Phir Milenge India

It is my last day in Delhi. It’s sad to be leaving India, but I can’t get out of Pahar Ganj too soon – the last three days have drawn my patience out to its very limit. I walk down the narrow jumble of the Main Bazar, past the cheap bookshops that sell nothing more interesting than guide books and paperback thrillers; past chai stalls and shady looking forex counters, shops crammed with piles of gaudy, un-saleable souvenirs; past endless displays of badly faked designer clothes, awful tie-and-dye hippy gear, and all the absurd New Age paraphernalia anyone could want. The Sonu Chaat House is open but in darkness, the mass of twisted and snaking electricity cables and wires that coil around every post and sag from every shop front dead, the whole tangled mess overloaded to the point of collapse. It is staggeringly hot inside the bhavan without even the half-hearted ceiling fans to create the illusion of a faint breeze, but there is nowhere else to go for the next hour until I can get online and check-in for my flight – if the power comes back on, of course. The waiter appears out of the darkness, picks up the Wills Classic I balance on the edge of the table and sets down a tall glass of black coffee, the whole transaction accomplished without a word being spoken, just the reciprocal nods of our heads signaling our satisfaction. An Indian woman is sitting at a table near the front of the bhavan with her young daughter. She was there when I came in, and ten minutes later is still holding the menu and waiting for someone to take her order; the waiters ignore her completely, until finally one of them stands over her table, looking down at his shoes, and quietly says something only she can hear. I’ve seen this before: the Sonu Chaat House doesn’t serve Indian women. Humiliated but defiant, she gathers her shopping bags and her little girl and walks out into dirty street with unshakeable dignity; the corrosive look she gives the waiter as he backs away could have eaten through a block of concrete. I sit at my gloomy table, smoking Wills Classics and drinking coffee for an hour and a half before the power flashes back on, sweat slowly trickling down the back of my neck, seething about the injustice meted out to the Indian woman: These people will happily take a European man’s cigarettes in exchange for effortless service, but they wouldn’t even entertain giving a tired little girl so much as a glass of water. I leave precisely enough to cover my bill, take all of my Wills Classics and leave the Sonu Chaat House for the last time.
The airline’s website sends an error message back to the screen every time I try to check in – there is no record of my booking – and in a state of rising panic, I ask to use one of the plywood partitioned phone booths lined up along the far wall. If I’m stuck in this place any longer, I will go mad – literally insane. I get through to the airline’s Delhi office and listen to the agent’s disconcerting “Hhmmms” and “Ehhmmms” as her fingers rattle over her keyboard, my heart in my mouth. The power shorts out again, plunging the internet café into pitch blackness; concerned chatter rises from the blinded surfers, someone with an Australian accent swears loudly, but thankfully, the phone’s connection holds.
“Sir?” The agents voice has the tone of finality about it that suggests that she has never heard of me and is about to cut me off as a prank caller. “You are now checked in, have a nice flight.”
I walk through the grotty, stinking back alleys to the Metropolis Hotel with the lightness and cheer of someone who has just received news of some unexpected good fortune, take a table in the shade and order a Kingfisher. In twenty hours, Pahar Ganj can continue its descent into a swamp of squalor and decay without me; until then, I am going to sit on this rooftop terrace - which at least is high enough above the pollution and mayhem of the street to be able to think and breathe - read, write and listen to music on my MP3 player.
But even here, in perhaps the very place where ‘Silvia from Slovakia’ once actually sat, there is no escape from the unpleasantness that hangs like a cloud over New Delhi. There’s some sort of altercation going on between one of the houseboys and a cook – raised voices, accusations, and then suddenly the crack! of a vicious, open handed slap that knocks the skinny little houseboy off his feet. The cook towers over him, thick, meaty forearms swinging at his sides, breathing heavily, ready to lash out again. The houseboy crawls away from his attacker, gets to his feet and blunders into the kitchen’s open annex. The cook is on him in an instant. Another sickening slap sends him reeling past my table and down the stairs, tears of pain and humiliation welling in his eyes. I am so stunned by this ugly scene that I cannot react quickly enough to stop it unfolding. The waiters stand around and laugh as the young houseboy flees down the stairs; the cook struts around with the smug, self satisfied sneer of an accomplished bully. I get up from my table and walk over to the waiters.
“What the hell is going on?” I shout at them with barely controlled rage.
“No, no, everything is okay,” one of them says, smiling in encouragement.
“Get the manager up here immediately,” I order him. “Don’t make me have to go downstairs and find him,” I add as a warning.
The manager is dismissive about the whole incident, offering no apology or explanation, blithely assuring me that the houseboy is alright and that the cook will be dealt with. He then walks round the terrace, using a 12 inch metal ruler to sweep bottles and dirty cups off tabletops and counters where they fall and smash on the floor, smacking and poking the waiters, screaming instructions at them, throwing his weight around.
I take my bag and my Wills Classics and simply walk out, dead eyeing the bullying cook and the tyrannical manager, daring either of them to challenge me about the bill, which, after what I have just seen, I have no intention whatsoever of paying. They both stare at the floor and say nothing as I pass.
There is nowhere to go in Delhi that I haven’t already been, nowhere I want to go other than to the airport – but that’s not until tomorrow, so I walk back to my hotel.
Halfway to the Gold Regency a seedy looking man with a London accent angles out of a doorway and falls into step alongside me.
“Name’s Terry. Want some of this?” He takes a bag of something from his front pocket and is mildly shocked at the two short words I give him as an answer. A torrent of abuse follows me down the Main Bazar until Terry slowly realizes that he’s attracting the curiosity of a unit of QRF troops who’ve just rounded the corner of Sang Trasham Road behind him. He slithers back into his hiding place and I carry on walking towards the next encounter.
“You are a doctor!” This from a seemingly respectable middle-aged Indian man blocking my path, his hand outstretched in greeting. Quite what kind of scam this outlandish but strangely flattering line of introduction was to precede I never find out, as two very implicit words – which Terry would recognize – stop him dead in his tracks.
With less than a hundred metres to go to the Gold Regency I’m intercepted by the Bangladeshi woman who collects foreign signatures in a spiral-bound notebook, the one who professes to want no money, but still charges you 10 Rupees for entering your name in her book. I hide in the darkest booth I can find in the Gold Regency Bar And Restaurant, whiling away the hours until I might be able to sleep. I time an order for another Kingfisher to the exact moment the waiter appears at my table with the hiked-up Temptation pricelist. In a scene that could be straight out of a Laurel and Hardy film, we wrestle each other for the Gold Regency menu, a tug of war that ends in farce when it tears cleanly in half along its middle fold. The waiter crosses his arms and gives a satisfyingly Hardyesque “Hhumph!” looking down at me with comical disappointment. His half has the snacks, masalas and thalis, mine the IMFL – Indian made Foreign Liquor – and beers: I win my last cheap bottle of Gold Regency Kingfisher.
The Disco Dance grinds into life somewhere in the depths of the hotel with all the fanfare and excitement of the start of surgery hours at a health clinic; I light a Wills Classic and begin a study of the Temptation pricelist. Cock Tails – not cocktails – with 60ml of liquor come in at an enormous 575 Rupees, plus VAT, plus ‘service’ – pretty expensive, even with the sheer entertainment value of their misspelled, grammatically challenged, or downright ill-conceived names. How about a ‘Tom, Collins’, or maybe a ‘Bandy Balloon’? Or perhaps a ‘Lady Queen’, even though it sounds suspiciously close to a Lady Boy? There’s a ‘Midnight Beauty’, which, as the bar is ‘Open 24 hours’ is theoretically possible, but room service calls go unanswered after 11pm and the doors are firmly locked. The ‘Virgin Marry’ sounds interesting, if only for the opportunity to try and make some sort of connection between, say, the Immaculate Conception and getting hammered on a mixture of Frisky Bison and White Mischief vodka in downtown New Delhi. And whilst not homophobic in any way, the ‘Fruit In The Night’ does seem to have a faint whiff of irregularity about it, and would probably not be something you’d want to call down for late in the evening if the fictitious room service ever became reality.
The alarm catapults me out of a deep sleep in the morning, the tedium and lethargy of the pervious days vanished, a sense of urgency and purpose in their place, just the faint, dull ache of old Kingfisher to remind me of the last few days in Pahar Ganj. I pack the last few things into my bag, pay my bill and turn my back on the Gold Regency. A decrepit old Suzuki minivan drops me outside the departures hall at Indira Gandhi International Airport, where I sit on a bench under the casual stares of a QRF squad and smoke Wills Classic until my flight to Heathrow is called.
I watch the slums of outer Delhi drop away below the wings of the wide bodied Airbus and then fade into the haze of smog that stretches over the city. My last sight of India is the pristine whiteness of the snow-capped Himalayan peaks of Ladakh as we cross into Afghan airspace and turn west for London.
I stand in the early spring sunshine on Winchcombe station in the Cotswolds and watch the tourists climb into the old British Rail Mark One carriages that one of the preserved Class 37 diesels of the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Railway will take to Cheltenham Racecourse. My sister and her partner have gone to the garden centre over the road, so for half an hour, I’m alone again on another station.
The Class 37 seems so small, clean and quiet. It leaves with a meek toot of its horns, a thin blue mist of diesel drifting in the air behind it, a faint burble from its exhaust; not the deep chug of an ALCO engine, the deafening and sustained blast of air horns, a massive cloud of black smoke billowing above it like a WDM.
I light a cigarette from my last pack of Wills Classics and watch the train slide from view, turning the pre-independence Rupee coin I bought in Kolkata over and over in my fingers.
I’m home, I suppose; even if the only sense of that word is that home is now just another place in the world where I can catch a train to somewhere else.

Hanging Around

In the morning, I order coffee from the same waiter that served my Kingfisher last night; I consider asking whether it is still Temptation, or whether I am back in the Gold Regency Bar And Restaurant – Mr. Jekyll, or Mr. Hyde? The tables are littered with empty bottles, glasses, half-eaten plates of food and overflowing ashtrays, the waiters’ eyes red rimmed with fatigue; it’s like stumbling into the aftermath of some all-night party and pretending that you feel quite natural in drinking your morning coffee while watching the hung-over hosts slowly clear up the wreckage around you. It as dingy and airless as the night before, and with no natural light, no reference to the world outside, it could be any hour of the day or night. It has a disorientating effect; it’s like taking breakfast in a sensory deprivation tank, so I smoke a Wills Classic, drop the butt into my empty cup and walk down the Main Bazar to the Sonu Chat House. Here, at least, I can see the squalor – there is no artificial darkness for it to hide in. The houseboy who takes my order for coffee wears a dirty tracksuit top and a pair of trainers that have split across the soles in such a way that they flap up and down like clown’s shoes when he walks. I slide two Wills Classics across the table and tell him to take them; my coffee arrives a minute later, long before the hippies in the corner see their bowls of muesli and honey. Should I tell them to throw away their beads and kaftans and start smoking if they really want to enjoy India? The unending circus of life in Pahar Ganj plays out in the lane outside the bhavan, complete with tourists in silly tropical shorts, bicycles with wobbly wheels, slapstick rickshaw wallahs, the comedy act of newly arrived backpackers stunned by the heat and hassle, and even two passing elephants; are those real, or pantomime cows? A QRF patrol saunters past, the crowd parting like a bow wave before them; a stray shaft of sunlight glances off the dull metal of the point man’s AK-47, highlighting it with such clarity that I can see the slight sheen of oil where the plastic clip meets the weapon’s body. With all this lethal hardware, suspicion and paranoia loose on the streets, it wouldn’t take much to turn Pahar Ganj into a bloodbath: a bomb, or a grenade tossed at the QRF patrol, perhaps a lone gunman chancing a quick potshot, and it would be a massacre. It’s an uncomfortable thought, but behind it is the even more frightening realization that the QRF aren’t here to defend themselves, they’re here to deter the very real threat of a terrorist strike. Like the crowded markets and Bazars of Kabul and Baghdad, Pahar Ganj is a perfect target; and the narrow streets and alleys are packed with European, American and Australian tourists.
I buy the Times Of Indian from a street hawker, order another coffee, light another Wills Classic and try to divert my imagination. ‘Australian National Dead’: a short piece in the sidebar on page five. As I read the story, something stirs at the back of my mind, something remembered from the bar on Sudder Street in Kolkata. Michael Someone-Or-Other, the story goes, found dead in a seedy hotel room in Pahar Ganj; aged 49, single, overdose suspected. Could it be ‘Mike’, the middle-aged Australian who latched onto me in that bar, boring me with his stories of drug abuse and vodka; the one who would look out for me in Delhi, as we’d both be here waiting for our flights around the same time, his to Bangkok, mine back to sanity and normality? He’d been traveling since his divorce five years before he told me “You don’t mind if I share your table, do you?” in the Beer Bar on Sudder Street; the place was almost empty, but I couldn’t very well say “Yes, actually, I do mind.” I listened politely to his stories of excess and indulgence across three continents, making the sort of neutral, non-committal comments that confound even the most ardent bore, and being deliberately evasive about which hotel I was in. I eventually escaped to a dinner appointment with some fictitious friends I invented – the same ones who’ve rescued me from countless other situations like this - and avoided his end of Sudder Street for the rest of my stay. A sad, lonely, and empty man; whatever he was running away from, high on dope and vodka, maybe it final caught up with him in a cheap, dirty room in Pahar Ganj.
The Russian woman at the table in front is being fawned over by a creepy looking Indian man young enough to be her son; she is overweight, her hair dyed bluish-black, her makeup cracking around the corners of her mouth like parched mud. The Indian man constantly asks her how much money she has, how much she earns, if she has a credit card, a cheque book? He searches through her handbag, removing a passport, wallet, mobile phone, examining each of them before carefully putting them back; she says nothing, reaches for a cigarette and lights it. Almost immediately, she starts coughing, doubling over and wracking her lungs; she drops her cigarette on the table, turns, and vomits down the side of her seat. She crashes blindly through the bhavan, knocking over chairs and dislodging tables, and stumbles for the narrow stairs that lead up to the first floor kitchen, oblivious to the shouts of protest from the staff. The creepy Indian man’s eyes slide slowly away from her handbag, and then, almost as an afterthought, he rises to help her, guiding her to the hand wash behind me, where she coughs up more sickness. With no apology, she barges past me, rakes her bag off the table and cartwheels out into the Main Bazar, coughing, retching and spitting, the Indian creep sycophantically rubbing her back and murmuring his deep concern, his eyes fixed inside her open bag. A group of Japanese tourists in white, anti-pollution face masks turn their cameras on her: another shot for the Wong family album, to be filed between the crippled beggar with flayed skin at Connaught Place, and the cow defecating on the doorstep of Gupta’s Hardware And Packing House just across the street. The cigarette is still smoldering on the table where she dropped it, blackening the Formica beneath its glowing tip, threatening to ignite the unpaid check they left behind.
I pay my bill and catch an auto-rickshaw to Connaught Place; it takes me twenty minutes to find the beggar, collapsed in the gutter on Radial Road 2, a few coins in an old paper cup held in his outstretched hand. I fold a 20 Rupee note into a small square, drop it into his cup, and bury it out of sight under a handful of small coins from the zip-up pocket of my bag; his skin may be blistered and peeling, as burnt and glistening as piece of irradiated meat, and he may be blind and more dead than alive, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be robbed.
I mooch around the bookshops and department stores, killing time, and then reluctantly fork out for the astronomical cost of a Kingfisher in The Standard Coffee House. I walk back to Pahar Ganj in the sweltering heat of late afternoon, and arrive at the doors of The Metropolis Hotel slicked with perspiration, overheated and dehydrated; I climb the stairs to the rooftop terrace, find a table under the shade of a sun umbrella and order a drink. The Metropolis is the only decent hotel in this part of town, and whilst I can’t afford a room here, the bar is at least affordable. The pricey menu assures me I won’t be eating here tonight, but it does tell me – in a hideously gushing paragraph of self promotion inside the front cover – of the luminaries who have stayed here over the years: Richard Gere; Kate Winslett; Sir John McCarthy; David Quarry of the British High Commission; and finally, ‘Silva (Actress From Slovakia)’. The name leaps off the page, quickly followed by all its connotations. I’m sure ‘Silvia’ is probably a highly respected member of Bratislava’s largely unknown, though undoubtedly burgeoning film industry, but with a name like that, I can’t help harboring doubts that her leading roles are quite as wholesome and attired as Ms Winslett’s. I waste a couple of hours drinking Kingfisher, listening to my MP3 player and examining the procession of weird, stressed-out, confused and sometimes certifiably insane travellers who come and go; after snickering under my breath about ‘Silvia’ for what must be the twentieth time, I start to worry that perhaps I’m becoming as strange as everyone else around me. I finish my drink and leave, being swept along in the stream of people flooding down the Main Bazar; it’s like stepping onto one of those moving walkways you find at Heathrow airport, except the miles of featureless corridors have been replaced with an acid-trip vision of hell. Borne along in this swell of jabbering, faceless bodies, I seem to be moving faster than I am walking; my feet are surfing a wave of Kingfisher, my eyes blinking away the ghastly, hallucinogenic flashes of sickening neon light. I get off the conveyor belt at The Gold Regency Bar And Restaurant, which may or may not actually be the Temptation bar at this hour of the night, order a Kingfisher and listen to the thump of the Nightly Disco Dance coming through the mirrored walls until I am sufficiently numbed to sleep through anything – even a visitation by the ghost of Michael, who, for all I know, might have died on the very mattress I am lying on, an empty syringe stuck in the rigor mortis of his cold, tied-off arm.

