cutting into India on an express across the Punjab and traveling up and down, linking the hill stations of Simla and Darjeeling with the long straight journeys of the plains – via Delhi, the Taj Mahal, and the holy city of Benares. After Calcutta I could nip into Bangladesh and go south to the end of the line, in Chittagong. I imagined my itinerary on a map as resembling my own elongated signature written in railway lines across the top of India.
I started from Jamrud, a deserted station, a short distance from Jamrud Fort which, having been built in 1823, is just a hundred years older than the Khyber Railway. It was an early morning in July, and very hot – the monsoon was weeks overdue.
Once a week, this train descends the 3,500 feet from the highest point of the Khyber Pass, carrying the refugees and travelers who can afford the seven rupee train fare. The train is required to climb such steep inclines that it is powered by two steam engines – one at the front and one at the rear of the five coaches – both belching smoke and whistling as it makes the journey to and from Landi Kotal.
‘Once there was no trouble here,’ a man told me as we clattered across the plain. ‘There was no water, no trees. Only small villages. Then a dam was built and water came to the valley in a stream, and since then there has been constant fighting.’
Tempers were very bad: the months of drought had scorched the face of the land and made it so hot that people had moved out of their houses and set up their string beds under trees – I counted fourteen beds under the dusty leaves of one large tree. To cool themselves, men sat on the banks of the stream trickling beside the railway tracks and they chatted, keeping their feet in the water.
There were over thirty-five thousand people in the Kacha Garhi Refugee Camp, and nearly as many in the one at Nasserbad not far away. Driven from their homes in Afghanistan by the war, they lay in hammocks, they cooked under trees, they waited for the daily shipment of food; they watched the train go by.
Across the ten miles of gravel are the high gray-brown mountains which mark the border of Afghanistan, and the black smoking train makes its way across the dead land.
This was always a tribal area, the people were always dressed like this, and always armed, the train was always pulled by smoking screeching steam engines, and the night-time noises were always human voices and the clopping hooves of the tonga ponies, and when – hours late – the train pulls into Peshawar Cantonment Station, the passengers hurry in various directions – to ‘Lower Class Exit’ or ‘First Class Exit,’ to ‘Woman’s Waiting Room’ or ‘Waiting Room for Gents.’ It is pitch dark and a hundred and ten degrees. As in the old days most people make straight for the bazaar.
‘This is the Qissa Khawani Bazaar,’ said Ziarat Gul in Peshawar. Mr Gul was a powerfully-built and kindly soul who was known locally as ‘Gujjar’ – ‘Buffalo Man.’ He was pointing at a labyrinth of alleys too narrow for anything but pony carts.
‘This means “The Storytellers’ Bazaar”. In the old times all the kafilas (caravans) came from Persia and Russia and Afghanistan, here to Peshawar. They told stories of their journeys.’
But Peshawar is once again a great destination. Now the travelers are Afghan refugees and the stories in the bazaar concern the heroism of Pathans ambushing Soviet convoys. There are said to be more than a million of them, and many of them bring goods and food to sell at the bazaar – carpets and jewelry, embroidery, leatherwork, cartridge belts, pistol holders, rifle slings, almonds, dates, prunes, and fresh fruit. The bazaar has never been busier or more full of hawkers, and everywhere are the beaky craggy faces of the travelers, the turbaned men and shrouded women, the rifles and pistols, and the tea-drinkers huddled around samovars – storytellers again.
Once I had come to Peshawar and asked for a bed-roll for the train and was told they had none. This evening I inquired again and was told they had one – but only one: ‘You may book it.’ I gladly did so and then stood with it under a whirring fan. Most of the larger railway stations in Pakistan and India have ceiling fans on the outdoor platforms, which is why the people waiting are spaced so evenly – clustered in little groups at regular intervals, and the humming fans make one feel one is trapped in a food processor.
It was an air-conditioned compartment and in its grumbling way the machinery actually worked. I was soon traveling under a bright moon through Nowshera and across the Indus River at Attock. We passed through Rawalpindi and Jhelum, too, but by then I was asleep.
