The Improbable Wallah

I am drinking my coffee on the sitout with a copy of the TOI. The serial killings in Noida have made the headlines again; the death toll now stands at 38 and the villagers are protesting that the local police – or cops, as the TOI prefers to describe them – turned a blind eye because they had been bribed to do so. There are also accusations that the police acted in collusion with the killer and may have been directly involved in selecting victims; organ trading has given way to cannibalism as a motive. The security forces pacify the demonstrators with Lachtis while the lawyers struggle to find witnesses who are not too scared of reprisals to testify at the initial hearing.
“Another fine day in Puri,” a quiet, well-spoken voice says from the veranda steps rising from the garden. It belongs to Brian, a retired head teacher from England; he is modest, worldly wise and charming. We chat for a while in the morning sunshine and Brian tells me he is a volunteer at a mission for disabled children in Puri; it’s something he does for a month or so every year , whether here or up in Kolkata at the hostel for dying, destitute men. He tells me the story of an eight year-old boy that he has been looking after at the mission, and it is immediately burned into my memory with an awful clarity. I walk up CT Road and collect the Yamaha, ride past the rambling old colonial Great Eastern Railway Hotel with its plinthed, narrow gauge steam engine in the garden; over the bridge that crosses a foul smelling stream lined with hovels, along VIP Road and park outside the reservations office on Station Road.
There is one berth remaining on the Howrah-Chennai Superfast Mail – train number 2603, departing Bhubaneswar at 6.38 tomorrow morning – the last of the ten first class, air-conditioned sleepers the train conveys; there is no other accommodation available – every other carriage is full and has a Wait List of hundreds hoping there will be cancellations and a seat, or berth will become available.
I ride the Yamaha along Marine Drive, past the seafront hotels that are the preserve of domestic Indian tourists, and then out onto Beach Road. The souvenir hawkers and chai stalls fall away, the hotels dwindle to nothing; on my left, an empty, golden beach; on my right, scrub and palm trees. Ahead of me, a straight, flat, deserted tarmac road disappears into the horizon. I take the little Yamaha to the limit, keeping the two-stroke engine in the power band and hit 70mph; the windblast snatches at my shirt, cooling me and scorching my skin at the same time. The sky is a dazzling blue, sunlight glitters on the crests of the breakers rolling in from the Bay of Bengal. The road peters out into a sandy track after a couple of miles, so I put the bike on its stand and walk along the beach. I ride back to Marine Drive and park behind Beach Beer Parlor No2: if there is a Parlor No1, I have yet to see it. I order a Royal Challenge beer, and ask the barman if he would keep my daypack in the back room of the shack. I sip my drink under the gazebo set out on the sand in front of the bar, and then walk across the beach and wade out into the sea. The beach slopes into the water and then levels out; after 100 metres I am still only waist deep. I let the early breakers crash over me and the late waves lift me, swimming through them and riding them back towards the shore. I walk back to the Beer Parlor and wash away the briny taste in my mouth with ice-cold Royal Challenge.
Again I see the two year-old boy lying in the pit outside the hovel’s door. His parents are farmers, uneducated, scratching a meager living out of the land; they cannot take the mentally handicapped infant into the fields with them, so they dig a pit outside their shack and leave him there from dawn until they return at dusk. He lies in the same position every day for six years before he is rescued and finds his way to the mission in Puri. But the damage is already done: his leg is withered and twisted from years of being folded beneath him; his head his permanently thrown back and his eyes sealed shut as protection from the sun that beat down on him in his cramped hole outside the hovel.