Machinegun Etiquette

I wake in the pitch darkness of my windowless room, fumble for my alarm and silence it; the sound of rickshaws, taxis and humanity streaming along the Main Bazar filters through the air vent above the bed, a ceaseless hum that seeps into the subconscious.
I order coffee in the restaurant, light a Wills Classic and open Trains At A Glance. I have three days in Delhi before my flight, one of which I will use to visit Agra; train 2002 – the New Delhi-Bhopal Shatabdi Express – leaves at 6.15am, and I can combine this with train 2617 for the return journey, arriving back at 9pm. I drop my key at the front desk and walk out into the hammering heat and seething crowds of the Main Bazar. As my introduction to India, Pahar Ganj had prepared me for the possibility that my entire trip might be a jostling, filthy, choking, squalid and seedy test of endurance; after three months, I now see it for what it is: a conflicting and uncomfortable mix of hawkers, travellers, pimps, hippies, drug pushers, immigrants, beggars, pickpockets and opportunists, crushed together in the narrow lanes and warren of back alleys behind New Delhi station, fighting like cats in a bag. It had been cold enough then for a jumper and scarf under my fleece; now the intense heat ferments the drifts of garbage that piles up in doorways and around footstalls, the whole area stinking like a giant vat of pig swill. At the security checkpoint on the corner of Basant Road, I walk through the rickety wooden frame of the metal detector, while everyone else streams unchecked through the open police barrier; the steel and aluminum of my Maglite and Leatherman fails to register, the circuitry and Lithium Ion batteries of my camera and MP3 player go unnoticed. It’s a charade; the policemen completely ignore me. Even the nasty looking QRF – Quick Reaction Force – troops that have appeared alongside the Riot Police since I was last here barely give me a second look. After the bombs that killed more than 60 passengers were placed on the Atari Express, security around New Delhi station, where the devices were smuggled onboard, has been stepped up, and extended into Pahar Ganj. QRF soldiers are everywhere, their blue camouflage combat pants tucked into their jump boots, bristling with riot guns and assault rifles; they stand in small groups, smoking cigarettes, staring down anyone who dares look at them. Their AK-47s have transparent plastic ammunition clips, the curve of gleaming bullets clearly visible, as sharp and deadly as a row of shark’s teeth; they are obviously real, and unquestionably lethal – a simple expedient to disabuse any doubting onlooker. The atmosphere crackles and fizzes with tension, a volatile mixture of menace and desperation, threat and fear, hovering on the brink of flashpoint. It is like walking through the occupied zone of a disputed territory, where the pretense of normal life is faltering under the burden of its protectors; it is impossible to feel comfortable or relaxed in this place, with the weight of all these watcher’s eyes bearing down on you.
I push through the crowds outside New Delhi station and climb the stairs to the Foreign Tourist’s Reservation Centre. Before the clerk will even check the availability of my Reservation Requisition, he demands my passport; some of the Atari bomb victims, thought to be Pakistani nationals, had managed to buy tickets in this booking office without producing their passports – nobody knows who they were, and they may never be identified because of the laxity of an Indian Railways booking clerk. There are Chair Car tickets available for train 2002, but train 2617 – the Ernakulam-Nizamuddin Mangala Lakshadweep Express – is booked solid for the next four days; the alternative is the return Bhopal Shatabdi, but it doesn’t leave Agra until 9pm – thirteen hours after I arrive.
Ticketless, I go downstairs and walk unhindered through the RPF cordon to platform one; there is an immense amount of security on the station, but nobody challenges me – not even an officious Inspector asks for a platform ticket. I stand between a chai stall and a wall of cloth-wrapped bales that are waiting to be loaded into a Luggage-Cum-Guards Van and quickly take a forbidden photograph of the passengers on the opposite platform; surely my behavior is suspicious enough to attract some attention? Seemingly not: I walk back out of the station, right under the noses of the massed ranks of RPF and QRF guards, the evidence of my crime flashed into the camera’s memory for any of them to examine.
I weave my way through the throng of pushy rickshaw wallahs on Chelmsford Road, sidestep the metal detector and join the flow of hand carts, cows and pedestrians trapped between the clamor of shops and stalls along the Bazar, bolts of cloth and fake CDs spilling into the narrow lane, piles of poor wood carvings and cheap holdalls resting on plastic groundsheets. I find the Sonu Chaat House, take a seat at the back, order a coffee and light a Wills Classic. The dhaba is hot, cramped and filthy; exhaust from the endless passage of auto-rickshaws and Ambassadors drifts through the open frontage and mixes with the smell of hot cooking oil, onions and tobacco, all of which is stirred up and then wafted down at the customers by two slowly rotating ceiling fans. A couple of hippies who look as if they just got off the plane at Indira Gandhi Airport are pretending to be cool at one of the other tables, but there’s no mistaking their shocked expressions at finding themselves in Pahar Ganj, and not the mystical paradise they had imagined was waiting for them. The service is slow, haphazard and offhand; I redirect two glasses of chai before my coffee arrives. A Dutch man opposite me loses his temper with the indolent waiter, slamming his fist on the table before tearing up the check and storming out, a trail of tiny squares of paper floating to the greasy floor in his wake. The waiter shrugs and moves on to the next table: business as usual. It is easy to see how the abrasive nature of New Delhi has a way of wearing down the visitor, how quickly the seedy dhabas and fleapit hotels, the clinging hawkers and loitering militias whittle away every ounce of patience and pleasure. I try to ignore it, but there’s no getting away from the fact that I’m here for the next three days. I drop a 10 Rupee note on the table, nod to the disinterested waiter, and catch an auto-rickshaw to Connaught Place.
I walk in circles around the colonnaded ring of shops, crossing the same radial roads again and again; only when I pass KFC for the third time, with its queue of waiting customers held at bay by an armed guard, do I give up and sit on a bench in the central park, surrounded by picnicking Indians lounging over the irregular grassy hump that hides the subterranean Palika Bazar. Within five minutes I am asked whether I would like a shoeshine, a map of Delhi, some cannabis, an ear clean, some postcards, someone’s daughter, a plastic model of an auto-rickshaw, an Indian drum, and most bizarrely of all, a black leather whip. When it comes to making money, it seems India’s moral superiority takes a back seat. I get a taxi out to the National Railway Museum and wander around the grounds, poking at the rusted shells and peeling paintwork of the country’s neglected railway heritage; nothing has changed since I visited in January – it’s just hotter, drier and looks even more defeated than before. In the back corner of the park is the rotting carcass of a WDM diesel, the maroon livery flaking and pitted, the bonnet doors gaping to reveal a black space that once resounded to the chug-chug-CHUG-chug-chug of an ALCO engine, the empty space now filled with the faint tick and snap of termites eating away the wood sleepers beneath its last stretch of slowly rusting track. Even the skeletal frames of the wheel sets are bare: they have been stripped of their motors and the valuable copper wire of their traction cables. The cab windows are broken, and the driving stand is wrecked – every dial and lever either missing or smashed; it is fit for a scrap yard, not a national museum. Unlike the museums in York or Budapest, there is nothing here that will ever pull a train again - no groups of enthusiasts to restore and maintain the WDM like the M61 in Hungary, no commitment to running it on the mainline like a preserved British Deltic. It such a depressing sight after travelling so far behind these charismatic and idiosyncratic machines, so sad to see it dumped here in this undignified and uncared for state that I leave quickly to find an auto-rickshaw back to Connaught Place.
I sit in a plush seat at The Standard Coffee House while the waiter pours an ice cold Kingfisher into a tall, frosted glass and sets it on the linen tablecloth in front of me; the beer is almost twice as expensive as The Gold Regency Bar, the food at the surrounding tables completely unaffordable, but the comfort and coolness of the air-conditioning and the discreet whisper of background conversation is a sublime pleasure after the noise and super-heated pollution of the city. I light a Wills Classic, take my notebook from my bag, and sip my Kingfisher in tiny increments, drawing it out until, an hour later, it is so warm and flat that I feel justified in signaling the waiter for another. It is dark when I get out of the auto-rickshaw back in Pahar Ganj, the night air weighted with heat, smoke and the smell of tons of decaying rubbish, shot through with gaudy coloured light, the flash of QRF torches and the misty flare of cooking fires. I push my way through the jostling, shoving crowds, slipping in piles of cow dung, kicking up dust, crunching over chicken bones and broken glass; faces push out of the gloom all around me – Chinese, Tibetan, Bangladeshi, Eurasian, European – deformed and distorted in bursts of purple and green neon, bulging and contracting with flickering firelight; a cacophony of alien languages rings in my ears, guttural, high-pitched, hard, aggressive.
Two more days of this: it is a waking nightmare.
I spend the evening sitting in a darkened booth in The Gold Regency Bar And Restaurant, which at 8 o’clock suddenly becomes Temptation Bar. There is no announcement, or magical, chameleon like shift in the décor or lighting; the waiters simply collect the old menus from the tables and replace them with Temptation versions, and the change is complete. The bar is so dimly lit that I have to hold my cigarette lighter up to the new pricelist to find that the Kingfisher has just acquired a 20 Rupee premium. There are no windows, and no ventilation; ceiling fans move the stale atmosphere in slow eddies, struggling to make it breathable. The walls are an unbroken run of brown-tinted, marble effect mirrors, so that wherever you look, you catch your own, or someone else’s eye; or see yourself sitting on the plastic, leather-effect seat in your booth and disappearing into reflected infinity with a half-empty bottle of overpriced Kingfisher. The back page of the Temptation pricelist orders me to visit the Nightly Disco Dance; it is quite unequivocal in this – the words an explicit instruction, rather than a friendly invitation. What can I do? I carry my drink through the passageway behind the kitchen and follow the thump of over-amplified bass to a hall at the back of the hotel.
I lean against a wall just inside the door and try to make sense of the surreal scene before me.
Rows of Indians are sitting in plastic chairs that are lined up to face a stage at the far end of the hall; on the stage are perhaps six men and women, sitting behind Formica topped desks, surrounded by boxes of CDs and cassettes. In one corner, a sound system churns out some Indian folk/fusion music with enough decibels to silence a jet engine. Every few minutes, one of the panel on stage gets up, changes the cassette or CD to one of their choice, and then sits back down behind their desk and stares out at the audience, as if looking for any signs of disapproval or dissent, or perhaps the flicker of any thought of dancing behind a particularly decadent pair of eyes. The others examine their fingernails or shuffle bits of paper around their desks until it is their turn. There is no dance floor in the Nightly Disco Dance, and the hall is starkly lit with fluorescent strip-lights; if anyone wanted to dance, why on earth would they want to do it here? It is about as exciting as a public debate about sewage reprocessing, as much fun as being tried for murder. If it wasn’t for the ear-splitting Hindi music, you would think you were watching a council meeting in some provincial town hall. The audience stares up at the panel seated behind the line of desks on the stage; immobile in their stackable plastic chairs, they have the slumped and resigned body language of hopelessly delayed passengers in an airport lounge; there is no applause, no reaction whatsoever between one song ending and another one beginning, just a strange, keening silence punctuated by the odd phlegmy cough and the rattle of the cassette drawer falling open.
I drain the last of my Kingfisher, place the empty bottle on a folding table by the door and turn to leave; swinging my bag onto my shoulder, it catches the lip of the bottle which tips and slowly rolls off the table. Timed to the precise instant, the music fades into silence just as the bottle hits the floor and shatters. With the sickening clarity of a slow motion film, the entire hall turns around to look at me with horrified, accusing eyes; this is what it must feel like to be caught in the act of sneaking into a church service to steal the collection box. I slide around the corner and walk quickly back to my room, the thump of distant music following me up the stairs, creeping through the air vent and sliding under the door.
I hadn’t noticed the distant beat last night, but now I can’t help straining my ears to pick it out from the murmur of the somnambulant Main Bazar. I pick up the rhythm, and out of nowhere the lyrics of a trashy, irritating, 1970s pop song invade my mind:
“Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-Dancing!”