Just before Wazirabad at dawn there was a knock on the door of my compartment. ‘You wanting breakfast?’
I could have been wrong of course, but it seemed to be the same brisk man who had asked the question ten years ago: it was the same bad eye, the same dirty turban, the same lined face. And the breakfast was the same – eggs, tea, bread on heavy stained crockery.
Scattered showers of the monsoon had begun to appear. They had darkened Lahore, once the princely city of Akbar and Shah Jahan, now the capital of Punjab. It was cooler here and the rice fields had water in them; planting had begun; the grass was green. Here the soil was mostly clay and so brick-works had sprung up, each one with a steeple-like chimney. Little girls, some looking as young as six or seven, were digging mud and clay out of pits for bricks and carrying it in baskets on their heads. In sharp contrast to this, little boys were playing gaily in the grass or else swimming in ditches. It is the absurd puritanism of the country that requires little girls modestly to remain clothed and do laborious work, while naked boys can frolic all the livelong day.
The decrepitude near Shahdara Bagh was interesting, because not far from Shahdara Station is one of Pakistan’s most glorious buildings, the Tomb of Jahangir, with its vast park – grander than the Shalimar Gardens – and the marble mausoleum inlaid with gems; all of it in a perfect state of preservation. Surrounded by palms, it lies outside Lahore, another marvel on the northwest railway.
When India was partitioned in 1947, so was the railway, and there were no through trains to Pakistan. But the tracks were not removed, and the steel rails still connected Wagha in Pakistan with Atari, the Indian border town. And then in 1976, the trains began to run again. Very little had changed on this line; the steam locomotives, like all steam locomotives in India, looked filthy, ancient, and reliable; they are great sooty thunder boxes, and there are eight thousand of them still operating in India; and the travelers, no matter what their religion or nationality, still privately celebrated the fact that they were Punjabis. The coaches were battered, and the train was very slow. This was the International Express.
The Customs and Immigration bottlenecks were set up there at Lahore Station – platform one – and four officials, one after the other, peered at me and said, ‘Profession?’ I said I was a writer. ‘Ah, books.’
The train left on time, which surprised me, considering that the thousand or so people on board had all had their passports stamped and their luggage examined. We traveled across a plain towards India. After an hour every man we passed wore a turban. We were nearing Amritsar, spiritual capital of the Sikhs, and we were among the great family of Singhs. Sikh is from the Sanskrit word Shishya, ‘disciple’ – they are disciples of a tradition of ten gurus, beginning with the fifteenth-century Guru Nanak who taught monotheism, espoused meditation, and opposed the Hindu caste system Sikhs herded goats, Sikhs dug in the fields, Sikhs processed the passengers on the International Express. This was Atari Station and the operation took several hours: everyone ordered off the train, everyone lined up and scrutinized, everyone ordered back on. Then the whistle blew and the black smoke darkened the sky, and we proceeded into India.
But it was not only black smoke in the sky. The clouds were the color of cast iron; they were blue-black and huge. It is usually possible in India to tell whether it will rain from the whiteness of the egrets – they look whitest when rain is due; and these dozens flying up from the rice paddies near Amritsar were brilliantly white against the dark clouds massing over us.
We arrived just before one o’clock at Amritsar, and as we pulled in, passing buffaloes and scattering the goats and ducks and children, the storm hit. It was the first rain of the monsoon – pelting gray drops, noisy and powerful and already, only minutes after it had begun, erupting from drains and streaming under the tracks.
The rain in its fury put the Indians into a good mood. It was the sunny days and blue skies – intimations of drought – that made them bad-tempered.