I put on my trainers, collect my bag, and then ride back along Beach Road and let the sun and the 60 mph wind dry my shorts. But my enthusiastic riding – I spent a lot of my younger years riding fast motorbikes - comes at a cost: the Yamaha’s engine putters to a stop and will not restart. While I was shouldering my bag outside the lock-up this morning, the owner must have turned the petrol tap that I set to main tank to reserve. The tank is bone dry and the beach and road empty. I light a Wills Classic, sit by the road and wait. After 20 minutes a scooter appears in the distance, struggling along the dusty track that leads off into the jungle. I wave it down and a pleasant Indian man gives me a lift to a roadside shack near the Beach Beer Parlor No2; I buy a litre of petrol in an old plastic water bottle – it is bright orange, the colour of Lucozade. As I get onto the pillion, my calf touches the exhaust pipe of the scooter: it blisters instantly, an angry, red swelling.
I ride back to CT Road, drop off the Yamaha and chastise the owner for not running it on the main tank; I pick-up some anti-septic ointment and bandages, and then go back to my room to treat the wound. It is already seeping a thin, yellow pus and has the throbbing heat of infection.
I take a cycle-rickshaw to Grand Road and shop for paper, pens and a small holdall in the Ganj. Halfway there I tell the wallah to pull over. The rickshaw has a double tube steel frame, a thick rear axle and a heavy, wooden bench set above the back wheels; even without the weight of one or two passengers it must be difficult to pedal, and I’ve often seen an exhausted wallah pushing his empty rickshaw up the slightest of gradients.
There really is only one way to find out.
I give the wallah my bag and tell him to get in the back; his jaw drops in disbelief as I explain to him that to understand how hard his job is, I have to try it myself. And the rickshaw really is as heavy and ungainly as it looks. I stand up on the pedals to get us rolling, and fight with the loose handlebars to keep on course, rattling over potholes and getting bogged down in the patches of sand when I stray too far to the edge of the road. It creates quite a spectacle, a Westerner pedaling a rickshaw wallah through the streets of Puri. The Indians we pass are in fits of laughter, calling and waving. People come out of shops and Dhabas to see what is going on. There is clapping and cheering, shouts of encouragement. I thank the wallah and tip him generously for his indulgence. The tired eyes that began our journey to Grand Road are now animated and full of humour, and he shakes my hand warmly as he asks, “Your good name, sir?”
I eat a masala of fresh king prawns at the Ahaa Garden restaurant, sharing the tails between a one-eared half-blind dog and her companion, a small black and white cat.
I walk back to the Ghandra hotel and sit up on the rooftop terrace with a Kingfisher; the wind is howling in from the sea - a cool, refreshing gale. I know two things – no three things - for definite: I will be sleeping on the Howrah-Chennai Mail tomorrow night; somewhere in Kolkata, the volunteers tending to the homeless who would otherwise die on the streets are soaking the men’s dhotis in disinfectant before gently peeling the cloth away from their ulcerated legs; I could spend a lifetime on Indian Railways and never become bored.

WAG, WAM, WAP

I have breakfast on the veranda in the morning sunshine; it is 8am and already hot. I write egg scramble, coffee black pot on the notepad outside the kitchen door, tear off my order and then pass it in to the cook. The kitchen is a small, dark room crammed with bottles of sauces, bowls of chopped onions, chillis and fruit; two gas rings occupy one corner, a small fridge stands against the back wall beneath the hot water geyser and the warm aroma of fresh, simmering masala hangs in the air. Food that is conjured from this dim, tiny space is remarkably good. The garden is quiet and peaceful; the other guests’ “guten Morgens” and “Bonjours” unobtrusive and considerate in the surrounding tranquility. The houseboys sweep the verandas and paths with foxtail brushes, water the banana trees and palms and carry buckets to the rooftop terrace for the potted plants; barefoot, they make almost no sound as they pad by my table.
I spend an hour at the internet café across the street, leaving my trainers amid the collection of flip-flops and sandals outside the door and then walk up Chankra Tirtha – CT – Road to find my transport for the day. I give 10 Rupees to the old man with polio in both legs who hand pedals his tricycle up and down all day in search of alms, then test-ride a maroon Yamaha RX100 from the first “Motorbike On Hire” lock-up I find. The forks are twisted in the yolks, the gears jump into neutral under power and arcing points cause a misfire and loss of power at high revs. The black RX100 at the next shop revs freely through all four gears and steers straight when I take my hands from the bars; I fill out a photocopied rental form with some sketchy and partially inaccurate information and exchange 200 Rupees for the Yamaha’s keys. Formalities such as producing a driving licence, or entering my passport number in the agreement are overlooked by both parties.