Last Passenger To Bangalore

I leave Ooty on the TTDC’s shuttle to Mysore at nine o’clock in the morning; the porters and waiters who have followed me at a discreet distance around the hotel, or camped outside the door to my cottage and made sure I wanted for nothing during my stay are disappointed to see me leave. My morning coffee is waiting in the dining hall when I arrive; a porter for my luggage when I close the cottage door behind me for the last time. The TTDC might be as architecturally unexciting as a multi-story car park, and as ramshackle as a run-down farm, but its sheer eccentricity and the friendliness of its staff make it an especially pleasant place to spend a few nights. I would rather stay in one of the TTDC’s hopelessly out-of-date cottages than at the five star Oberoi Grand - or in one of the Socialist reality Standard rooms of the Hotel Akademia, with an unrivalled view of the surrounding concrete forest of grim, workers’ tower blocks, than the upscale Hotel Slovan in Kosice, for that matter.
The shuttle is a minibus with a roof rack for luggage, frayed brown velour seats, and a gaudy postcard of Jesus performing a miracle tacked to the dashboard next to the cassette player; the windscreen is cracked and chipped, the tyres are worn smooth, and there is a hole where the speedometer should be. I have an argument with the driver when he refuses to chain my bag to the rack, and eventually push past him, climb the rusty ladder onto the roof, and do it myself. The shuttle drives around Ooty for the next half an hour, stopping at a dozen small hotels to pick up more passengers; we eventually climb out of town on the mountain road with at least twenty five people crammed into the sixteen seat bus, sharing seats and sitting in the aisle. It is hot, cramped, and airless; as Ooty drops away behind us, someone passes a cassette forward to the driver, who slams it into the player at Jesus’ right hand and turns the volume all the way up. The music is so loud and distorted it’s impossible to tell whether it’s a woman’s voice or a violin that has set off the high pitched ringing that has affected my ears; it does, however, drown out the worrying sound of the overloaded bus’s chassis dragging on the road when we hit a pothole of a bump.
It takes five hours to reach Mysore - including a fifteen minute stop at a suitably remote, overpriced, and unpleasant roadside bhavan – where I am dumped outside a seedy hotel behind the City Bus Stand that the driver insists I must take a room in. He blocks my path to the rooftop ladder, and I have no choice but to give him the key to unlock the chain on my bag. I’m forced to pay 5 Rupees ‘Luggage Fee’ before it’s thrown off the roof into the roadside dust; it’s a pathetically small amount, and to annoy the driver as much as possible, I make a big show of pulling wads of 500 and 1000 Rupee notes from my pockets before I find a few coins to toss at him. He watches his hotel commission disappear as I shoulder my bag, walk over to the nearest auto-rickshaw, and ask for the Mayura Hoysala; the look of perfect dismay on his face is pleasing to note, after all the hassle and irritation he has caused me, and I’m very tempted to finish him off by telling him that his five Rupees ‘Luggage Fee’ was all the journey had actually cost me.
For the third time, I check into room 104 at the Mayura Hoysala. I turn the air-conditioner to its highest setting, and sit beneath the ceiling fan as the room’s temperature slowly drops; after the freshness of Ooty, Mysore is like a steam bath, and there’s a blast of hot, damp air when I open the door to the veranda for the waiter with my room service bottle of Kingfisher. Even as I walk down to The Kwality Bar And Restaurant after sunset, the air is thick with heat and humidity; in the few days since leaving for Tamil Nadu, the Karnatakan spring has given way to the full ferocity of high summer.
I walk back towards the Mayura Hoysala, turn right at the traffic lights and follow the tree lined avenue to Mysore Junction; I buy a bottle of water from one of the wallahs on the pavement outside and sit on a bench at the end of platform one, in the darkness beyond the reach of the station lights. The Mysore-Chennai Kaveri Express is waiting at platform two behind a pair of WDMs, the driver checking behind the bonnet doors and cleaning the cab windows while passengers hurriedly buy drinks and snacks for their journey and run back to their seats. The train is a mix of air-conditioned two and three tier sleepers – 2AC and 3AC – Sleeper Class coaches, and ordinary Second Class. I cross over the tracks in front of the leading WDM and walk alongside the Kaveri Express until I am standing at the door of the first Sleeper Class carriage. It is absolutely packed inside, people and luggage jumbled together in the bunks, the aisles, and the doorways; the floor is littered with food wrappers, paan leaf, nutshells and banana skins. A barefoot man in a dhoti and open necked shirt frees himself from the tangle inside the coach and steps down onto the platform to buy a small plastic bag of dried fruit, bringing the tangy smell of sweat and urine on the draught of stale air that follows him. I would have spent more than forty hours in a carriage like this had I not booked the flight to Delhi. The driver locks the WDM’s air horns on for departure and drops his green flag from the cab window; people run for the carriage doors, hawkers quickly take money and give change, boxes and bulging cotton sacks are anxiously shoved onto the train; there are panicked shouts, babies crying, the metallic clang of something falling from an open door and hitting the tracks, the blast of a conductor’s whistle, the deepening chug-chug-CHUG-chug-chug of the two WDMs as they take up the strain, the deafening tone of their air horns, the hiss of their compressors. The Kaveri Express creeps slowly out of Mysore Junction and disappears into the balmy night, the red glow of the Luggage-Cum-Brake van’s tail light gradually diminishing and then suddenly winking out as the train slips around a bend somewhere out in the darkness. I walk of the end of the platform, cross the running lines and pick my way along the line of abandoned YDM diesels in the yard; on the other side of the station’s fence, I buy a bottle of Kingfisher at a hole-in-the-wall beer shop in the poor and decaying part of town, which is almost literally, on the wrong side of the tracks. The owner wraps it in the business pages of the Vijay Times, and I discreetly open it back at the bench on platform one, ready to dispose of it should anyone approach. But the station is quiet for the moment, just a few families huddled together under the canopy lights, the odd down-and-out bunched under a blanket in a corner, no RPF officers scouring the platforms in search of Europeans flouting the unequivocal prohibition of alcohol on Indian Railways. Dots of red and amber light twinkle and shimmer in the distance, and as I strain my eyes to pick out the dark silhouettes of signal posts and gantries, one of them blinks to green. An orange and white WDG coasts out of the night, the beam of its headlight sparkling off the polished rails in front of it. It comes to rest beneath the footbridge halfway along the station, well away from my bench and my proscribed bottle of Kingfisher, where a fresh crew is waiting; as quickly as it arrived, it is gone again – fading back into the blackness where it came from, probably to pick up a freight train from the goods yard on the edge of town. Somewhere behind me, in the carriage sidings, another WDM bursts into life with a deep grunt, the huge cloud of exhaust fumes a black plume against the ink-blue night sky; it draws a long line of Second Class coaches out of the sidings and then pushes them back into the station for the 2am Bangalore Passenger. The next train from Mysore after that will be the six o’clock Passenger, and it is hard not to feel sad that once I get on board, I will be starting my journey home to England; it will almost certainly be the last WDM diesel I see on my trip, and may well be the last train I catch on Indian Railways. These thoughts preoccupy me as I walk back to the Mayura Hoysala, and it is a long time before I drift into a fitful and unhappy sleep.
I sit on a bare wooden seat in the Luggage-Cum-Ordinary Class coach at the front of the Bangalore Passenger, the huge engine of the South Western Railways WDM rocking the whole coach gently as it ticks over, the acrid whiff of diesel fumes drifting through the open doors and windows on the cool morning air. I chain my bag to the seat post and push it underneath, out of view, then take my daypack and Wills Classics and sit in the open doorway at the front of the carriage: if this is going to be my last Indian Railways journey, I’m going to do it properly and footboard ride the whole three hours to Bangalore – I can wash the soot off and pluck the bits of carbon from the corners of my eyes when I get to the airport. At six o’clock precisely the air horns blare and the driver opens up the WDM; the pre-dawn slipstream is uncomfortably cool against my face as I lean out and watch the big ALCO diesel pick up speed, but I am not moving. I light a Wills Classic and watch indiscernible shapes whip by in the gloom beyond the dim carriage lights: shacks or huts, crossings or bridge parapets - I can’t tell. Sometimes a lonely oil lamp or cooking fire flares briefly in the distance, but otherwise there is nothing: the darkness is as flat and deep as an ocean. I look ahead, trying to pick out the tracks the WDM is following, but see nothing other than the tiny speck of a green signal floating way off in the void. Anything could be out there, hurtling towards us at 70 kilometres an hour; I grip the handrails even tighter, hoping that the driver is more confidant than I am that the line is clear. I try not to imagine we are speeding towards some unseen obstruction – an overloaded Tata truck that has broken down on a remote level crossing, a shoddily built apartment block that has collapsed across the line, a piece of line side debris that has been deliberately placed to fulfill my fears – but still shudder at the memory of seeing an auto-rickshaw jump the crossing barriers a few seconds ahead of the Ganga-Gompti Express to Lucknow.
The sun rises as we approach Mandya, turning the chill slipstream into a baking, gale force wind. The noise of the WDM’s engine and air horns rings in my ears when we stop at the quiet station, and I can taste diesel at the back of my throat; my hair is thick and gritty with exhaust fumes, my face streaked and smudged with oily residues. I light a Wills Classic and walk in circles on the platform, forcing the circulation to return to my tingling, cramped legs. After three and a half hours I unchain my bag from its hiding place beneath the wooden seat, step onto the platform at Bangalore City station and walk forward to the cab window of the WDM; I thank the driver, and he smiles back uncertainly. Finally, I pat the sole bar of the WDM, then turn and walk out of the station.
I catch an auto-rickshaw out to the airport, check in for my flight, and take a seat at the back of the Boeing 737 that operates Spicejet’s Bangalore-Delhi route. Four hours later, I get out of an Ambassador taxi at the top of the Main Bazar in Pahar Ganj, walk down the hot, noisy, dirty street, check into the Gold Regency Hotel, and begin the wait for my flight back to London.

Bedlam And Botany

I open the cottage door on my way to the dining hall for breakfast and find one of the porters asleep in the porch; he opens his eyes and clambers to his feet, apologizing profusely.
“Good morning, good sir,” he greets me, pulling up the collar of his greatcoat against the post-dawn chill. “Can I be of assistance?” From the corner of my eye I see one of the waiters hovering beside the path to the main block. I ask the porter to find someone from the laundry and send them over after breakfast, and he gratefully accepts a Wills Classic in return; the waiter intercepts me halfway across the garden, takes my order for coffee, and then dashes off ahead of me so that it’s waiting at a table when I arrive in the dining hall, which, for some unknown reason, has been strung with brightly coloured bunting since yesterday morning. I order toast and a masala omelette, which takes the waiters by surprise; the paper trail brings out a previously unseen chef, who examines me from the kitchen door before approving the order and disappearing again. My toast – which actually seems to be fried bread – arrives via one waiter, and a second coffee by another; there’s no sign of the omelette, but I am joined by two sparrows, who hop through one of several windows that are left open regardless of how cold it is, or how many insulating layers the waiters are as a result forced to wear. The sparrows perch hopefully on the chair back opposite me, and then hop onto the tabletop to peck at the little pinches of fried toast I leave for them. The cashier watches disapprovingly from behind his 1960s mechanical cash register, but is suddenly distracted by the arrival of a large party of Indian tourists; the dining hall is thrown into a state of chaos; the waiters watch in horror as families and couples file in and settle across a dozen separate tables; the sparrows fly up to the bunting, twittering and craning their heads to watch me with bright, glassy eyes.
My omelette is dumped on the edge of the table by a speeding waiter; he passes on his way back to the cashier with a wad of requisitions for dosai and sambar, a look of alarm passing between them. The dining hall echoes with the animated conversation and bright laughter that only Indians are capable of making this early in the day; somebody turns the television volume up, and the jangly notes of a sitar rises above the bedlam; in the background, it sounds like someone else is destroying the kitchen and murdering the chef. Breakfast in the Hotel Akademia, on the other hand, whilst equally as unpredictable, would be a somber ritual, conducted in the fearful silence of a Soviet era Party funeral. And the hottest paprika in Slovakia would be laughed out of the TTDC’s kitchen: my masala omelette, along with diced onions and tomatoes, is studded with chunks of fresh green chilli, seeded and uncompromisingly hot. A sheen of sweat breaks out on my forehead, even as the cold morning air puckers and goose bumps the skin on my arms. The monkeys cling to the window frame behind me, bouncing up and down, mooning in at me; a pigeon glides beneath the bunting and lands on my table, much to the disgust of the sparrows who drop down and take up their positions on the chair back. None of them is fooled by the large piece of glistening, dark green, searing hot chilli I slip into the pile of toast crumbs.
The porter tells me the laundry man is “coming ten minutes, sir.”
I sit on the veranda and work out how I am going to get back to Delhi for my flight to London next week. Trains At A Glance tells me it’s 2700 kilometres and 60 hours via Chennai Central from Combiatore Junction, which I can reach by taking the Nilgiris Railway from Ooty; or 2500 kilometres and 40 hours direct from Bangalore, via the bus to Mysore, and then the Bangalore Passenger train. Allowing for connections and delays, and if I can get a reservation, it is going to be a grueling, three to four day journey.
After half an hour I give up on the laundry man and go to find the porter. I give him my bag of washing, 20 Rupees, and a Wills Classic, and tell him to make sure he brings the cleaned clothes back to my cottage no later than six this evening. I walk through Charing Cross and the Big Bazar to the reservations office at Ooty station. Train number 2615 – The Chennai-New Delhi Grand Trunk Express – has two hundred people Wait Listed for the day after tomorrow; the Bangalore-New Delhi Karnataka Express only has berths in Sleeper Class: two uncomfortable days on hard wooden seats, and two sleepless nights. I book it and try not to think about the promise of being packed into a torturously small space, surrounded by strangers and noise, and being suffocated by the enveloping odor of filthy toilets. I decide to take my mind off it with a visit to Ooty’s botanical gardens, and as I walk back along Commercial Road to find an auto-rickshaw, I notice a poster in the window of Blue Mountains Tours And Travels for Spicejet flights to the capital. I find an internet café in the jumble of shops behind the Hyderbadi Biryani House and buy an e-ticket for the three hour Bangalore-Delhi flight for little more than I paid for the Karnataka Express. Ten minutes later, I am back at the railway reservations counter and filling out a Reservation/Cancellation Requisition for a refund on my redundant Sleeper Class ticket. I call the Mayura Hoysala in Mysore, reserve a room for tomorrow night, and ask them double check the early morning Bangalore Passenger train times, the ‘Peoples Trains’ that aren’t listed in Trains: I can leave Mysore at 5am, and be in Delhi by 5pm. I breathe a huge sigh of relief and barely complain about the absurd fare the rickshaw wallah demands for the short ride to the botanical gardens.
I admit to having maintained a studied ignorance of anything that grows, flowers, or blooms for my entire adult life, an admission made even worse by considering myself otherwise inquisitive, and trying to impassion others with my fascination about railways. I put it down to the seemingly endless chores in the family garden when growing up in Leicester, which didn’t sit at all well with the spiky hair and Doc Marten’s of my teenage years; the Walkman had yet to be invented, so I couldn’t even rebel by listening to The Buzzcocks singing ‘Boredom’ while I mowed the lawns or trimmed the front hedge. I buy a guide book from the shop near the Fern House and navigate my way along the paths that wind through the gardens, trying to identify some of the 1000 species of plants and trees without any success whatsoever – they all look identical, and the pictures in the guide could easily be of the same cacti or palms, photographed from different angles on different days. If it wasn’t for the fact that the place has the credibility of being laid out by a team from London’s Kew Gardens in the mid 1800s, I might have suspected The Emperor’s New Clothes had been rewritten in Hindi, and The Maharaja’s New Shrubs is being played out around the neatly clipped lawns of Ooty’s Botanical Gardens. But that’s ignorance for you. The gardens are undeniably beautiful, and immaculately maintained; and you don’t need any specialist knowledge to enjoy this peaceful escape from the hustle and bustle of the Big Bazar and the traffic of Charing Cross, much as you don’t need to know the difference between a Russian M62 diesel and an Indian WDM to enjoy a railway journey.
I buy some coffee at a roadside shack outside the gardens and drink it sitting on a wooden stool in the afternoon sun; even at an altitude of two and a half kilometers, Ooty’s spring days still reach more than 30 degrees. I cross the road to the Tibetan Market and wander around rows of identical concrete stalls selling cheap training shoes and badly made sportswear, fake designer labels and plastic houswares; there is no sign of Tibetan craft or culture, and nothing on offer that couldn’t be bought at any Bazar or Chowk from here to Lucknow. The stall holders aren’t doing any business; they sit next to their piles of worthless and uninteresting goods and watch the tourists drift by, a uniform look of utter boredom settled across their strong, Oriental features.
I catch an auto-rickshaw back to Commercial Road and order a Golden Eagle in The Blue Hills Hotel. A group of young Indian men are getting roaring drunk in one of the booths in the dimly lit bar; the stewards are lined up against the wall, arms folded across their chests, watching with obvious distain. A glass of beer is dropped and smashes on the floor; the waiters’ expressions don’t even flicker. One of the young men pulls himself to his feet and reels off towards the toilet, lurching from table to table, crashing into chairs, fumbling along the walls for support; there is a retch and a splash as he is sick on the floor outside the kitchen door. The waiters look at each other; they’ve seen it all before.
I walk back to the TTDC and book their private shuttle bus service to Mysore in the morning; it costs 20 Rupees more than the KSRTC bus, but it will collect me from the hotel and deliver me to the Mayura Hoysala within, I am promised, four hours. I ask them to prepare my bill and bring it up to the bar. As soon as I sit down the barman appears with a chilled Kingfisher and a little bowl of masala cashews, places them on the table in front of me and then backs away, bowing slightly, and smiling his brown, gap-toothed smile. The porter from the dining hall puts his head around the door: “Good evening, good sir,” he nods at me enthusiastically. A few minutes later he returns with the laundryman, and the clerk from the front desk; in exchange for 30 Rupees and three Wills Classics, I am given a bag of clean clothes, a tissue-paper thin Invoice For Rooms, and the dedicated service of the porter for my ‘evening’s requirements’. For some unknown reason, the front desk has decided to apply a 10 percent discount to my final bill; have they forgotten that they had already reduced the price of my cottage by 100 Rupees a night? I ask the clerk to check the amount again, and after borrowing the barman’s calculator, he manages to reduce it even further, rather than remove the discount; most of my bar bill, and the cost of my lift back to Mysore have suddenly evaporated.
I ask the porter to come up to my cottage at 8 o’clock with a menu, pay cash for another bottle of Kingfisher, and then sit on my veranda with my headphones on.
If only I’d had an MP3 player for the tedious hours spent working in the garden back at home. Half the size of a pack of Wills Classics, hidden among its three hundred files are some of the same songs I came to know then, half a lifetime and two continents ago.