Because of the rain, only rickshaws were running in Amritsar. Cars lay stranded and submerged all over the inundated city. I sat inside, deafened by the rain, and studied the Indian Railways Timetable, and after a while I became curious about the route of a certain train out of Amritsar. This particular mail train left Amritsar at ten in the evening and headed south on the main line to Delhi; but halfway there it made a hairpin turn at Ambala and raced north to Kalka where, at dawn, it connected with the railcar to Simla. It was an extraordinary route – and a very fast train: instead of going to bed in the hotel, I could reserve a sleeper, and board the train, and more or less wake up in the foothills of the Himalayas, in Simla.
It was not a popular train, this Simla Mail. Its odd twisted route was undoubtedly the result of the demands of the imperial postal service, for the British regarded letter writing and mail delivery as one of the distinguishing features of any great civilization. And Indians feel pretty much the same.
‘Use the shutters,’ the ticket collector said, ‘and don’t leave any small articles lying around.’
The whistle of the Simla Mail drowned the sounds of music from the bazaar. I was soon asleep. But at midnight I was woken by rain beating against the shutters. The monsoon which had hit the Punjab only the day before had brought another storm, and the train struggled through it. The thick raindrops came down so hard they spattered through the slats and louvers in the shutters, and a fine spray soaked the compartment floor.
The Guard knocked on the door at 5:20 to announce that we had arrived at Kalka.
It was cool and green at Kalka, and after a shave in the Gentlemen’s Waiting Room I was ready for the five-hour journey through the hills to Simla. I could have taken the small pottering ‘Simla Queen’ or the express, but the white twenty-seat railcar was already waiting at the platform. I boarded, and snoozed, and woke to see mists lying across the hills and heavy green foliage in the glades beside the line.
Two hours later at five thousand feet, we came to the little station at Barog, where every day the railcar waits while the passengers have breakfast; and then it sets off again into the tumbling cloud. Occasionally the cloud and mist was broken by a shaft of light and it parted to reveal a valley floor thousands of feet below.
Solan Brewery, on the line to Simla, is both a brewery and a railway station. But the station came afterward, for the brewery was started in the nineteenth century by a British company which found good spring water here in these hills of Himachal Pradesh. In 1904, when the railway was built, the line was cut right through the brewery.
The opinion of the Indian in the hill station is that the plains are disorderly and crime-ridden. It is believed that as soon as they are above three or four thousand feet people tend to behave themselves. ‘People on the plains indulge in bad behavior, indiscipline and mischief,’ a man at Simla station told me. He was a train Guard, but he was full of complaints about lowland vandalism and tardiness and ‘mischief – especially political mischief’ on the railways.
‘You’re very frank, sir,’ I said.
‘It is because I have resigned,’ he replied.
The residents of Simla are often visited by relatives. ‘They always say, “I’ m coming for two or three days,” but after three weeks they’re still here. And there is something about this air that excites them and makes them difficult.’
The man speaking was an army colonel. He had a remedy for unwelcome guests. He made lists of sights that were not to be missed in Simla. Each one was a day’s walk from his house and it was usually at the top of a steep hill. After a few days of this sightseeing the starch was taken out of his guests and they were fairly glad when it was time to go.
The most knowledgeable railway buff I met in Simla was a man who, over a period of years, had traveled all over India on trains visiting race tracks. He seldom stayed overnight. He would hurry to Lucknow on a night train, gamble all day at the track, and then catch the sleeper to Calcutta and do the same thing. I said it seemed a difficult thing to do, all that railroading. No, he said, the difficult thing was putting on a sad face and hailing a tonga and then riding Third Class so that no potential thief would guess that he had five thousand rupees of winnings in his pocket.
I glided down from Simla in the cozy little blue train to Kalka and then in the late evening boarded the sleeper for Delhi. It was air-conditioned, and the bed was made – starched sheets and a soft pillow. There was no better way to Delhi.
At seven the next morning I looked out the window and saw the outskirts of Delhi, simmering under the gray lid of the sky.
At Old Delhi Station, it seemed to me that the unluckiest railwayman in this season of heat was a fireman on a steam locomotive. Rambling around the station yard I discovered an even more exhausting job: boilermaker. The boilermaker is essentially a welder, but because he deals with all aspects of the boiler he is often required to use his welding torch inside the boiler or the firebox.