I park the bike outside the Ghandra Hotel and change into boots and jeans, cover myself with sunscreen and collect my sunglasses and hat. I pull my daypack over my shoulders, kick start the Yamaha, pull the peak of my baseball cap a little further down and then set off into chaotic traffic towards Waterworks Road. Potholed and patched tarmac gives way to sand, loose gravel, pools of thick, oozing mud; red dust and compacted earth. The bike fishtails and squirms, the back wheel sliding, the front hopping over large stones and chunks of shattered concrete and side-stepping alarmingly. Pedestrians, monkeys, dogs, rickshaws, cows, scooters, huge Tata trucks and herds of goats come at me from all directions. The rules of the road are: give way to rickshaws on roundabouts and use your horn when overtaking or something comes too close – or looks like it might. Otherwise, take any available gap, space or part of the road – left or right – and try to miss everything else. I fight my way along the sandy lane to the main road at a snails pace, skimming my boots over the dust for balance, wrenching the Yamaha upright when it slides in the wet mud. Waterworks road is a wide, level tarmac strip running parallel to the carriage sidings alongside Puri station; I let the tyres dry off and then open the throttle wide. The little two-stroke engine is eager; I take it into the power band in every gear and settle into a 60mph cruise. The locals are stunned as I whip past their rickshaws and scooters with a blast of my horn, as long and urgent as a WDM’s. I become part of the mass of traffic at the level crossing gates and watch the familiar WDM-2 push its train of empty coaches back into the station, cross, pull up outside the main bus stand, light a Wills Classic and wait. My map covers the town center and goes no further than the end of Grand Road. A purple and yellow Leyland bus festooned with chrome trims, petal garlands and intricate hand-painted designs rumble out of the station; a homemade sign in the windscreen says Bhubaneswar: I follow it
Once on the main road out of town, I swing the Yamaha far over to the left and look up the side of the bus: clear. I pull out to the middle of the road, check the right side, look back over my shoulder, drop down into third and wind the throttle back. Heads and waving hands hang out of the open windows as I scream past; I hear shouts and cheers, “Heys!” and “Halos!” as I move up into fourth and leave the bus behind in a trail of hazy blue two-stoke exhaust.
I pull off the road after four or five miles and follow a lane of red dust through paddy fields and palm stands to a level crossing near a mud-and-thatch village. The villagers look over as I park the bike on it’s center stand and sit in the shade of a coconut palm; I wave to them and they go back to the business of rural life and subsistence farming. It is far hotter inland without the cooling sea breeze; my socks are damp inside my boots, my shirt drenched within minutes of stopping. The still air carries the muted sound of leaves being pounded in the village, birdsong and the faint call of a kite circling far overhead: otherwise it is silent.
I hear the WAP-4 long before I see it round the distant bend in the railway line; it passes over the crossing at 50mph, air horns blaring, people clinging in every doorway of the 16 coach passenger train. Further up the line, a woman who is collecting discarded plastic water bottles from the line side crouches in the ballast as the train rushes by, the turbulence snatching and tugging at her turquoise sari. Sunlight glints off the engine’s huge headlight, set high above the barred windscreens, and bleaches the flat front of the cab, the two zigzag bolts of electricity painted in pale orange on it’s white face becoming almost indiscernible. There is something indefinably Gallic in the WAP’s appearance – perhaps it’s proportions, the high center headlight or the lattice of ducting and insulators on the roof between the twin pantographs (the scissor-like frames that reach up to the overhead power line) – and it wouldn’t look out of place at Paris Gare Du Nord or heading for the Riviera with Le Mistral.