Distant Home Signal

Ooty is cold enough in the morning for me to see my own breath; there is no heating in my cottage, and the stone floor numbs my toes when I pull back the thick blankets and walk from the bed-sitting room to the enormous bathroom. I pull on a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt, grab my fleece, and walk across the garden to the dining room for coffee. The TTDC ( Tamil Tourist Development Corporation ) Hotel is a huge, rambling, tatty complex of 1960s concrete and dark wood buildings set amidst an equally erratic spread of lawns, flowerbeds, and towering evergreens. The main building has had bits haphazardly added over the years, and at some point in the mid 1970s, somebody thought it would be a good idea to put some cottages in the middle of the garden. The place is a warren of passages, corridors, courtyards, and stairwells that you could get lost in for hours; it is gloomy, run-down, faded, and worn, with unexpected dead ends and echoing of footsteps. As I walk down a dimly lit corridor around the edge of an overgrown courtyard, a monkey suddenly leaps through one of the open windows and tears off ahead off me, hotly pursued by its playmate. I hear them chattering and screeching as they crash through some unseen part of the hotel, and see them again from the window of the dining hall.
I sit at a small table in the vast dining hall; it reminds me of a school canteen, with its institutional green walls, high flat ceiling and woodblock floor – there is even a suitably austere clock above the serving hatch to complete the picture. It could easily seat 200 people. Even at this hour, a big, old-fashioned television set in one corner is playing a Bollywood movie. There is an Indian couple several tables away in the middle of the room, but nobody else apart from me for the four waiters and the cashier to serve, each of them bundled up against the morning chill. I order a coffee. The waiter writes out a requisition, one part of which is handed to another waiter who takes it to a third waiter posted at the hot drinks vending machine; the second part is lodged with the cashier, who transfers the details into an A4 ledger before spiking it pending payment. After a full five minutes, a small paper cup of black coffee is relayed to my table by the team of waiters, a curl of steam rising into the cold air of the hangar-like dining room. I throw them into complete confusion by immediately ordering a second cup; there is a lot of discussion, but they eventually manage to bring it to my table just as I finish the first and light a Wills Classic. They look longingly at my cigarette. What the hell? I smile at them, and push the pack across the Formica tabletop. Service is a lot quicker after this.
The two monkeys are chasing each other around the gardens outside the dining hall. They shoot up drainpipes, swing from window ledges, and leap from balconies; but their favorite pastime is tumbling around inside a large satellite dish that is mounted on the flat roof of the laundry. It rocks alarmingly as the monkeys roll around inside it, pulling each others tails and twisting their ears. The television picture flickers and rolls, snow clouds of interference blowing across the screen; the waiters take it in turns to poke at the controls, scratching their heads and rechecking cable connections. Over the waiters’ shoulders, I watch the monkeys jump up and down in the dish, using it like a trampoline; the television goes haywire, the waiters are baffled. It is hilarious.
The TTDC front desk was apologetic that they had nothing available for me apart from a cottage; they sheepishly pointed to the Xeroxed tariff pinned to the dark-wood veneered wall and said it would be 600 Rupees. By the time I had looked at it and returned to the lobby, the price was down to 500. A whole family could live in my cottage – although bungalow would be a better description; it has a long, monkey proof veranda, which leads into the bed-sitting room; a large bathroom with a hot water geyser; and a dressing-cum-dining room. The furniture is an eclectic mix of dark wood, Formica, plastic and vinyl, all of it truly dreadful, but perfectly suited to the spirit of the TTDC. Two 1970s bucket seats in bright orange plastic and a hideous Alpine print in a cheap, gold coloured frame are my favorite pieces. It is such an unexpected, endlessly entertaining and eccentric place that I cannot help but love it. There is a knock at the front door. One waiter and two porters are waiting outside.
“You would like coffee,” the waiter asks, “breakfast?”
“You would like laundry,” one of the porters enquires, “washing?”
“You would like anything, good sir?” asks the other.
It is pleasantly warm as I walk down the hill to Commercial Road, past the strikingly colonial British secondary school, and find the Irani Coffee House. Inside, shafts of dusty sunlight poke through the gaps in the timber roof and fall across the old and scarred wooden tables; little silver pots of thick, strong coffee are served beneath verses of the Koran woven into silk wall hangings; the atmosphere is redolent of strong tobacco, incense, and Persian mystery. A white bearded old man in a skullcap welcomes and serves me with warmth and politeness; it does not matter that I am a English catholic, he an Iranian Muslim; and neither of us need to patronize the other to prove how tolerant and accepting we are. I wander through the maze of steep alleys and lanes of the Big Bazar, past shops full of cooking pots and sandalwood carvings, bags of tealeaf and bolts of cloth; past squalid yatri lodges and stinking mutton stalls, shops full of gold with shotgun toting guards outside and dingy little chai stalls. Further past the racecourse and the bus stand, I find Ooty’s railway station – the terminus of the Nilgiri Blue Mountain Railway – and buy a cardboard Edmondson ticket for the 12.15 departure for Coonor.
The train is waiting in the station’s only platform behind a metre gauge YDM diesel – almost identical to the ones stranded at Mysore Junction, except that ‘Powered By Bio-Diesel’ is painted on its cab side. Almost a scaled down version of the broad gauge WDM, the YDM works the upper part of the line, after which a steam engine takes over for the most steeply graded part of the route down to Mettupalayam, where its Rack-And-Pinion gearing is needed. I sit on a wooden bench-seat in the first coach and drop the window down on its leather strap; although the steam engines date from the line’s completion in 1908, I would guess that most of the coaches date from somewhere around the 1940s, along with a few others that are quite obviously much more modern. Built by Nilgiris tea planters and the colonial British, the railway’s 46 kilometre route appears in table 93 of Trains At A Glance, and nearly 100 years later, you can still get a train from Ooty and on to anywhere in India. There are few places left in the world where the national railway schedules century old steam locomotives in their timetables.
The tell-tale signs that the nation which gave the world railways built this line are everywhere; from the ground frames that control the points outside the station, to the old water tower at the end of the platform; from the station master’s Acme Thunderer whistle, to the block token signal machine in the porters’ office. And the semaphore signals that could have been plucked from the Great Central, or the erstwhile Great Eastern railway, and planted beside these tracks, high up in the mountains of Tamil Nadu. Different types of signals for different functions, like the one the train is approaching now, the growl of the YDM’s exhaust belying its size: a distant home signal, cleared for the run to the last section; perhaps a reminder for me, also, that I am approaching the end of my journey.
As I lean out of the window, I see the front wheels of the YDM suddenly jump and then crash back down onto the track; a second later something clatters off the underside of my coach and the drivers applies the brakes in full emergency. The crew walk down the train and pull a metal rail chair from between the carriage wheels; someone deliberately laid it across the tracks, and would have derailed the train had they chosen a curved, rather than straight section of the line. At Coonor, a steam engine waits under the home signal to take the train down Mettupalayam; the YDM drops onto the return service to Ooty, and after smoking a Wills Classic, I climb up behind the diesel for the slow, steep crawl back to the terminus.
I walk back to Charing Cross and go into The Blue Hills Hotel bar; they have no Kingfisher, so I order a Golden Eagle. The red and gold label reads De Luxe Premium Beer – Specially Bottled For Connoisseurs – Quite A Chiller! Quite a mouthful. I debate asking the barman if he has ever caught anyone posing as a Connoisseur to surreptitiously drink one of his bottles of Golden Eagle, but decide it is not worth explaining Mohan Breweries’ strange and slightly ambiguous assertion. I buy some chicken tikka and rice from the Hyderbadi Biryani House to take back to the crazy TTDC Hotel; the uncooked kebabs hang on skewers outside the shop, unrefrigerated since whatever time they were made, and are cooked in a pot of charcoal out on the street. The rice appears from somewhere in the back of the grimy kitchen-cum-dining room, and the whole lot is presented to me in a purple carrier bag that encourages me to Fly Emirates. I call down to the bar for a room service Kingfisher, and eat my dinner on the veranda while the monkeys do their best to wreck the picnic tables on the lawn below me. If the TTDC arranged an exchange program with the Hotel Akademia in Slovakia, it would herald a whole new era in adventure tourism – one that would remain Exclusively For The Connoisseur of such places, I hope.

Blue Mountain Ultra Deluxe

I wake in the opaque pre-dawn light and repack my bag for the bus out of Madikeri; the restaurant will not open for another forty minutes, so I ride the Yamaha back to the tourist office, push the keys under the door, and walk back to the Rajhandi through the empty streets. Mist rolls across Kennett Lane and slowly swirls around me, dampening my hair and brushing droplets of dew on my shirt, but somehow leaving the dust under my boots untouched. A few metres from the hotel car park, I disturb an enormous brown rat feeding on the waste from yesterday’s slaughter at The Best Mutton Stall; its nose twitches at the air, but it does not move off; its thick brown fur is beaded with mist; it is the size of a small cat. I order a pot of black coffee from room service, sit at my table, and watch the town slowly wake up outside my window.
In Delhi or Kolkata, I would see smudges of smoke tainting the sky above the bastees and slums, hear the constant growl and clatter of traffic, and the howls of stray dogs; I would smell cooking fires, rotting garbage, exhaust fumes, decay and human waste. In Madikeri I see the mist cloaked hills, hear birdsong and the distant call to prayer from the mosque down in the valley; I smell only the tang of evergreen sap and lighter notes of jacaranda and bougainvillea. High in the Coorg hills, surrounded by plantations where coffee bushes shade beneath trees strung with pepper vines, Madikeri seems as distant from the madness of urban India as it is possible to be; the chronic social problems that shock the senses in other cities – the slums and street dwellers, the pollution and the poverty – are unseen. It is as if it has placed itself, literally, above that.
I wave down the solitary auto-rickshaw that sometimes cruises Raja’s Seat Road looking for a fare and load my bag onto the small shelf above the engine at the back of the passenger compartment. Across the road, the little train waits silently in the station, the driver and conductor dozing on two platform benches; it will be a long day – the tour buses won’t arrive until six o’clock, and the Rajhandi’s bar will have first call.
There are two buses waiting to leave from the KSRTC bus stand for Mysore. I check the Deluxe service for any sign of video equipment, buy a 95 Rupee ticket, and stow my bag behind the driver’s seat. I buy a litre of water, smoke a Wills Classic, and take a farewell look at the town; further up the hill at the circle, a white uniformed traffic policeman stands with his hands on his hips and glares down at me with a decidedly non-plussed expression. I creep back to the bus and take my seat.
It takes five hours to reach the suburbs of Mysore. I step down into the burgeoning City Bus Stand and back into the noise and chaos I had escaped in for a short while. After the freshness of Madikeri, the heat and humidity is intense. I take an auto-rickshaw to the Mayura Hoysala and check in to my old room; they welcome me like an old friend and ask whether I would like a bottle of Kingfisher in the bar, or served to my room. I sit on the veranda with Trains At A Glance and work out a route to Udhagamandalam – or, as it’s more commonly known, Ooty – in the Ghats of Tamil Nadu. Although it lies only 130 kilometres from Mysore, there is no direct rail link, and I calculate a journey of 30 hours on three different trains via Bangalore and Combiatore Junction. I walk over to the station booking office and find that train 2677 - The Bangalore-Combiatore Intercity Express - for the following morning has only Wait Listed tickets; I change the date on my Reservation Requisition Form and push it back over the counter: Wait List or Reserved Against Cancellation.
“You take bus,” the booking clerk advises, “every day, nine o’clock, Ooty in six hours only”.
I thank him, take an auto-rickshaw back to the City Bus Stand, and within 10 minutes have a ticket for the morning’s Ultra-Deluxe coach to ‘The Queen Of The Hill Stations’.
It is getting dark as I walk back through Devaraja market to The Kwality Bar And Restaurant; the worst of the heat has backed off, but the evening air is like a hot breath on my face. I sit under an ancient, wobbling ceiling fan and hold a chilled bottle of Kingfisher against my neck, flicking perspiration from my finger tips.
“Please, you must help my friend.” A tall, well dressed Indian stands beside my table, his hands clasped in front of him. “Please speak to him, before it is too late.”
His friend is a middle-aged plantation owner from an area south of Coorg; I am told that since his wife left him, he has spent his time drinking and has lost interest in his coffee bushes, his estate, and his friends. A further concern is his cigarette smoking. I sip my Kingfisher, light a Wills Classic, and ask him exactly what sort of advice would he expect me to offer his friend. The irony is lost, however, and his friend summoned to my table. I point out that I am neither a doctor nor a psychiatrist, and that I smoke and drink on a near biblical scale; but it doesn’t matter, the tall Indian assures me: “You are English – he will listen to you.” His friend turns out to be quite content with his apparently decadent and destructive lifestyle; his staff is quite capable of running the estate, and he is relieved to be free of the conventions of a boring marriage. He has lived a full life, and is looking forward to the day when one of the big co-operatives will buy his plantation and allow him to retire and fully embrace the pleasures of McDowell’s and Navy Cut.
“If there is one thing you could say to him,” the tall Indian asks me, looking at his friend, “what would it be? What piece of advice?”
What indeed?
“Enjoy yourself,” I tell his friend, finishing my Kingfisher and standing to leave. The tall Indian looks at me with disappointment; I shrug apologetically: he is fighting a moral crusade to save somebody who doesn’t want to be saved, but he simply can’t see that.
I cover myself with Odomos mosquito repellant and sit on the veranda late into the night; as the traffic noise subsidies I can hear the Chug of a WDM idling in Mysore Junction station, waiting to back onto the 2am Bangalore Passenger train. Bats swoop and flit around the trees that line Jhansi Laxmi Bai Road; the shrill cry of a startled kite and the occasional bark of a stray dog penetrate the darkness, but otherwise it is eerily quiet.
I have less than two weeks left in India. It doesn’t seem possible.
In the morning I drink my usual tall glass of hot black coffee, shoulder my bag, check out of the Mayura Hoysala once more, and take an auto-rickshaw to the bus stand. I walk the line of buses that are parked nose-in to the main concourse until I find my Ultra-Deluxe, waiting with the engine running and only two other passengers on board. I buy a breakfast of potato chips, which I throw away after a few mouthfuls: thick, hard, and greasy, they are caked in a mixture of chilli powder and sugar, rendering them inedible to anything but the most hardened local palette. On the bus, I am pleased to note a gaping square hole in the laminated hardboard wall behind the driver’s seat where the video screen once faced the passengers. In fact the whole interior looks as if it has been burgled of most of its fittings; more holes appear in the ceiling with speaker cables poking out, and all the knobs have been removed from the seat reclining levers; there is nothing left of the seat back tables apart from empty screw holes to show where the hinges were, and the door to the pilfered first aid kit hangs open, swinging backwards and forwards with each bump in the road. My seat is stuck at an uncomfortable and random angle, neither upright nor reclined; what’s left of the handle won’t budge, so I spend the journey halfway between sitting and lying, like a hospital convalescent. The drive is hair-raising; there is no concession to traffic or road conditions; from the minute we leave Mysore, the driver keeps his foot to the floor and his hand on the horn. Sometimes we drive with the nearside wheels on the hard packed mud of the verge, kicking up stones and dust as we undertake a Tonga or an old Ambassador taxi; at other times, on the wrong side of the road, dodging and weaving through the oncoming trucks and rickshaws. After three nerve-wracking hours we pull off the road at an isolated truck stop for a break. Before any of the passengers can prise themselves from their broken seats, the driver and conductor are inside the shabby little bhavan and claiming their commission. While the owner serves the bus crew a meal of steamed iddli, dosai, and sambar, the passengers are ignored and left to study the stale contents of a dirty, glass fronted food cabinet balanced on a sagging wooden serving counter. I stand in the desolated car park and smoke a Wills Classic, looking through the doorway as my fellow passengers reluctantly select what they think they can stomach from the tired and old fried snacks on display; as the driver and conductor accept cups of hot chai from their host, a woman in a cobalt blue sari leads her young daughter back to the bus, disappointment and disgust written across her face. The little girl is clutching a cold, sickly brown bonda to her mouth and taking small bites; her mother is going hungry.
There is a rough, stinking, wooden lean-to behind the bhavan marked ‘Ladies.’
I ask where I will find the gents.
“Outside,” the owner says, with a dismissive flick of his hand. I feel like leaning across his filthy counter with its three yellowed plastic bottles of overpriced drinking water and punching his lights out. Outside means exactly that: anywhere outside. I choose the back wall outside the open kitchen door and add the smoking butt of my Wills Classic to the puddle.
We cross into Tamil Nadu at a military checkpoint outside the gates to Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary; the park is out of bounds to visitors, even though the bus drives right through the middle of it. Banditry linked to the trade in illegal sandalwood has made whole tracts of the Ghats no-go areas; roadside signs prohibit stopping unless absolutely necessary, and forbid leaving your vehicle in any event. Dense, scrubby bush rears up on either side of the thin ribbon of Tarmac; thick and seemingly impenetrable, a whole army of dacoits could hide unseen in this vast jungle. Other signs show pictures of elephants, monkeys, and even tigers, with ’30 KM MAX’ in large red letters; our driver carelessly throws the bus from one side of the narrow road to the other at twice this speed. Beyond the teak and sandalwood trees, the peaks of the Ghats soar above the foothills and lower valleys; somewhere in those mountains is Ooty, but that the road will reach such a height seems impossible to believe. The climb is torturous; each time we reach a pass or a saddle between these huge ridges, we face another wall of sloping rock rising still higher into the thinning blue air. Eventually, we clear the highest ridge and begin to drop into the mountain valleys where the colonial British rulers would retreat from the suffocating summer heat of the Tamil Plains. Forests of eucalyptus and sandalwood gather in the clefts and folds of the mountains, and plantations climb the steep valley walls, a carpet of emerald green dotted with the tiny, brightly coloured figures of tea pickers.
After seven hours, we reach Ooty’s bus stand. Following my introduction to Tamil Nadu in Chennai, my first impressions of the town do little to dispel my negative feelings about the state. Spanning a long, wide valley, Ooty seems to be a hotchpotch of scruffy shacks, red-brick colonial public buildings, ugly concrete boxes, and alpine ski chalets. A faded and overgrown racecourse occupies the oval of land between the bus stand and the Big Bazar; further west, the boating lake receives the town’s sewage and pervades the air with a faint, but unpleasant smell.
I find a pokey little bhavan on Lower bazaar, order a coffee and a cucumber sandwich, and study my map; I settle on the TTDC Tamil Nadu Hotel just off Commercial Road in Charing Cross, pay my bill, and catch an auto-rickshaw.
In the evening I sit in the wood paneled bar beneath reproduction prints of Victorian English gentlemen playing croquet and hunting with dogs, sipping Kingfisher, and thinking about The Hotel Akademia in the distant central European city of Kosice. If my stay there was like a post-Soviet version of Fawlty Towers, then my stay at the TTDC Hotel is promising to be the Bollywood remake.
And then there’s the Nilgiri Blue Mountain Railway.
I think I’m going to enjoy Ooty.