Today it was 103° at the Old Delhi loco shed, but Suresh Baboo, a boilermaker, crawled out of a locomotive’s firebox to tell me that he was not deterred by a little thing like heat.
He was a railwayman Grade Two and earned one thousand rupees a month ($100) of which four hundred was his ‘Dearness Allowance’ (‘Because in Delhi, food and living are very dear’).
Was this enough to live on? Not in Delhi. ‘We are asking for an increase in the Dearness,’ said Suresh Baboo.
‘For some reason – probably because of the British tradition – morale among railwaymen is very high,’ said Mr K. T. V. Raghavan, Chairman of the Indian Railway Board. His position in the hierarchy of the Indian Civil Service shows the importance of the railway in India: he is the second most senior civil servant in the country.
Mr Raghavan impressed me by speaking of the special nature of the railway in India. It was not merely a way of going to and from work, but rather in India a solution to the complex demands of the family. Birth, death, marriage, illness, and religious festivals all required witnesses and rituals which implied a journey home. Indians, Mr Raghavan said, only seemed to be restless travelers; in fact, most of them were merely showing piety and carrying out religious or domestic duties.
In Delhi I found the best organized railway station in India. This was Hazrat Nizamuddin Station, just south of the city and a short walk from Humayun’s Tomb.
There were flowers and shrubs in pots on the platform, and every day on the orders of the Stationmaster, Mr G. L. Suri, ant powder was sprinkled along the walls. Mr Suri proudly took me on a tour of the station. He hadn’t been recommended to me by the Railway Board – I had simply stopped on one of the one hundred and eighty trains that pass through each day and noticed how unusual it looked. How was it possible to keep a station so clean in the hot season?
Mr Suri said, ‘I do my duty – I get satisfaction from it. Sometimes I work sixteen hours a day. I do not accept excuses.’ He nodded and added softly, ‘And I am very tough.’
The Janata–Madras Express passes through Hazrat Nizamuddin Station, and of course it stops, because ‘Janata’ means ‘People’s and the People’ Express stops everywhere. It is probably the slowest express in the world.
It would be several days before this long rumbling steam train arrived in Madras. It was cheap – all second class – but it was not really for long-distance passengers; it went fourteen hundred miles, stopping at every station – just like a country bus – and most people only went a few miles.
In India, it is easy to tell the long-distance travelers. They are heavily laden, and always carry a big steel trunk. At railway stations in India one sees the family grouped around the trunk – they sit on it, sleep beside it, use it for a table, and when their train draws in they hire a skinny man to wrestle it on board.
‘My mother was typical,’ a man told me on this train. ‘She carried all her jewelry and all her saris – thirty or forty of them. She brought glasses to drink out of, cooking utensils, plates and the trays we call thali. She took the essential household. All Indians do this. The trouble was that my mother used to take all these things even if she was only going away for a day or so.’
It seemed that the trunk was an Indian’s best defense against being robbed, contaminated, or stranded: it made them completely portable and very safe. At any moment, using the trunk, an Indian could set up house.
‘You’re not going far,’ I was reminded.
No, only to Agra – six hours on this slow beast; but six hours was nothing on an Indian train, where some people might say, ‘When do I arrive? Let me see. Today is Thursday and tomorrow is …’
I was sitting across from Bansilal Bajaj, who was on home leave from Abu Dhabi – every two years he got two months’ leave, and he spent a month of that on Indian Railways, going up and down the country.
‘In Abu Dhabi all we do is work. I am in the catering and cleaning business, but I am no more than a machine. When I come back to India I am human again.’
It was a lovely evening, very clear, just after a heavy rainstorm of the monsoon. Now there was not a cloud in the sky, and in the west it was the color of a tropical sea – greeny-blue, reflected in perfectly still pools and paddy fields. There was a sweetness in the air and for a number of miles no people – just color and empty space and darting birds.