It is a passenger only electric locomotive – unlike the WDM, which is a diesel designed to haul both passenger and freight trains. There is a bewildering variety of classes and types of engine on Indian Railways, but each has its own , logical definition. WAGs, WAPs, WAMs; WDGs, WDPs, WDMs; WAG-4s, WDM-2s and WDM-3s. What are they? What do all these letters and numbers mean? Simple: ‘W’ for wide gauge – the 5’6” Imperial Broad gauge; ‘A’ for AC electric; ‘D’ for diesel. ‘P’ denotes a passenger locomotive, ‘G’ a goods, or freight engine, while ‘M’ means mixed – suitable for both goods and passenger use. Once you know what sort of train your locomotive can pull, the only other major consideration is: how powerful is it? That is what the number following the three letter designation will tell you: the higher the number, the more powerful the engine. So, a WDM-3 is more powerful than a WDM-2, but has less power than a WAG-4; both the WDMs can be used on any type of train, but the WAG-4 is confined to goods. And of course, all three are wide, or broad gauge. The same system applies to the two other gauges found in India: metre gauge is denoted by ‘Y’ – probably derived from the rough measurement of a yard – and ‘N’ means narrow gauge. A YDM, then, is a metre gauge diesel locomotive that can be used for both passenger and freight: simple, logical. There are very few metre gauge lines left, and those are steadily being converted to broad gauge; the three major narrow gauge lines that remain serve the hill stations of Darjeeling, Matheran and Shimla (the famous Queen Of Hill Stations, Ooty, is connected by a metre gauge line) and their popularity with tourists gaurantees their survival.
So, what do a WDG and a WAM have in common, and where do they differ?
Nothing else will pass by until the WAP-4 clears the single line up to the junction at Khurda Road, so I kick start the Yamaha and ride back into town. I park up on Grand Road and walk up to Jagganath temple. Both sides of the wide street of decaying colonial buildings is lined with stalls selling garish and tacky souvenirs. The open shop fronts and warrens of the makeshift Ganj ( market ) are awash with gaudy pictures of Lord Jagganath in cheap frames, holographic bumper stickers of his brother Balabhadra and four foot tall plastic statues of his sister Subhadra, shoddily painted in a clashing mix of lurid colours. Yatris squat at the temple gates to have their heads shaved with a blunt, straight blade razor before entering; beggars, touts and hawkers crowd in, every one of them wanting something. The temple is out of bounds to Westerners, so I climb to the viewing platform in the library opposite; I am asked to sign the visitors’ book and write the amount I am going to donate in the right hand column. The figures across the page are astronomical – hundreds, thousands of Rupees – and completely false: 50 Rupees has become 500, twenty has multiplied into 2000. The additional zeros are in a different hand and sometimes a different coloured ink. The view of the temple is unspectacular, and I see no sign of any of the 5000 monkeys that live inside it’s walls, terrorizing and robbing the pilgrims. The temple authorities latest attempt to remove the troublesome monkeys involved what was described in the TOI as “a group of seven skilled monkey-catchers from the Hill Khadia Mankadia Development Agency”, who’s stated aim was “to catch at least 1000 monkeys” during their week-long visit, using nets and ropes, and working at night when the daytime crowds have left. That would mean each of them would have to catch at least 20 monkeys a night, using only nets and ropes - in pitch darkness? On the first night, they managed to catch a total of eight between them; by the second night, they have been sacked and are making their unhappy way home to Mayurbhanj
I retrieve the Yamaha from its parking spot, ride down VIP Road, along CT Road and drop it off at the lock-up. I leave a deposit and tell the shopkeeper to make sure there’s enough fuel in it for tomorrow. I walk down the sandy lane towards the fishing village; as soon as the pye dogs see or scent me they begin howling and rise from the shade of bushes and lean-tos. It is disconcerting: they ignore the locals but follow me at a distance, yapping and baying to each other – running the unwelcome visitor out of town. I turn right into a narrow passage that leads down to the beach and stop dead. Lying in a pile of rubbish and rotting food at my feet is a thin, trembling mongrel, foam and saliva dripping from its snarling, bared canines. It’s eyes are filled with fear and demented hatred; it tries to lunge for me but is too weak in the final stages of rabies to do anything but collapse onto it’s side. I back away and take the lane on the opposite side of the road and find the Bravery Beer Parlor. Plastic chairs and dirty Formica tables are set up in the four, square rooms off the veranda of what must once have been a small housing block; the straggly, narrow strip of garden at the front is littered with empty whisky, rum and beer bottles, the rooms filthy, fetid and flyblown. I order a Kingfisher and sit beneath the ceiling fan in one of the pokey rooms; the floor is covered in bits of food and cigarette ends, the table ring-stained and sticky with spilled drink, the walls covered with posters advertising Zhedong 12000 and Super Stud beers, both promising virility and oblivion in equal measures. The seediest Hungarian bar, the most squalid Slovakian booth pale in comparison to the Bravery Beer Parlor.