The Gladiator And The Gulag

In the morning, I order black coffee and sit at a table in the restaurant overlooking the garden. Madikeri is shrouded in early morning mist; ethereal fingers of vapour curl through the evergreens that climb the hillsides above town, and only the minarets of the Rajas’ tombs rise above the rolling cloud that fills the valley floor. The air is already hot by the time I finish my coffee and The Vijay Times and walk downstairs to the car park. The Yamaha refuses to start; it’s become used to being left on ‘reserve’ tank and doesn’t like that I turned the petrol tap to ‘off’ the previous evening. I spend 10 minutes kicking it over and shaking it around before the sediment in the bottom of the tank allows some fuel to reach the carburetor, and then gun the engine and ride down Kennet Lane into town. I pull over and walk through the private bus stand to buy Wills Classic and a bottle of water; a line of battered, bent and leaning old buses are reversed up to the kerb outside a row of bare concrete waiting rooms where women sit on rickety benches in near darkness. The men wait beyond the barred doors of these cells, spitting paan leaf onto the littered pavement, smoking beedis, and arguing fares with the touts who compete loudly and with wild gestures for passengers. There is no timetable, no booking office, nor any hint of where any of the buses might be going; it is even more intuitive than the KSRTC bus stand in Mysore.
As I ride the Yamaha across the traffic circle and past the auto-rickshaw stand I hear the shrill blast of a whistle; the white uniformed traffic policeman points at me and waves me down with his lachti stick. I pretend not to see him, drop the bike into second, and accelerate down a side street behind the Capitol Hotel; I have no helmet, and although everyone else in Madikeri flaunts this law, I have just saved myself a lot of hassle and a large fine. Consulting my map, I work out that I can circumnavigate the centre of town, and, when I need to, park out of sight behind the Canara Bank and walk the short distance to the main street.
The road to Abbi Falls is a strip of narrow, hilly Tarmac that winds its way through coffee estates and thick jungle; after six or seven kilometers it hugs the edge of a steep valley with views that disappear into the haze surrounding the distant peaks of the Western Ghats. Every so often a shared jeep or Ambassador taxi passes in the opposite direction, sending me fishtailing onto the dusty verge with an incessant beep-beep-beep of its horn; otherwise the road is hot, empty, and meandering as it snakes through the lush, green countryside peppered with hamlets and smallholdings. I pull over beneath the shade of a jacaranda and drop the Yamaha onto its side stand; as I reach for a Wills Classic movement catches my eye: a bright green viper – perhaps three feet in length – slides from beneath the bike and arcs towards my feet. I unashamedly run a good twenty metres down the road until I deem it safe to smoke a cigarette before going back to the Yamaha. I reach the waterfalls from a footpath that runs from the car park at the road’s end; a steep descent through a coffee plantation brings me to a wooden bridge beneath the trickle of water that spills over its lip, and a litter strewn picnic area patrolled by a bored looking park ranger. I cannot imagine a less inspiring scene; it has a fraction of the charm of even the most mundane stretch of the road from Madikeri. But I am at least satisfied that the Yamaha Gladiator is as much a match for the roads of Coorg as I am, and leave Abbi Falls for Kushar Nagar, some fifty kilometers to the east.
I follow Mysore Road out of town, dropping into the Cauvery River valley through a series of hairpin bends; the road is quiet, but the few buses and lorries I meet drive straight at me and overtake each other on blind bends, making it is far more dangerous than riding around town. I overtake whole families of Indians balanced on scooters and small motorbikes, and often slow to wind my way through herds of cows that cross or simply stand in the middle of the road. When a long stretch opens up, I push the Yamaha to its limits, streaking up behind other riders and then overtaking with a blast of the horn, tempting them to see if they can catch me. Two young men on Hondas take up the challenge but give up as the Gladiator’s speedometer creeps towards 90 kph on a sweeping bend; when I slow to take the road to the Durbar, they smile and rev their engines as they pass, waving and holding up their thumbs. After ten kilometers of crumbling Tarmac, dust, gravel, and compacted mud I reach a crossroads with a hand painted sign showing a badly drawn, smiling elephant; a narrow lane snakes through a few hamlets and a wide plain of paddy fields and eventually ends at The Durbar Hotel on the banks of the River Cauvery.
The elephant training camp is on an island in the centre of the river; I pay 5 Rupees to park the Yamaha under the hotel’s porch, and another five to take the ferry across to the camp. It is hot, still, and humid on the island; the thermometer at the deserted feeding centre sits at 36 degrees, and my forearms tingle with wind blasted sunburn from the ride.
Sweat trickles down my chest and darkens my shirt in large patches; clouds of mosquitoes gather around me. The trainers lead two small elephants into the water below a sign saying ‘Bathing Area’, screaming instructions at them and beating them with bamboo lachtis until they lie in the shallow water; they scrub at the leathery skin of the animals’ ears with soap and stones, and smash them repeatedly on the head if they attempt to resist the brutal treatment. Beyond the feeding area, another trainer is forcing a larger, older elephant to lift its front feet for the visitors; thick, heavy steel chains are wrapped around its legs, and the scrubby bush that covers the island resounds to the crack of the trainer’s stick hitting the elephant’s shins. Excited Indian families pose in front of these cruel, degrading, and ugly little scenes, and then turn their backs on the animals’ fate and compare photographs over their picnics. I feel sick and ashamed of myself for coming to this place. As I take the boat back to the Durbar Hotel and leave the hopeless elephants to their life of slavery in this rotten gulag, a park ranger smiles at me and asks: “You like our camp? You will come again?”
I ride the Yamaha twenty kilometers to the picnic area at Kushal Nagar Dam; the River Cauvery is a crucial element in the life of Karnataka, and, further east, Tamil Nadu. It irrigates the paddy fields and farms, and provides drinking water for millions; it is also the source of tension between the two states, and a political powder keg. The dam at Kushal Nagar is almost empty, but The Vijay Times is full of editorial comment and angry letters about the Cauvery Dispute – the division of the precious supply of water between the two states. Back in Mysore, demonstrations are paralyzing the city; at Mandya, protestors have blocked the railway line from Bangalore; in the countryside, impoverished farmers are committing suicide as their smallholdings literally dry up; across both states violence is rising as the water levels slowly drop. Central government in Delhi has finally awarded each state a share after more than a decade of wrangling, but nobody is satisfied: there simply isn’t enough flowing from the Western Ghats for everybody. There isn’t even enough in Kushal Nagar to attract the flocks of wading birds Karnataka State Tourism guaranteed.
I ride back to the Mysore Road and find the Pooja Bar And Restaurant; I order a Kingfisher and take a seat at a dirty wooden table with a cracked plastic ashtray advertising McDowell’s No1. The local men eye me curiously: a Western visitor in their dark, pokey, and flyblown local bar is probably unprecedented - and one that has arrived on a motorbike?
I take a circuitous route back to The Rajhandi Hotel, turning off the main road on the outskirts of Madikeri and riding in on Racecourse Road past Raja’s Seat. The state tourism leaflet I picked up in Mysore says that ‘not an inch of railway line has been laid in Coorg.’ But they are wrong: across the road from my hotel, just below Raja’s Seat, a narrow gauge railway trundles in a loop around a small amusement park. The tiny yellow engine pulls three open-sided carriages at snails pace in a small circle, and it looks like the kind of thing you’d find rusting away in a forgotten English seaside resort. But in Madikeri, this is the closest thing you will find to a white knuckle ride; the tour buses that ferry people to watch the sunset from Raja’s Seat also bring a stream of young people who get tanked up on Kingfisher Strong in the Rajhandi’s bar before riding the train. It is quite surreal. They hang from the sides of the open carriages and whoop as the little engine totters out of the station; as they reach the first bend in the tracks, they wave their arms in the air and close their eyes; there are blood curdling screams as the train plunges very slowly into the six foot long mock tunnel halfway round. Even after a skin full of Hayward’s 5000, it really couldn’t be much more frightening than nearly stubbing a toe, or anywhere near as exciting as watching a pair of snails mating.
I sit in the hotel bar with a Kingfisher as the riders return to finish off their evening with a few more Hayward’s before getting back on their buses. Keyed up to fever pitch, they gulp down whole bottles in one go, some of them trying to appear worldly by pretending to smoke Wills Navy Cut cigarettes, coughing and holding thier affected cigarettes at amueturish angles. I buy a bottle to take out, walk over the road, and climb over the gate into the darkened and empty amusement park. The station signs, signal posts and platform benches are identical to those in Bhubaneswar and Lucknow; the rails, although only two feet apart, are standard Indian Railways patterns; the ballast between the sleepers is the same grade as the South Western Railway’s mainline across the Deccan plateau. A small, almost real railway, running to nowhere and in the middle of nowhere. And no WDMs. I finish my Kingfisher, walk back to my room, and lie on the bed. A real white knuckle ride is sitting in the doorway of a Shatabdi Express as it rockets through a small town behind a WDP-4.
The nearest mainline is 130 kilometres away in Mysore; the bus from Madikeri leaves at 10 o’clock in the morning.
Tomorrow.

The Road To Madikeri

The waiter appears with a glass of black coffee as soon as I take a table in the courtyard restaurant; the first hint of dawn is tinging the sky to the east, the crows and kites starting their morning reveille. At 7 o'clock I leave a 10 Rupee note under my empty glass, collect my bag, and leave the key to room 104 at the front desk. I walk down an almost deserted Dhanavanthri Road until I find a rickshaw pulled up on the dusty verge, the wallah waking himself up with a cup of chai from the little wooden road-side shack that never seems to close; his hair is tousled and his shirt crumpled, and it takes him a few moments to register his first fare of the day. It is common for drivers to live in their rickshaws, and many only go home to their villages and families for a day or two when earnings permit the luxury; they live a harsh, unforgiving life, renting their vehicles by the week with no guarantee of covering even that modest cost. Before we reach Mysore's City Bus Stand, the wallah coasts into a garage and asks apologetically if I would pay my fare now so that he can afford some fuel. He buys 20 Rupees worth of petrol and puts the other ten in his back pocket. It will go towards the costs of rickshaw hire, and sustaining himself; and, if it is a good day, there will be a few coins left over to take home to his family.
An Indian city's bus stand is at the tumultuous heart of its already chaotic transport system; at any hour of the day, it is a thriving, animated circus of noise, light, and movement. Where Mysore Junction railway station follows the pattern of logic laid down by timetables, platforms, and bilingual loudspeaker announcements, the City Bus Stand works under the premises of guesswork, intuition, and some sort of unspoken collective understanding. I ask a brown-uniformed official, who carries a clipboard and seems to be some sort of controller or despatcher, where the bus to Madikeri will leave from; he gestures in the vague direction of the parking bays at the back of the building, where a long line of battered coaches with homemade destination signs in Hindi and Kanadian stand. At the front of each bus there are more uniformed people, and crowds of passengers urgently negotiating prices and arguing over luggage fees, buying tickets and passing bags and suitcases through bus windows to unseen friends and relatives inside.
Like Indian Railways, the state operated buses have different classes. Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) offers the choice of Ordinary, Semi-Deluxe, Super-Deluxe and Ultra-Deluxe travel; increasing in increments of less discomfort, more cost, and fewer and shorter stops, they run everywhere but to the smallest towns and villages. I find a Ultra-Deluxe from Bangalore that is making the run to Mangalore over the Western Ghats via Madikeri and pay the conductor 105 Rupees for a reserved seat - twice the price of a train journey of comparable distance, had a line serving the Coorg region of Karnataka ever been built. The bus is a dented Ashoka Leyland with blacked-out windows, balding tyres and frayed reclining seats; there is no luggage hold, and my bag is too big to fit in the overhead rack; I wedge it between the back of the drivers seat and the transmission housing, chaining it to a handrail for security. I buy water and some cashews for breakfast, smoke a Wills Classic, and push my way down the aisle of the already crowded bus to my seat. The driver sounds his horn as we pull slowly out of the bus station, provoking a stampede of last minute passengers who shoehorn themselves into every inch of standing space left; the conductor turns on a large television at the front of the bus, inserts a video in the player and adjusts the volume to an ear-splitting, distorted scream. The Ultra-Deluxe is what is known as a Videobus service - one of India's most disagreeable ways to travel - but it is too late to change now that we are on the main Eliwala Road. The man sitting next to me unpacks the breakfast of iddli and copra chutney he has bought from the bhavan in the bus stand, sprawls himself out in and stares fixedly at the screen as an attractive Indian actress launches into a screeching love song against the backdrop of a misty Punjabi plain. I slide my window open and watch the streets of Mysore slip by, trying to ignore the deafening music and crowding limbs of my travelling companion.
I have never understood having entertainment on transport other than, perhaps, aircraft. There is little to see at 39000 feet at night on a long flight, but in daylight, I would much rather look out of the window and cross reference what I am seeing with the interactive map on the seat-back screen. But on land - whether in a car, a train, or a bus - there is always something interesting, exciting, bizarre or occasionally shocking to see - day and night. Why watch a film on a Videobus or a car's seat-back DVD player when the world is outside your window? Are we that indifferent to what is happening around us, whether it is the brightly dressed women working in the paddy fields of Tamil Nadu, or the old man walking his dog through a housing estate in Milton Keynes? It takes the best part of fifty minutes and a lot of stops for even more passengers to pile aboard before we are on the open road with Mysore behind us. The road varies from brand new dual carriageway - where once, we are overtaken by another bus driving head-on into the oncoming traffic on the other side of the central barrier - to little more than a beaten earth track through dusty farmland; the driver bullies rickshaws and scooters out of the way with his horn, and keeps the bus a scant couple of feet from the bumper of the vehicle in front. I have no choice but to slide my window shut against the choking dust thrown up from the road, and endure the airless, sweat-scented atmosphere inside and din of the television with gritted teeth.
At 11 o'clock we swing into the bus stand at Bylakuppa for a ten minute break; I fight my way to the door and stand on the forecourt with a Wills Classic and my map. I estimate we are less than 50 kilometres from Madikeri - which is borne out by the blue outline of the Coorg hills on the horizon - a journey of perhaps an hour and a half at most. I buy a cup of chai, more water, and get back on the bus. The handful of passengers who got off at Bylakuppa have been replaced with twice as many more, and it takes me several minutes to convince the occupant of my reserved seat that under no circumstances is he staying in it. There is no deference to age, gender, or infirmity on Indian buses - unlike travelling on Indian Railways; pregnant women and tired old men will stand for a journey of hours while younger and fitter passengers doze contentedly in the reclining seats. To offer my place to the exhausted old lady with her bags of market vegetables would be a breach of social etiquette, and could be misinterpreted in any number of ways. There is a momentary respite from the pummelling noise from the television while the tape is changed; the next film is what appears to be an action/comedy/romance/musical filmed in the 1970s, with creaking, garishly painted sets, awful contemporary costumes, and lengthy and entirely unconvincing set-piece martial arts fights. If anything, it is even louder than before.
After an hour I begin to doubt my estimate of being in Madikeri before one o'clock; the road rises steadily through the lower hills, then begins a twisting ascent into the mountainous coffee growing region of Coorg. The hairpin bends are so tight, the climbs so steep, that the bus grinds uphill at less than walking pace in first gear. The scenery, though, is idyllic: coffee bushes and pepper vines growing under the shade of sandalwood and palm trees; thick forest jungle and blossoming jacaranda; tiny villages and plantations with names like Fairlands and Hillyside Estates hidden behind white painted picket fences; rivers and mountain streams sparkling in the sun, unpolluted and undisturbed. When I open my window, the air is fresh and warm, free of the heat and fumes of Mysore which seemed at the time a relief after Chennai. We stop at Kushal Nagar just after one o'clock; a sign outside the bus stand tells me it is still 30 kilometres to Madikeri. The road becomes ever steeper, the forest thicker and lusher, as we toil up the last stretch to the outskirts of Madikeri and drive the short distance to the bus stand - just as the end credits of the terrible film roll down the screen, as if they had been timed to the very second. I retrieve my bag from behind the driver's seat, dust off the prints where it has been used as a footrest, thank the conductor, and step down into the refreshing air of Madikeri - or Mercara as it is known in Kanadian, the Karnatakan language - capital of Coorg (Kodagu), an area proudly described as The Scotland Of India by those who live here.
The bus stand is at the bottom of a hill behind the main Chouk. I follow a narrow lane between the backs of some ugly concrete office blocks and climb a steep flight of stone steps up to Mahadev Pet and the rickshaw stand opposite the Canara Bank. The entire town centre would fit inside the confines of Mysore's Devajara Market; there are two or three hotels - each with a bar and restaurant - a handful 'Meals Ready' halls, a couple of dozen 'General Sales' and beedi-and-paan stores, and the odd 'Coorg Honey-Coffee-Cardamom' shop serving the few tourists who pass through. A small traffic circle in front of the public bus stand, where old and decrepit coaches wait to ferry villagers out into the nearby countryside and backwaters not served by KSRTC, is presided over by a policeman in a crisp uniform, complete with white gloves and bush hat. There isn't very much traffic for him to direct, apart from the endless stream of buses that grind up and down the hilly main road. I ask a rickshaw driver to take me to the Hotel Valley View - part of the same government run chain as the Mayura Hoysala - but dismiss any thoughts of staying there as soon as we reach the main gate. The ramshackle colonial building that was the original accommodation has been elbowed out of the way by a new, starkly modern, characterless block, which sits in the middle of a waste ground of builders debris. The car park is a field of rubble, and a apart from a bicycle leaning against the hotel wall, it is completely empty. The tariff board facing the road asks for 1000 Rupees a night, and I doubt many people get any further than this before turning around. The silhouettes of five or six staff gather behind the smoked glass lobby doors and then drift away in disappointment as my rickshaw u-turns back onto Race Course Road. I find the Rajhandi Hotel a hundred metres below Raja's Seat - once the site of the Maharajas' belvedere overlooking the valley below - and check into a room with a view of the garden and the two resident ducks that waddle around the lawn and paddle in the small pond.
The Rajhandi is built into a hillside on the edge of town, its four floors descending from Raja's Seat Road to the car park entrance on a narrow lane called Gowhli Street. I sit at my window table with a room service bottle of Kingfisher and look out over the town. Ringed by low green hills, the brightly painted bungalows with their red terracotta roof tiles stand shoulder to shoulder with the minarets and domes of the rajas' tombs, surrounded by tall trees and colourful splashes of bougainvillea; it is so quiet that I can hear only distant birdsong and the whisper of a faint breeze in the palms along the lane.
I walk down Gowhli Street into town and eat a simple meal of stewed pumpkin and rice in the Capitol Bar And Restaurant. I am their only western customer; the houseboys serve me with something akin to reverence for a rare European visitor, and the manager makes a point of coming to my table to welcome me. I tell him, in all honesty, that his food is excellent, and leave a generous tip for their obliging service. On my way back to the Rajhandi I notice a sign for 'Motorbike On Hire' with an arrow pointing to a rickety staircase and a first floor office lettered Nisarga Tourism. Half an hour later I sit in the hotel bar with a Kingfisher and plan a route for tomorrow using the hand-drawn maps that came with the Yamaha Gladiator. A web of minor roads radiates out from Madikei and connects countless tiny settlement and plantation estates with the capital; and more destinations lie off the main Mysore Road that my bus crawled up today. But for my first trip, I decide on a short orienteering ride to Abbi Falls and back - just to make sure that both the bike, and myself, can negotiate Coorg's roads.