Just after dark the lights in the train failed, and we traveled clattering through pitch-blackness, with the steam engine puffing and wheezing, and the whistle blowing off-key, and the only lights were the sparks from the smokestack, sailing past the window like fireflies.
It was almost nine by the time we arrived in Agra. The town is nothing. The Agra Fort is substantial. Akbar’s Mausoleum of Sikandra has character, and the Moti Masjid (the ‘Pearl Mosque’) has personality; but the Taj Mahal is something else. Just looking at it you are certain that you will never forget it. It is not merely a visual experience, but an emotional one – its pure symmetry imparts such strong feeling; and it is a spiritual experience, too; for the Taj Mahal is alone among buildings I have seen. It is not merely lovely; it looks as if it has a soul.
The Ganga–Yamuna Express to Varanasi was like a certain kind of Asiatic prison cell.
It was a long night. Dawn broke at Kanpur, and two hours later at Lucknow it was very sunny and bright, a noontime heat, though it was hardly half-past seven in the morning.
All the paddy fields were brim full. The rains were dangerously strong in Hardwar and had flooded Delhi, but here beside the line of the Ganga-Yamuna Express they had guaranteed a great rice crop and had given the landscape a serene lithographed look – the palms very still, the buffaloes obedient, the Indians up to their shins in water. An emblematic mother weeding vegetables with her infant in the middle of another field under the shade of a big black umbrella.
For miles, for hours – for days on these plains – you see nothing else at this time of year: men, women, and children planting, or plowing or tending the crop, and all of them working under the blazing sun and burned as black as their buffaloes.
The villages were mud huts and grass roofs, like a glimpse of central Africa in the province of Uttar Pradesh, except that in the center of every frail village was always a substantial stone temple. None of these villages were sign-posted but sometimes a tiny station or a halt displayed the name. One sun-baked station in the middle of the hot plain was Rudanli. Three horse-drawn tongas were waiting at the platform, and some people looked hopefully up from their tin trunks. The Ganga–Yamuna Express did not stop.
We were going the long way to Varanasi, taking ‘the Faizabad Loop,’ via Ayodhya where monkeys on the platform sat on the inkblots of shade. We passed through Shahganj, where rice planters stood scanning the blue sky for clouds; and then after Jaunpur we joined the main line.
Varanasi Station has the contours of a Hindu temple, built in the Mauryan style, and like a temple it is filled with holy men and pilgrims. It is also full of sacred cows. The cows at Varanasi Station are wise to the place – they get water at the drinking fountains, food near the refreshment stalls, shelter along the platforms, and exercise beside the tracks; they also know how to use the cross-over bridges and can climb up and down the steepest stairs.
‘We are installing cow-catchers,’ the Station Superintendent told me – but he did not mean the traditional ones, on the engines, he meant fences to prevent the cows from entering the station.
The flocks of goats at Varanasi Station are on their way to the Ganges to have their throats cut and be dumped into the river as a sacrifice; the beggars are testing the piety of the pilgrims; and those small narrow bundles that are part of so many of the travelers’ luggage are in fact human corpses, headed for the cremation fires on the ghats. Because nothing that is holy in India can be regarded as dirty, holy Varanasi with its fifteen hundred temples is one of the filthiest of Indian cities and positively stinking with sanctity. I met an Indian medical student who had just arrived in Varanasi. He was on his way to the Ganges to take his ritual bath. He said he was definitely planning to bathe in the Ganges, among the dead goats and monkeys and corpses of beggars who died at the station and were taken in rickshaws to the river and thrown in uncremated.
‘Oh, yes,’ the medical student said. ‘I will immerse myself.’
‘What about the health aspect?’
He said, ‘It is a question of mind over matter.’
From a distance in the early morning, Varanasi looks wonderful, and the most glorious sight of it is from the Howrah Mail as it crosses the Dufferin Bridge which spans the Ganges just east of the city.
The Howrah Mail, one of India’s best trains, leaves Varanasi at five-thirty in the morning, just as the passengers from Delhi are yawning and peering out the window and getting their first glimpses of the holy city. And the people waiting on the platform at Varanasi are watching the train with admiration, because this train represents luxury – it has three chair cars, and sleeping cars, and a pantry car, where food is cooked and dished up in trays which are distributed around the train by waiters. The Howrah Mail is efficiently air-conditioned; it is famous for being fast and is nearly always on time. From the high vantage point of the bridge the whole populous riverbank and all the ghats can be seen gilded in the light of the rising sun, and its splendor is intensified because the distance blurs the city’s decay, and at this time of day – the early morning – the river is filled with people washing, swimming, and generally going about their prayers.
From here – the outskirts of Varanasi all the way to Calcutta – the land is waterlogged and fertile, an endless rice field. At noon the train stops at Gaya, where Buddha received enlightenment.
Gaya also marks the beginning of a very strange landscape. Sudden single hills are thrust out of the flatness like massive dinosaurs petrified on the flat Bihari plain; and other hills are like pyramids, and still more like slag heaps. They don’t seem to belong to any range of hills and have a comic plopped-down look.
It was wet and cool and jungly four hours later when we entered West Bengal, and when the train stopped some blind beggars got on. The Ticket Examiner asked them to beg in a different part of the train and they meekly agreed.
This Ticket Examiner was a woman – one of three or four women who work on the Howrah Mail. ‘And there are many women working on Indian Railways.’ Her name was Ollie Francis. ‘I was a Christian,’ she said. ‘But then I married Mr Ningam and so I became a Hindu. It was not an arranged marriage. I married for love.’
She had seven children, the eldest eighteen, the youngest five. She missed them when she made this Calcutta run, but her relatives helped look after them. She had worked for the railways for twenty years.
What Ollie liked best about the Howrah Mail was its speed – less than fourteen hours from Varanasi to Calcutta. As the train drew into Howrah Station, the daylight was extinguished by smoke, and rain mixed with fog; frightening numbers of people were making their way through the mud and the lamplight.
Howrah is very large; but like Calcutta it is in a state of decay. Enormous and noisy, a combination of grandeur and desolation, the wonder is that it still works. Calcutta is one of the cities of the world that I associate with the future. This is how New York City could look, I think, after a terrible disaster.
The monsoon that beautifies and enriches the countryside had made Calcutta ugly and almost uninhabitable. Rain in India gives all buildings, especially modern ones, a look of senility. The streets were flooded, there were stalled cars everywhere, and people waded among the drowned dogs.
‘Calcutta’s future is very dark,’ Professor Chatterjee told me in Calcutta one afternoon. Professor Chatterjee was an astrologer. He then told me (after a brief examination of my palm) that I would live to the age of seventy-eight, have another child (a daughter) and be given problems by people of small size.
The part about small people was certainly true. It was a small man who refused to find me a bed-roll, and another small man who demanded that I double his tip, and yet another who overcharged me in a taxi, and a fourth little man who insisted that I get in touch with his brother in California to settle some family litigation that was long overdue; and four small porters squabbled so furiously over carrying my suitcases that I ended up carrying them myself in order to keep the peace.
In Calcutta I reflected on my traveling across the subcontinent by train, my going from station to station. The stations had everything – not only food and retiring rooms and human company, but also each station possessed the unique character of its city, its peculiar stinks and perfumes.
I had wanted to take a train to Assam, to Nowgong and Silchar, and then to descend into Sylhet and move sideways into Bangladesh. But this was now impossible. There was fighting in Assam, civil strife between Assamese and Bengalis, and the Nagas had never really been pacified. If I needed proof of that I had only to look at my fellow passengers on the Kamrup Express: they were men from the Indian Air Force and the Army; they had unfinished business in Assam.
Even New Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling are regarded as Disturbed Areas; foreign travelers needed a special permit to visit these places, and when it is shown at the railway station in Jalpaiguri your passport is stamped, just as it would be if you were crossing into another country.