Big City, Quiet Suburb

I wake in the warm darkness at six o'clock in the morning, bucket shower to the sound of the kites in the trees outside rousing themselves for the day's scavenging and go down to the courtyard restaurant. After five minutes of searching I finally find the waiter: "Black coffee, Sir?" he asks, bringing a steaming glass to my table along with a Haywards 5000 ashtray. The restaurant is empty, the rest of the hotel dark and silent; it is a Saturday, and nobody is in a hurry to anywhere at this hour. I leave my key behind the deserted front desk and walk down Dhanavanthri Road to the kiosk that sells paan, 10 Paise candies, Hindi newspapers and Wills Classics; it is closed, as is everything else around it. I turn back and make for the station, scanning the raised section of footpath that borders the approach road for dark squares where some of the thick, stone slabs are missing - a three foot drop into the sewer flowing below, perhaps a broken leg on the way down. I buy an unreserved ticket for Bangalore on the 6.45 Chamundi Express and find a street hawker selling packs of Wills Navy Cut beneath a plane tree outside the station gates. I stand in the shadows beside a chai stall and smoke, politely refusing the offers of rickshaws into town, explaining that I am waiting for the train, pointing out to the shoeshine wallahs that my boots are already very clean and declining to buy enormous packets of cashews and groundnuts for journey. A man leading a thin, saddled and lame pony pauses in front of me: "You like ride in town?". The Chamundi Express is waiting at platform one behind a WDM-2 and the bustle of activity in the station is a complete contrast to the slumbering town beyond its perimeter lights. Bales of cloth and mounds of cases are being loaded into the Luggage-Cum-Brake Van, hawkers and chai wallahs hover around the carriage doors serving passengers who dart out from their dim interiors and rush back before their seats are lost; a large crowd jostles to refill empty plastic bottles at the drinking water fountain, while those who have already secured a seat on the train stand on the platform smoking, chatting, drinking chai and glancing at their watches.
I sit on a lower corridor side bunk in a Sleeper Class coach; there is thin foam padding beneath the blue vinyl cover, and it is almost as uncomfortable as the bare wooden seats in Second Class. As the WDM sounds its air horns for departure, a woman who's face is so worn and lined that she could be any age between 30 and 50 pushes through the crowded carriage and sits on the bunk opposite mine; one of her sons is perhaps ten years old and wears a dirty pullover and ragged underpants, the other is older and carries himself on his hands and the points of his knees, his withered legs scissored behind him, crabbing along the filthy carriage floor. The crab-boy climbs into the upper bunk above his mother with surprising agility, perfectly adapted to his condition, and hangs with his head upside down to torment his brother with a drooling leer. The train starts with a lurch, stops again suddenly and then a few moments later gets underway for real. We stop at every halt and station along the line to Bangalore, sometimes for little more than a minute, other times long enough to step down onto the platform to buy a cup of chai or coffee and smoke a Wills Classic.
Travelling on an ordinary Indian passenger train is unlike any railway journey I could take in Europe. In Britain, railways are a strictly commercial, for-profit operation and as such preclude any notions of social responsibility in providing a service for ordinary people: they are for business people and well-heeled leisure travellers, students with discount cards and pensioners with concessions; for almost everyone else they prohibitively expensive. This exclusion becomes less marked as you cross mainland Europe and almost vanishes when you cross the German border into the Czech Republic. Throughout central Europe fares are considerably lower than the west and are the same whether a ticket is bought two months in advance or two minutes before departure; trains are recognised as a social necessity - incomes are lower and car ownership less - an essential link for a large proportion of the population. But in India, the railways are the backbone of the country's transport system and an indispensable part of life for millions of people. The railways have a life of their own: their own political and social structures, annual budgets in hundreds of millions of Rupees, their own police force, officers clubs and welfare associations, more than a million employees and thirteen million passengers every day. For every Shatabdi Express charging 300 Rupees to Bangalore there is at least one ordinary passenger train charging 25 Rupees; on the Howrah-Chennai Mail you can travel the 1663 kilometres in First Class Air-Conditioned at 2935 Rupees or pay 140 Rupees in Second Class. Nobody is excluded, regardless of income; each social tier is accommodated, and the train made up to reflect demand - just 10 First Class Sleeper berths in an entire 24 coach train, the majority of the the rest the least expensive Second Class and ordinary Sleeper Class. Even with increasing car ownership the mathematics make sense: 1663 kilometres, 70 kilometres per litre of fuel costing 50 Rupees per litre equals 1187 Rupees - a comfortable berth in a Three Tier Air-Conditioned coach would cost less. To put that into perspective, if I bought a single standard class ticket from Swindon to London Paddington tomorrow - which is less than 100 miles - it would cost me more than a first class sleeper journey of 5000 kilometres on Indian Railways. And if I chose to spend my money on an Unreserved Second Class ticket, it would buy me 76,000 kilometres of travel. The Times Of India and the Vijay Times often refer to ordinary trains as "Peoples Trains" or "Trains For The Poor" - this is not derogatory in any way, but simply an understanding of the social role played by Indian Railways. And the most surprising thing about India's Peoples Railway? An estimated profit of 2.5 billion US Dollars last year, as reported in the Washington Post.
I arrive at Bangalore City station a little after 10 o'clock. Nobody seems to use the footbridge over to platform one and the exit, the disembarking passengers choosing to walk across the tracks instead. It's a risky affair: there are five running lines and numerous power operated points to navigate. I cross in front of the WDM at the head of my train and immediately jump back as a red and white WAP-4 electric blasts its horns at me as it passes on the adjacent line. I watch as the points snap over with a thunk! and it reverses back onto its train in platform three. I pick my way over to the exit, pausing again for a pair of WDMs to rumble through the station and find a rickshaw to take me to MG Road. The driver demands 150 Rupees, which I negotiate down to 70, and we set off into the choking fumes and gridlocked streets of the city. As with Mysore, there are no cycle-rickshaws in Bangalore; the roads are too crowded and too dangerous, the distances and the hills too great. Where Mysore has herds of cows and horses wandering the streets and lanes, Bangalore has hordes of cars and scooters, rickshaws and Ashoka Leyland buses, along with the notorious packs of stray dogs; the pollution is staggering and the noise overwhelming. For all its affluence, it is an unattractive city. It takes almost forty minutes to travel the seven kilometres to MG Road, most of which is spent in traffic jams breathing in the fumes from a thousand exhaust pipes. I find the Thomas Cook office tucked away in a modern shopping mall and change a cheque; the cashier only has 100 and 500 Rupee notes and I walk back to the street with an inch thick wad of notes crammed into my security wallet, bulging noticeably behind the pocket of my jeans. I find the Indian Coffee House and order a drink and a very pukka cucumber sandwich.
"Do you mind if I join you?" an elderly Indian man in smart casual clothes asks in perfect and un-accented English.
He introduces himself as Jesse, retired naval officer turned freelance journalist and part-time author, and is delighted when he notices a Le Carre novel that I picked up at Higginbotham's on the way to the coffee shop. We chat about books, reading, writing, politics and some of the absurdities of Indian life. He warns me about the eunuchs who frequent MG Road, and their unorthodox means of begging: dressed as women, if their initial request for money is refused, they will simply raise their sarees or dresses and follow you until you pay up. While visitors may be shamed and embarrassed into submission, the locals aren't quite as sensitive, as the Vijay Times reports: three eunuchs - Rupa, Prema and Mary - were attacked for harassing people in Kanakapura Road. While Mary made her, or it's escape, Prema and Rupa were both hospitalised. But it's not all bad news for Bangalore's eunuchs: some unscrupulous banks are employing them to visit defaulters homes to recover outstanding monies - a tactic that is proving very successful......
I take a rickshaw back to city station and just make the Bangalore-Mysore Tippu Express. I stand in the open doorway with a Wills Classic as we crawl through the suburbs; this is the view of Bangalore the city doesn't promote. Squalid shacks and tented slums; stinking, polluted streams choked with litter and plastic bags; barefoot rag-pickers and filthy naked children; open sewers, open cooking fires, packs of big, brown rats scurrying amongst rotting piles of garbage. In downtown Bangalore the money is high-rise; from there the poverty spreads outwards for miles in every direction like a stain.
The heat is dying down by the time I arrive back at Mysore; I walk down the tracks to the over bridge, climb down the embankment and walk over to the Mayura Hoysala. I order a Kingfisher in the courtyard restaurant and exchange pleasantries with the waiter. He tells me he is finished for the day and asks whether I would like to visit his home and have supper, which his wife is preparing. I go to my room, change my shirt and then climb onto the pillion for the ride out to Kuvempunagar, a small suburb on the southern outskirts of town. The difference between the cacophony of Bangalore and this leafy corner of Mysore could not be more stark. The narrow lanes are clean, quiet and free of traffic, stray dogs and eunuchs. The home is small - four rooms on the bottom floor of a modest two story house: two bedrooms, living room and kitchen. The toilet is in a small alcove near the back door and the bucket-shower is in the alley behind the house. Piles of coconut husks dry on shelves in the kitchen for use in the stove, and an old colour television takes up most of the living room wall. The whole place is spotlessly clean and the smell of home cooking wafts from the little kitchen. I am introduced to their son - an intelligent and polite 18 year old - who plugs my MP3 player into an ancient stereo and plays "Hard Day's Night" at full volume. The sound of The Beatles echoing around this sleepy neighborhood on the edge of Mysore as the sun settles on the horizon is unexpectedly satisfying. I eat supper with the family at a small table in the dining room; I am given the only chair while everyone else stands or shares a stool. There is a spicy South Indian chicken curry, sambar, chutney and steamed dosai all prepared with fresh herbs, spices and produce from Devaraja market in a cramped kitchen over one gas burner - far and away the best Indian food I have ever tasted. However hard I try, the family will accept no money to help with the cost of the food, even though it became clear during the meal that they had bought the chicken only when they learned I was coming.
I ride the Suzuki 150 motorbike back to the Mayura Hoysala with the son giving directions from the pillion; the roads are almost empty this late in the evening and to his delight I get the Suzuki up to 80kmh on a long stretch - which he confides is the fastest he's ever been on his bike. I drink a Kingfisher in the restaurant, which is as empty now as it was early this morning, and then lie on my bed under the slowly rotating ceiling fan. I have another early start in the morning, but instead of a WDM to take me to my next destination, it will be a bus.