In India there is nothing remarkable about a train that is slow – particularly one that is making a long journey through such remote provinces. But in one respect, the Kamrup Express to New Jalpaiguri was unusual: it had a dining car. For hours after we left, relays of men – only men – sat in the dining car squashing rice and dhal in their fists and flinging it into their mouths. Meanwhile, the kitchen staff boiled cauldrons of lentils and crouched between the cars strenuously peeling potatoes.
At dawn everything was different and serene. The landscape was dry here, but the trees were green, and not far away were the dim blue shapes of mountains to the north and northwest. We were scheduled to arrive at seven-fifteen. At seven-thirty we stopped at a tiny station near the village of Dhumdanj, which was no more than a few cows and a few families and one buffalo.
Two hours had passed. This is an aspect of train travel that must not be overlooked: the unexplained stop in the middle of nowhere; and the unexplained delay – hours during which only a dog barks, and someone shuts off a radio, and a child emerges from the tall grass beside the track to sell tea in disposable clay cups. You don’t know whether you will leave in two minutes or two days, so it is unwise to stray very far from the train. The sun moves higher in the sky. A child begins to weep. Then an unexplained whistle and a few seconds later the train moves, and five hundred Indians run alongside, trying to board. We left Dhumdanj.
Everyone calls the train to Darjeeling The Toy Train. It is a narrow-gauge mountain railway, with the sort of small blue steam engines that other people put into transport museums; a real jewel, a tremendously ingenious piece of engineering – a true original. If it is inconvenient it is because in the hundred years in which it has been running it has never been improved and hardly been maintained. It was bravely built and it looks so clever and powerful that it seems an impertinence to do anything to it except ride it and let it run. It actually looks indestructible.
On this railway line dogs sleep between the tracks, and children play on the tracks and roll toys along them, and the tracks are also put to practical use by men who push huge logs along them – skidding them downhill on the rails.
The four coaches are nearly always full, if not with legitimate travelers then with joy riders – the train is part of the life of the long series of mountainsides that connect Siliguri to Darjeeling. Some people only ride a hundred yards, others are going miles. It is full of businessmen, farmers, Buddhist monks, and schoolchildren. Every ticket is made out in duplicate, though none of them costs more than a few cents.
The train passes by the houses, a few familiar inches from the windows. It passes close enough to the shops and stalls for a train passenger to reach out and pick an onion or an apple out of a basket on the shop counter.
The valleys and these hillsides are open to the distant plains, and so the traveler on the toy train has a view which seems almost unnatural it is so dramatic. At Sonada it is like standing at the heights of a gigantic outdoor amphitheatre and looking down and seeing the plains and the rivers, roads and crops printed upon it and flattened by the yellow heat. There are wisps and whorls of cloud down there, too. But up here it is dark green and wet hill country, where nearly everyone has rosy cheeks.
After Sonada we came to Jor Bungalow Station and then Ghoom, the highest railway station in Asia at 7,407 feet (2,257 meters). The mist shifts slightly and farther along, towards Darjeeling, it is possible on a clear day to see the long irregular ridge of rock – Kanchenjunga, massively white in the great folds of snow-covered rock.
The so-called ‘Batasia Loop’ is the famous descent in which the train appears to be tying itself into a knot while at the same time whistling to clear its own caboose out of the way, and after three or four curves it continues on its way, gliding into Darjeeling, still following the main road and bumping past the shops and sharing the thoroughfare with the Buddhist monks and the bullock carts.
Darjeeling is unlike Simla. It is not an Indian resort but rather a Nepali town. It is a solemn place, full of schools and convents and monasteries. It is barer than Simla, not as populous; it is muddier, friendlier, very oriental looking and rather un-Indian in aspect. Simla has visitors, Darjeeling has residents; Simla is Anglo-Indian, but Darjeeling is Oriental. It is not posh. It is a hospitable place.