Mysore Junction

I go down to the empty courtyard restaurant at seven o'clock in the morning and surprise the waiter who is dozing in a chair outside the kitchen door. I forgo the complimentary South Indian breakfast of idli or dosai with sambar in favour of a steaming glass of black coffee and pick at the Vijay Times. Today the lead story is Bangalore's stray dog menace: yesterday, for the second time in a month, a child was mauled to death by one of the packs of wild dogs that roam the city streets. Officials blame the illegal mutton and chicken stalls that dump their waste on the streets for the dogs to feed on, making them bloodthirsty and aggressive, while the residents cite casual disregard for the entire problem by the governing council as the underlying cause. I signal the waiter for more coffee and consult Mysore And Around. The 08.30 Passenger's second stop on the line back to Bangalore is Srirangapattna, a ruined, walled temple complex on an island in the River Cauvery, site of the 1799 Battle Of Mysore against the British colonial forces. I finish my coffee, gather my notebook, camera and daypack and walk down Jansi Lakshmibai Road towards Mysore Junction station. I wait at the traffic lights to cross the intersection with Dhanavanthri Road; as in Debrecen in Hungary, there is a countdown display above the lights to tell motorists how long they will have to wait for a green light. The stopped traffic in front of me waits until there is fifteen seconds left and, ignoring the still red light, pulls off into the oncoming traffic with a screech of tyres and a cacophony of blaring horns. The junction grinds to a halt, a confusion of cars, scooters and rickshaws fighting for a passage through the gridlock. I use the distraction to weave through the traffic to the safety of the far pavement and continue towards the station. I buy a 10 Rupee Second Class Unreserved ticket to Srirangapattna and back from the General Ticket window and then stand beneath the station's elegant clock tower and smoke a Wills Classic. It is a building of shuttered windows and wide verandas and stands at the end of a broad, tree lined avenue - a classic post-colonial Indian railway station. I buy a small glass of milky coffee on platform 1 and watch an old WDS shunting a pair of windowless red coaches around the carriage sidings; part of the Accident Relief Train to provide emergency medical facilities for crashes and derailments, or as the Vijay Times describes such incidents, mishaps.
Mysore Junction is ostensibly the convergence of three routes: The line South to Chamarajanagar; the Northern division to Hassan and Mangalore; and the mainline that follows a Northeastern course to Bangalore for connections to Chennai and the rest of the Indian Railways network. But the only trains running are on the Bangalore section: the Chamarajanagar line is undergoing conversion from metre to broad gauge, and as it is only a branch line terminating at a small unknown town, progress is painfully slow; the major route to Hassan and Mangalore has already been converted but has yet to open. The reason for this can be seen in the sidings at the North end of Mysore Junction: lines of YDM diesels and rakes of coaches stranded on the few hundred feet of metere gauge track left in the yard. They are perfectly serviceable, but completely useless; they are landlocked, stranded and surrounded by lines they can't run on. And even though table 20 in Trains At A Glance shows train 6517 the Yesvantpur-Mangalore Express departing Mysore at 22.35 daily for Hassan and the coast, an addendum states Date of introduction to be notified later. South Western Railways simply do not have the stock to operate the service, even though the track is ready. Imagine converting your domestic electricity supply from 110v to 240v but neglecting to budget for new appliances: brand new wiring, perfectly good washing machine and DVD player, but they won't work together and you have no money left for new ones. New broad gauge track, plenty of metre gauge YDM diesels that can't use it and no money for replacement WDMs or WDP-4s.
The station clock is showing 8.10 and the heat of the day is slowly starting to build. A blue WDM-2 draws a long line of coaches out of the sidings behind me and then propels them into platform two for the morning Passenger train; a roundel on its nose reads "Diesel Shed - Krishnarajapurnam" - Bangalore's main locomotive shed, which would be very unhappy if Mysore sent one of its engines off to Mangalore and the Konkan Railway on the new broad gauge line. I leave my bottle of water on a hard wooden seat next to a barred open window in the leading Luggage-Cum-Second Class carriage, stand on the platform in the hot sunshine and watch the driver walk round the WDM, opening engine covers, checking brake blocks and wiping pulped flies from the cab windows. I walk over to him and ask what he thinks of the WDMs. He is surprised by my knowledge of railways and amazed when I ask whether he prefers the ALCO or General Motors engined locomotives. He likes them both, but the visibility from a WDP-4 is a lot better than a WDM. He shows me around the cab and is pleased when I remark how clean it is inside; it's as well looked after as MAV Techniks Hungarian M61 or any goggle-eyed 754 in the Czech Republic. We chat a little more down on the platform until he looks at his watch and excuses himself. Back in the cab, he completes the last of his paperwork and then hits the air horns for departure. I climb back into my coach just as the train begins to edge along the platform and sit in the open doorway with my feet on the outside step - foot board riding, one of Indian Railways great pleasures. Some caution is required when deciding where and when to board ride: firstly, it is not generally accepted in FC (first class), CC (chair car) or 2AC and 3AC ( two and three tier air-conditioned sleeping cars) where signs above the doors discourage the practice and coach attendants actively prohibit it; and secondly, the cleanliness of the SC (sleeper class) or Unreserved coach in which it seems to be a perfectly acceptable way to travel. Unreserved and Sleeper class are usually chronically overcrowded, and on long journeys become filthy with discarded food, spit and overflowing toilets; the open doorways are used as an alternative convenience, which is blown back onto the doorhandles, threshold and the inside of the door itself. The Mysore-Bangalore Passenger is fresh from the carriage sidings where it has been cleaned since the previous days return journey, so my doorstep is free of the pervasive smell and crusted remains of human waste. The WDM-2 draws the train past the lines of redundant YDMs and metre gauge coaches, crosses the point work where the unused Hassan-Mangalore section waits for a train and accelerates past the goods yard and a cluster of brightly painted Tata trucks waiting to unload a rake of goods wagons that has just arrived behind a pair of orange WDGs. We pause briefly at a small halt a few kilometres out of Mysore where one or two passenger alight and then the WDM starts to pick up speed along the single track line. From my seat in the doorway, the noise and fumes are overwhelming; we rattle over level crossings where the barriers are so close I could touch them and fly over river bridges that have no parapets or railings so that I am looking straight down at the water 40 feet below. The paddy fields are bright green in the morning sun, the sky a cloudless powder blue; the breeze cools me as I lean forward and watch the exhaust billowing from the WDM as the driver piles on the power to climb a gradient - it is unlike any railway trip I have taken in any other country, almost perfection.
We cross a long bridge across the Cauvery and slow for the river island station at Srirangapattna; I leave the train, walk up to the pedestrian crossing and watch as it pulls out and crosses the bridge on the far side of the island. As the engine's air horns fade into the distance, the signal at the South end of the curving platform flashes to green; within minutes an express headed by two WDMs rumbles through the station in the opposite direction with a non-stop express from Bangalore, having waited for my train to clear the passing loop somewhere out of sight on the mainland.
Srirangapattna station is a sleepy country halt with one ticket window and a small chai stall and waiting room; an abandoned signal cabin sits at the South end of the only platform, almost hidden under a vast banyan tree. The steel bridge that brought the Bangalore Passenger onto the island, and the one to the North that took it back to shore are paralleled by the stone viaducts of the old metre gauge line, lifted long ago, and are used by the locals on foot and on bicycles to cross the river. I pick my way along the steep path that leads down to the river and follow a narrow track beneath the crumbling walls of the ruined temple fort. It is hot, still and quiet; I see a woman washing clothing and spreading it to dry on the huge rocks that rise from the riverbed, but otherwise the is nobody in sight. The wide, shallow river stretches as far as the eye can see before disappearing into the blue-green haze of the distant jungle. I walk to the tip of the island and back along the North bank; I have barely covered half the distance before my two litre bottle of water is finished. I pass the Sriranganatha temple - slowly decaying behind a veil of creepers and a barbed wire fence - and walk through the dusty little town. The term backwater could have been invented for Srirangapattna: not much happens here, and what little does, happens at a very unhurried pace. There is a "Meals Ready" hall on the main street, a small Yatri hostel and a few General Sales stalls; there is no Cold Beer Parlour or hotel bar, and no restaurant or Souvenir-Cum-Bookshop. I sit on a bench under the shade of the station canopy and wait for the train back to Mysore; after forty minutes I walk back to the ticket counter and ask when the 11.30 Passenger will arrive, as it's already twenty minutes late. I am told it is running 2 hours behind schedule. I sit on my bench and decide to wait for the Chennai-Mysore Shatabdi Express: with any luck it will get held at the South signal to let a Bangalore train enter the passing loop between here and Mysore. Three RPF officers laze on one of the benches outside the waiting room; they have no AK-47s, no Lachti sticks and two of them are wearing flip-flops with their khaki uniforms. The oldest and most senior one rises slowly from the bench, stretches, yawns, climbs down from the platform and crosses the track to a small yellow washed building with a sign outside reading Railway Traffic Training Compound. He lets himself through a gate in the picket fence and checks if the laundry he has hung from the students' demonstration Speed Restriction and Shunt Limit signs is dry. Satisfied, he ambles back to the platform edge and summons his juniors to gather his washing and fold it into the two bags he gives each of them.
A long blast of an air horn splits the silent early afternoon, and I look down the platform to the signal at the edge of the bridge: Red - for the moment, at least. The Shatabdi comes into the station at speed, the driver only braking when he spots the signal, which is still at red. I climb the steps into the Sleeper Class coach while it is still moving, just as the signal flicks to green and the driver powers-up the WDM and takes off again: split second timing - the train didn't actually stop.
I spend the rest of the afternoon fighting with a computer at Cyber Zone and walk away feeling defeated and frustrated. I sit on the rooftop terrace at Shipashri Bar And Restaurant with a cold Kingfisher and watch the light and heat fade from the sky. A very large Indo-Chinese couple arrive and sit at the table facing mine; they wear identical pudgy frowns and stare at their menus silently. They reel off a long order to the waiter and then wait wordlessly for their meal to arrive, ignoring each other completely. The waiter appears with a chicken sizzler and chips; their eyes light up and suddenly they're both smiling and chatting now that they can share their one common interest - food. An enormous bowl of fried rice arrives, and then another one; two curries and more chips; bottles of ketchup and Kinleys Soda which they shovel spoonfulls of sugar into. They are gluttons; they have barely swallowed one mouthful before the next load is hovering before their fat lips. They belch as loudly as the egg-sucking man in the Kwality Bar And Restaurant, hiccup and slow their pace; but they don't give up. They finish every last grain of rice and clean every shred of meat from the chicken bones. The man reaches under his bulging stomach and loosens the button of his trousers while the woman slumps back in her chair and cradles her belly. They revert to morbid silence until they spot the waiter crossing the terrace with their desserts. It is a disgusting spectacle, and one I refuse to continue witnessing; I leave a 100 Rupee note under my half-finished bottle of Kingfisher, walk down to the street and go back to the Mayura Hoysala.
I sit on the veranda with a Kingfisher and idly glance at the room service menu: at this rate, I will be on hunger strike in roughly eight days time.
I'm still sitting outside in the warm night air when I hear the air horns of a WDM announcing the departure of the 23.30 Mysore-Bangalore Passenger. That is my indulgence - helped along with a little Kingfisher: is that so bad?

In Karnataka

I wake just after seven o'clock to the sound of the kites' high pitched call from the trees outside my veranda, step into the bathroom and open the shutters. It is far hotter and more humid than the fan cooled bedroom even at this hour, bright sunlight streaming through the window and warming the floor tiles. I bucket shower, shave and then walk down to the courtyard restaurant for coffee, picking up my copy of The Vijay Times from the doormat outside my room on the way. I am the only westerner in the hotel; the other guests are holidaying Indian families and a couple of business men in smart casual clothes carrying mobile phones. At one of the tables a small group of pilgrims from the Yatri Niwas ( pilgrim hostel ) next door to the Mayura Hoysala are quietly eating a traditional breakfast of dosai and iddli before setting off to visit the temples within the walls of the Maharajha's Palace. I order a black coffee and it arrives a few minutes later in a tall glass that is so hot I have to wrap a napkin around it to lift it. The headline of The Vijay Times jumps off the page: "66 Killed as blasts strike Indo-Pak friendship train". Just before midnight, while I was sleeping in my comfortable bed under the cooling breeze from the ceiling fan, low powered explosives surrounded by cans of petrol were detonated in two coaches of the Samjhauta Express - know as the Friendship Train - as it travelled between New Delhi and Lahore in Pakistan. Rather than blow the coaches apart, the devices were designed to cause a huge fire; unaware of the two burning carriages, the driver continued at 110kmh until alerted by a pointsman at a level crossing, and the train finally came to a stop outside the village of Shiva some two and a half kilometres later. By that time more than 60 passengers had been burned to death and 50 more seriously injured. There is no entry for the Samjhauta Express in Trains At A Glance, even though it made it's inaugural bi-weekly run in 1976: it is a Special Express, unadvertised, each run essentially a one-off - such is the nature of the political relationship between India and Pakistan.
I walk down Dhanavatri Road towards Devaraja Market and find a department store called Fab City tucked down a side street just off the main road. It looks as if it has been plucked from the centre of Luton or Carlisle and slotted neatly between the "Meals Ready" halls and tailoring shops that line Narayana Shastri Road; the steel and glass three story facade towering incongruously above the dusty street where chai wallahs vie for trade and goats and cows mooch around in piles of litter and coconut husks. I leave my bag at the security desk outside in exchange for a small brass token stamped Number 14 and walk through the sliding doors into bright fluorescent lighting and deeply chilled air. Fab City sells everything from toothpaste to televisions, trainers to tomato ketchup. There is at least one member of staff in a bright red Fab City polo shirt in each aisle on all three floors, and several more milling around each department - all doing very little other than following a small handful of customers around the store. Along with the guard on the desk outside and the one on the front door, more security is posted at intervals up and down the central spiral staircase and outside the lifts, and two mobile patrols circle wherever a shopper pauses long enough to browse the items on a shelf. It is a very uncomfortable experience, one that makes you think twice about daring to touch, let alone pick up any of their obviously precious stock. With sweating palms and a no doubt guilty look, I select a notebook from the stationary department, hurry downstairs and find some shampoo to furtively take to the computerised checkout. An vaguely suspicious assistant packs my shopping into a bag, seals it with a plastic tie, stamps my receipt "Paid" and tells me I am free to leave the store. After showing the sealed bag and the irrefutable proof of the receipt to both the doorman and the guard at the security desk where I left my bag, I walk into the hot, noisy, dusty and undoubting atmosphere of the real Mysore.
I walk along Sayaji Roa Road and turn into a narrow passage that leads into Devaraja Market, a warren of covered stalls piled with spices, incense, pyramids of the spectacularly coloured powder used to celebrate Holi, mountains of bananas and vegetables of every imaginable variety. The sun beats down on the narrow paths between the stalls and the mass of people who wind their way through the maze. The scent of corriander and sandalwood mixes with the coppery smell of blood from the plucked chickens and mutton carcasses that hang upside down in a cloud of flies outside the slaughterhouse. The sheer variety and quantity of produce is incredible; from the familiar to the unidentifiable, it is all carried into the market on the heads of a swarm of coolis, bent double under the weight of their loads. I walk through another passage entrance at the south of the market and find the Paras Bhavan "Meals Ready" hall. I order a fresh lime soda - it is a pure vegetarian establishment and therefore serves no alcohol, not even Kingfisher - and an Aloo Puri Masala, both of which are extremely good and are embarrassingly inexpensive.
I spend a frustrating couple of hours at the Cyber Zone internet cafe, which is tucked into the attic of a "Gifts Emporium" near Fab City and boasts four elderly PCs, none of which has a CD-ROM, USB port or adequate processing speed. I give up trying to work after the second power cut leaves the room in hot darkness for twenty minutes, walk back along Dhanavantri Road and find the partially hidden entrance to Mysore Railway Museum on the far side of the station. India's National Railway Museum opened in Delhi in 1977 and was followed by the announcement to establish regional museums in Chennai, Pune and Mysore, the latter of which opened in 1979 and remains the only fulfilment of the plan. The museum comprises of a small selection of rusting and dilapidated metre and narrow gauge steam engines, a few wagons and rotting wooden coaches and a small building housing two carriages of the maharajah's private train, all laid out in an overgrown garden. The history of Indian Railways and the opportunity to describe and showcase it's achievements have been squandered at the Mysore Railway Museum; the exhibits stand in dereliction exactly where they were dumped 28 years ago, and nothing new has joined them since; there is no information to help interpret what is being seen - not even a guide book is published - no literature at the empty souvenir stand ; there is nowhere to buy refreshments and no knowledgeable curator to answer your questions. I am the only visitor, and the museum grounds have the stillness and silence associated with long standing abandonment or evacuation.
I quietly leave and walk down Vinoba Road and find an anonymous bar that has nothing more than a McDowells Whisky poster above the door to advertise its business. I order a Kingfisher, carry it into the back room and sit at one of the dirty Formica topped tables. It is a typical local Indian bar: dingy paintwork, litter strewn floor, a television blaring a Bollywood soundtrack and groups of men drinking too much super strong beer and White Mischief vodka. The napkins in the chipped and yellowing plastic holder are squares of torn newspaper. The Indian man opposite me pushes away two empty quarter bottles of McDowells No1 whiskey and orders another, along with a Haywards 9000 beer and a snack. He is overweight, sweating and has thick, coiffed hair and a stomach that strains at the buttons of his red nylon shirt. He pours half of the fresh bottle into his glass, tops it up with a small amount of water from a plastic jug on the table and drinks it straight back in one go. He scoops up a handful of masala peanuts from the bowl in front of him and washes them down with a gulp of the super strong beer. As he pours the last few drops of whiskey into his glass and dilutes it with some Haywards 9000, the barman pushes a plate of fried eggs across the table to him. He lights a Navy Cut cigarette, balances it in the ashtray, lifts the plate to his mouth, places his thick, moist lips over an egg and with a slurp sucks the yolk out of its nesting place in the milky, undercooked albumen. He rinses his mouth with whisky and beer, sucks out the second yolk, wipes a slick of sweat from his forehead and belches loudly. He fits the Navy Cut into the corner of his mouth and pushes pieces of egg white past the filter with his fingers while he smokes. He wipes his greasy fingers on his huge, flared denim jeans, stubs his cigarette and lowers his head to the plate to hoover up the remaining lumps of runny egg before washing it down with the last of the McDowells and Haywards.
I walk back to the Mayura Hoysala in the warmth of the gathering dusk and sit in the courtyard restaurant with a Kingfisher. I look at the menu, immediately see "Eggs To Order" and push it as far away across the table as I can. I take my drink upstairs and sit on the veranda with Trains At A Glance and a booklet entitled Mysore And Around. Much like The Samjhauta Express, there is no mention in Trains of any local Passenger services from Mysore; but my locally published booklet shows an Unreserved Ordinary train leaving at 8.30 in the morning which will call at Srirangatpattna. I order another Kingfisher from room service, shower, put a few things in my bag for the morning and lie on top of the bed under the slowly rotating ceiling fan, ignoring any thoughts of food.

Deccan Shatabdi

I wake the doorman at 5am and send him off to find someone to settle my bill; he reappears five minutes later with the bleary-eyed, half-asleep manager who is not at all happy to be awake at this hour. I pick up an auto-rickshaw in front of Egmore station, cross over the stinking river for the last time and arrive at Chennai Central in the sultry, pre-dawn gloom. Every inch of floorspace in the concourse is covered with prone and sleeping figures, mountains of luggage and cotton-wrapped parcels with only a six foot margin around the edges of the rectangular hall free and navigable; hundreds of tired passengers and resigned yatris waiting for hours or the whole night until a train arrives to take them on their journeys or pilgrimages. I buy a cup of sweet, milky coffee from the chai counter of yesterday's waking dream and find train 2007 - the Chennai-Mysore Shatabdi Express - waiting over the footbridge at platform 17. It has only eight coaches, seven of which are air-conditioned chair cars and the eighth a pantry car, and a WAM-4 electric waiting silently at the head. I find my name next to seat 49 on the reservations list posted at the door to coach C3, stow my bag in the overhead luggage rack and then discreetly smoke a Wills Classic in a dimly lit corner of the platform - an indulgence that could cost me a 200 Rupees fine should an RPF officer emerge from the shadows and challenge me.
The WAM-4 make light work of hustling the short train out of Central station and onto the flat, dark, featureless plains west of Chennai, cruising at a steady 90kph on the straight and level double track mainline. Trains At A Glance describes the Shatabdi Express as a Superfast Intercity on which "hospitality treats you to meal and snacks" and adding that "before you are through, your destination has arrived"; which seems to cheat the laws of physics. It is second only to the Rajdhani Expresses - the pride of Indian Railways, offering multi-cuisine catering, piped music and deluxe air-conditioned accommodation - and is followed by the cheaper Jan Shatabdi ( self catering and without air-conditioning ) and the Sapark Kranti Express which is only slightly faster than an ordinary Mail or Express, though a lot quicker than a lowly Passenger train. The Shatabdi is, however, ten times more expensive than a Passenger train, and costs five times as much for the same journey on a Mail or ordinary Express; and if you choose the Executive Chair Car, the price doubles again.
The coach attendant points at my cigarette as I stand in the open doorway at the end of the coach, unsuccessfully trying to light it with a tiny box of Bison Wax Matches in the 60mph slipstream.
"Two-hundred Rupees," he says, writing the figure invisibly on his left palm with his right forefinger.
"No fine," I tell him, holding the now smoking Wills Classic outside the door, "cigarette not in train".
"Fifty, fifty." He writes the revised figure on his palm.
"No fifty, and no baksheesh. Go away." I guide him by the shoulder to the connecting gangway of the next coach, leave him there and ignore him.
I return to my seat as breakfast is served: iddli, sambar and copra chutney - the traditional morning meal for millions of South Indians. The food is as good as any I've eaten in Dhabas, Tiffin Houses and "Meals Ready" halls anywhere, and better than some restaurants I have come across. Indian Railways and food have a close relationship which is carefully maintained by their Catering and Tourism Corporation - IRCTC. It is fresh, properly prepared and affordable; a world away from the bland, processed baguettes and microwaved burgers sold for scandalous prices on British trains. Even before privatisation, when important trains often had a proper buffet car, the incumbent Travellers Fare managed to turn itself into a laughing stock by offering the iconic, if infamous British Rail Ham Sandwich - that anti-hero of railway catering. But "how can I be sure of the quality of catering services on trains and at stations?" asks Your Questions Answered on page 264 of Trains At A Glance, just in case you have any concerns. It answers with advice about insisting on a "Cash Memo" for all services, consulting the menu, ordering with the waiter or coach attendant well in advance and recording your "suggestions" in the "complaints book" - which "can be called from the pantry car at any time by the passenger." But on the subject of the actual quality of the food itself, Trains remains silent. With unintended irony, or perhaps a degree of prescience, the next frequently asked question is addressed more fully: "Is medical assistance available on trains?"
The train climbs steadily onto the edge of the Deccan Plateau and the flat plains give way to low hills and scrubby bush, interspersed with paddy fields and swathes of nodding palms. The line begins to twist and rise, riding high embankments and diving into deep cuttings in the reddish-brown earth. Huge boulders dot the landscape, sometimes standing alone and balanced at odd angles, other times piled into enormous conical, gravity defying mounds.
We arrive at Bangalore city at eleven o'clock and pause for fifteen minutes while an army of cleaners board the train with fox-tail sweeping brushes and vats of disinfectant for the toilets, and the pantry car boys bring on more supplies for the Shatabdi lunch. The city's technology fuelled wealth has become something of an Indian cliche, but it is immediately obvious and completely inescapable. So too is the disparity between the glass-and-steel high-rise office blocks, the opulent apartment complexes and the grinding poverty of the rag-pickers and slum-dwellers living beside the railway line. The WAM-4 is replaced with a South Western Railways WDP-4 for the run on the single track, 135km un-electrified line to Mysore. The designation identifies it as a broad gauge passenger diesel locomotive, but it is a very different machine from the familiar WDM. It is an American design, and shares the same long bonnet layout as the WDM, but there the similarity ends: it is modern, micro-processor controlled and instead of the Chug of an ALCO engine, there is a muted whirring from the General Motors diesel that provides the power.
By the time we pull out of Bangalore, the train is thirty minutes behind schedule. The driver gives the WDP its head once we have cleared the sprawling suburbs, pushing the 4000 horsepower high-speed diesel engine to full power on the climbs and straights and then braking for the crossings and bends. It is noticeably quicker than the old WDM, especially so with only eight coaches: a WDP-4 is capable of handling a 24 coach, 1400 tonne train at 110kph and could easily take the Shatabdi to 160kph and beyond if the track and operating rules permitted it.
The coach attendant calls me from my post at the open door back to my seat where lunch has been served - biryani, raitha, roti and chutney. Even if Trains declines to comment on the quality of the food, I will vouch for it. Back at the open door, I lean out and watch the track unfold in front of the WDP. We are travelling very quickly with the long hood of the locomotive leading, the driving cab at the back: after riding on the WDM in Puri, I am aware just how little visibility the driver will have, and how the second man will be calling warnings to him from his position in the right hand seat. We approach a long, sweeping bend and curve through the centre of a small town, huts and concrete apartment blocks crowding the line, ragged scraps of woven nylon made into makeshift, tented hovels at the edge of the tracks. The driver touches the brakes as we lean into the turn, locks the air-horns on and then pulls the the power handle wide open, scattering herds of grazing goats and sending rooting pigs into a blind panic, running in circles and crashing into each other. We pass the level crossing in the middle of town at the best part of 60mph, people turning their backs against the storm of litter and dust sucked up in our wake, their children covering their ears and screaming in fright, then hurtle through the little station in a cloud of exhaust fumes and noise. It is both exhilarating and frightening leaning out of the doorway and seeing the improbably narrow passage the rails follow between the buildings and bastees streak by: if the train derailed here, at this speed, it would demolish half of this small, quiet town. The pace never slackens: through coffee plantations, villages and paddy fields, climbing still higher onto the Mysore plateau, the WDP at full blast with the air horns locked on for what seems like minutes at a time.
We cross the River Cauvery at Srirangapattana and arrive at Mysore Junction at 1.10pm - only ten minutes late after the hair-raising run from Bangalore. I take an auto-rickshaw to the Hotel Mayura Hoysala - a restored colonial mansion - and check into a spacious, well appointed room with a veranda overlooking the Mysore-Chamrajnagar division of South Western Railways. I am sunburned from two hours in the hot wind at the open door of the train, but Mysore is perceptibly cooler and less humid than the steaming cauldron of Chennai. I order a cold Kingfisher from room service, watch a WDM-2 bring a local passenger service into the station, shower, change and then go out into the warm evening air. I sit on the rooftop terrace of Shilpashri Bar And Restaurant and watch the sun sink over Mysore, wondering how much skill it would take to drive a WDP to the very limit on the Bangalore-Mysore division; and when I will feel hungry again after the Deccan Shatabdi hospitality.

Chennai Central

I wake to the shrill beep! beep! beep! beep! of my alarm clock gone mad, its initial gentle entreaties frustrated and now an urgent demand that I switch it off and get up now. It is ten o’clock in the morning and the hours since the Howrah-Chennai Superfast Mail arrived at Central Station are a half-remembered dream. I know I sat on the steps outside the station and smoked Wills Classics for an eternity; and that even at 5am it was hot, humid and close. I think I drank at least three cups of coffee from the 24-hour chai stall in the concourse, and visited the Pay And Use toilets, which I’m sure were near platform 6, as many times – the ones I renamed Pay And Display on the second occasion, such was the curiosity I aroused in the other patrons. And it seems to me that it took far longer than three hours for the sun to rise fully and allow me to search for a room. And how many hotels did I try? Well, there was the one with the pleasant, marbled lobby on Kennet Lane with no rooms free, and the squalid Yatri hostel over the road that had plenty of vacancies; the one I told I needed to visit an ATM, and could they hold the room for an hour? The one with no hot water and a filthy, not-quite-big-enough, threadbare sheet stretched across the stained and sagging mattress, no pillow or towel provided? And half a dozen other places that were either full, too costly or ineffably disgusting until I found the Hotel Chennai Gate. I’m sure they said they had opened just last week, so they were little known and had priced the spotless, air-conditioned room, with it’s hot and cold running water and picture window facing the front elevation of Egmore Station, accordingly. When I spread my hand on the windowpane, the glass is hot from the mid-morning sun.
I shower, change my clothes and leave my room; the heat hits me like a hammer blow the instant I step into the corridor, as if it has been waiting in ambush for me to appear. I wade through the thick, heavy air and arrive in the lobby with my shirt clinging to my back. It is mayhem on the street outside: buses, Ambassador taxis and huge, Ashok Leyland trucks torment the pedestrians forced off the pavement by the erratic clutter of street hawker’s stalls and tease the swarms of auto-rickshaws, who’s drivers protest squeaking their hooters – not horns, but little, high-pitched hooters blown by squeezing a rubber ball, sounding for all the world like a prolonged, heated exchange between Sooty and Sweep. But in all of this melee there is no sign of a cycle-rickshaw or a wandering cow: the roads are too fast, too crowded for either to survive very long on them. I walk down Pantheon Road, turn left into Montieth Road and change some money at the Thomas Cook office. Perspiration is running down my temples in rivulets as I countersign my cheque, dripping off the tip of my nose onto the polished wooden counter. The cashier pretends not to notice: five hundred dollars is a lot of money in Tamil Nadu. I take an auto-rickshaw back to Egmore Station in the gathering afternoon heat; the sky has turned a sickly grey, big spots of warm rain darkening the pavements for a second before they evaporate again. I buy a ticket for Beach Station on the Chennai Suburban railway It is an old-fashioned pasteboard ticket; the same size and shape as the one I bought at Balatonkenese in Hungary last summer, and the ones I bought in the 1970’s at Leicester for my early, and occasionally over-ambitious railway adventures: the universal ticketing system invented in 1840’s England by Thomas Edmondson, adopted by an eclectic mix of railway companies the world over. The Edmondson ticket: an Edwardian gentleman time-traveller who has somehow circumvented the Information Superhighway to arrive 170 years later in a changed world.
The suburban electric train has hard, wooden seats, bare plate steel flooring and overhead fans blowing down from the grimy ceiling. The windows are glassless and barred, the sliding doors fixed to be permanently open. As it pulls into the station, the mass of people gathered on the platform surge towards the doors and fight their way onboard. I push my way half inside the threshold of one of the doors and grip the outside handrail tightly, more outside than inside the carriage. Every inch of space is stuffed with hot. Sweating and miserable passengers; my position is precarious but is preferable to being in the suffocating crush of bodies inside the coach: I can see and breathe, and be cooled by the breeze as the train gathers speed. There is no beach at, or near Beach Station. There is a deep-water container port and an inter-modal transfer facility – neither of which I think would be all that attractive, even if they were accessible. I return to the station and board the same train, which is now waiting in the bay platform to return south to Trisulam. There is something wrong with the hawkers and wallahs who pass through the train selling playing cards, cheap plastic wristwatches, bottles of warm Kinley Soda water and cellophane wrapped blocks of barfi. It takes me a few minutes to realize that they make deliberate and cautious movements because all of them are blind. They move slowly along the platform until they somehow sense an open door, feeling for the handrail with outstretched hands and probing for the carriage doorstep with an extended foot; they navigate their way steadily and confidently through the familiar territory of the coach chanting “Sweet-Snack-Chips” in a metallic drone. They know where each handhold, protruding seat edge and partition wall lies; every entrance and exit, whether it leads to a sheer drop to the tracks below on one side or the safety of the platform on the other. They bump into me as I stand inside the doorway, alter their course and move slowly around me, the exact position of this new and temporary obstacle fixed on their mental map of the carriage. Each has a badge to identify them as a licensed vendor of the Chennai Suburban Railway, a hazardous and dangerous environment in which to work, even with all senses present.
I get off the train at the first station and follow the lane down to Fort St George. An ancient iron studded, wooden gate at the west entrance leads me into a dark, 30 foot tunnel driven through the base of the huge, fortified walls: when the British established Madras Town here in 1640, they clearly intended to keep hold of their first territorial Indian possession. Inside, a warren of narrow roads are lined with colonial mansions, some restored for commercial use, many more in complete disrepair; some of the deep alcoves in the fort’s inner walls are inhabited, the deep recesses divided into sleeping and cooking-cum-sitout areas by crude wooden partitions. Much of the interior is used by the Indian army as a transfer camp and is out of bounds; constantly, I am stopped and turned back by sentries, only to turn the next corner and find myself in a dead end. I follow the direction of the few bicycles and Ambassadors that pass and eventually arrive at the northern tip of Marina Beach, my shirt plastered to me like a wet rag. It is the world’s longest city beach; and quite possibly it’s most polluted too. Every square foot of the yellow-brown sand is littered with food wrappers, plastic bottles and human excrement; a kilometer south of the fort, the estuary of the River Cooum dumps it’s foul smelling cargo of concentrated sewage – picked up on it’s meandering course through the city’s bastees and slums - into the Bay of Bengal, only for it to be washed back ashore by waves already slick with oil from the container port. The stench of the river is inescapable: it pervades the hot, humid air of Chennai day and night. Nobody swims from Marina Beach, or sunbathes on it either: for the disapproving Tamil Nadus it is a place to walk, relieve oneself and indulge at one of hundreds of identical Cold Drinks, Snacks, Juice and Ice Cream stalls that march across the sand in wide avenues.
I hail an auto-rickshaw and ride through the choking, fume filled streets to Central Station. I tap train number 2007 MRS-MYS into the self-service enquiry system in the booking hall; there are forty-seven seats still available for tomorrow’s Mysore Shatabdi Express, the fastest way out of the pressure cooker of Chennai. I walk back to Kennett Lane and find the Vasanta Bhavan “Meals Ready” food hall. My south Indian thalli arrives on a platter lined with banana leaves – bowls of samabar and subje, chutney, vegetable masalas and pickles arranged around a central mound of rice which is shored up on two sides with chapatis. Every so often I decline the waiter’s offer to top up this or that bowl with even more of the delicious food; for next to nothing I can eat as much as I like, but one helping of the “Unlimited Thalli” is more than enough.
I walk across the road to the economically named Beer Garden and order a Kingfisher. The small courtyard is packed with very drunk Indian men, their raucous laughter and shouted conversation drowning out some Indo-fusion pop music that plays from a speaker hidden behind the serving counter. I stand in a corner, trying to be inconspicuous and failing miserably. I begin to feel very uncomfortable as bloodshot eyes and leering smiles settle on me; a group of fat, sweating men with half a dozen empty McDowells whisky bottles lying scattered across their table turn to stare at me. One of them says something I cannot hear and they shriek with laughter. At another table a nasty looking young man with a ridge of scar tissue running from his right ear to the corner of his mouth pours a quarter pint bottle of some cheap spirit into his glass and drinks it in one long draught. His burning eyes don’t leave me for a second. Tamil Nadu has some of the most restrictive liquor laws in India, and yesterday was a “Dry Day”, when no sales of alcohol are permitted. And the result of this policy can be seen tonight in the Beer Garden: while these men might have got drunk last night, their state enforced deprivation has driven them to tonight’s excess. In Orissa, the label on the back of a Kingfisher bottle will tell you “Liquor Consumption Is Injurious to Health." In Tamil Nadu, it warns “Liquor Ruins Country, Family and Life.” Perhaps it should really say this: “The State Of Tamil Nadu Compounds The Problems Of Liquor Consumption With Pointless, Punitive Legislation And Is In Itself Injurious To Health.”
I leave my half-finished Kingfisher on a table and quickly leave the bar. I look back to see if anyone has risen to follow me out into the darkness on Kennett Lane and see Scar face squabbling with another drunk for possession of my discarded beer: clearly Juthna – food or drink contaminated by others’ lips – doesn’t extend to the injurious pursuit of liquor consumption.
I turn the air-conditioning to the highest setting, switch on the ceiling fan for good measure and lie on my bed in the Hotel Chennai Gate. Outside my window Sooty and Sweep have yet to resolve their differences; inside the pocket of my daypack is my ticket out of Chennai and Tamil Nadu. I have absolutely no intention of looking back; or ever coming back, for that matter.