The curse of the town is its traffic – an endless procession of honking jeeps and trucks. It seemed to me that most of Darjeeling’s problems would probably be solved with a modern version of the train, which was finished just a hundred years ago. It was a great solution then, and it still serves the town, for many people commute from places like Ghoom to jobs in Darjeeling – to the shops, to the government offices, and even to the stranger occupations in Darjeeling such as the carver of yak bones and the clerk who stands under the sign ‘Licensed Vendor for Ganja & Bhang.’ Ten grams of ganja (marijuana) cost thirty cents.
The railway needs to be improved, yet the wonder of it – like the wonder of much else in India – is that it still operates. India is a complex place. The phones seldom work, the mail is unreliable, the electricity is subject to sudden stoppages. There are numerous natural disasters and there are eight hundred million people. It seems almost inconceivable that this country is still viable, and yet there are times when one gets glimpses of its greatness. Towards the end of my Indian journey I decided that India runs primarily because of the railway. It is an old-fashioned solution, but India has old-fashioned problems.
India’s relations with Bangladesh have never been cordial, but perhaps on the theory propounded by Robert Frost that good fences make good neighbors, India has recently announced its plan to secure its national boundary with Bangladesh with a two-thousand-mile barbed-wire fence. Trains have not crossed the border for some time. I flew to Dhaka and took the Ulka Express south.
This train was on the world news the day I boarded it: it was the only link between Dhaka and Chittagong – every other road was under five feet of water, and scores of people had drowned in the torrential rains. But the monsoon comes every year to Bangladesh, and it is always severe. Its damage comes so regularly it is not remarkable. The feeling on the Ulka Express was that Bangladesh was having another unlucky week.
It was not immediately obvious that the rain was a disaster. Today the sun was shining, and this whole southern part of Bangladesh had been turned into a spectacular lake – hundreds of miles of floodwater. And the only things showing in all that water were the long straight rails of the railway track.
The Ulka Express, fifteen coaches long – one was First Class – was pulled by a Diesel engine. I would have gone Second but I would not have found a seat, and I was not prepared to stand for nine hours.
At Tongi Junction I saw another train pull in. There were perhaps fifty people clinging to the sides of the engine and hanging from the carriages and sitting and standing on the coach roofs. These seemingly magnetized people had the effect of making the train look small. They completely covered it and of course the paying passengers were jammed inside.
It made me curious about seating arrangements on the Ulka Express. I leaned out the window and saw that, apart from my coach, the whole train was exactly the same – people everywhere, holding on to the sides, the engine, and crowding the roofs. To the sound of a young beggar boy’s flute, the train rattled south.
In the hot, stricken country the only thing that moved was the railway. But there was no panic. At Akhaura (‘Change Here For Sylhet’) a man stood up to his waist in a flooded field thoughtfully washing his cow, and farther on boats had penetrated to villages – the large boats were beamy, like old Portuguese frigates, and the smaller ones were gracefully shaped like Persian slippers.
‘You will see where President Zia was assassinated in Chittagong,’ Mr Shahid said as we rolled along. It was as if he was passing on a piece of tourist information. He did say that I should have taken the Karnafuli Express – it did not stop often and therefore fewer people clung to its sides.
At Comilla I met a young man who had just opened an office to encourage Bangladeshis to enroll in a Voluntary Sterilization program.
‘They need incentives …’
What sort? I wondered.
‘We have tried money and clothes as a sort of reward, but it is not enough. We need something more substantial. There is no problem with middle-class people. I have two children myself and I think that is a good number. The problem is with the poor. But this is a democratic country, and so we do not make sterilization compulsory.’
Was he making any progress?
‘Very slow progress,’ he said.
The worst of the floods were south of Comilla, at the town of Feni. With a kind of gloomy resignation some people resolutely bailed out their houses and fields, and others took baths. The children in the area were swimming and diving and having a wonderful time. The floods had also brought fish to these hungry people, and where the banks of rivers had been breached fishermen were enthusiastically using nets, scoops, lines, buckets, and ancient-looking fish traps.
The day continued hot, but the flood did not abate. Chittagong lay just ahead, simmering under the sun.