I walk back to my hotel and sit on the veranda with a Kingfisher; the cook brings out a tuna steak and I agree it is very fresh, and that it would be best grilled and served with vegetable puloa and green salad.
A small lizard clings upside down on the bathroom ceiling and watches me bucket-shower; I turn the overhead fan to the lowest setting, switch off the light and listen to the cacophony of nocturnal life in the garden outside my window.
Tomorrow, I will book a ticket for the Howrah-Chennai Mail; after that, who knows where I will find myself?

A Branch Line To The Seaside

I check out of the Arya Mahal and walk down to the station; it is 10am and already the heat is building: the TOI forecasts 34.8 degrees with 93% humidity – I believe them. The Sambalpur-Puri Express is running late. I check the whiteboard behind the counter at Enquiries: expected 11.45 at platform 4 – an hour down on the 300km run from Sambalpur. I wait on the platform and smoke a Wills Classic while the WDS shifts rakes of coaches from one side of the station to the other. A WAP-4 pulls a military transport slowly through platform three; tanks, jeeps, armored personnel carriers and trucks lashed onto flat wagons; brake vans spread throughout heavy the train to help slow it down, Luggage-Cum-Guard’s vans full of troops bristling with weapons. Some of the soldiers have set up picnic tables beneath the barrels of the tanks’ guns, with cooler boxes of food and gas powered barbecues. The troop train is heading North – perhaps to the troubled Jammu-Kashmir region where Maoist extremists are waging a daily guerilla war against the state government.
I take my seat in the Chair Car of the express and leave Bhubaneswar behind a growling WDM-3 of the East Coast Railway – one of 16 divisional companies that Indian Railways is comprised of. Their names promise the romance of train travel in far away, exotic and rugged places: The North East Frontier Railway; The West Coast Railway; The South Central Railway. The scale is vast and it would take a lifetime to see it all: 63,000kms of track, 11,000 trains carrying nearly two million tons of freight and close to 14 million passengers a day. Only America's super-size railroad is bigger. The divisional names have a grandeur that was lost long ago in the United Kingdom when the Great Central Railway was abandoned and the London and North Eastern became just another anonymous part of British Rail; they are redolent of the Golden Age of railways, promising adventures Hull Trains, Heathrow Connect or Merseyrail could never hope to compete with. I stand on the baking platform at Khurda Road while we wait for a passenger train to clear the line down to Puri; the sky is a blazing blue, and the light breeze warm and damp. The WDM locks on the horns and the train leaves the Howrah-Chennai mainline and joins the 43km single track branch to the shores of the Bay of Bengal. I could imagine I am traveling along a quaint Cornish branch line of the Great Western Railway if it wasn’t for the coconut palms and paddy fields where there should be pastures and chestnut trees; the signals are old semaphores on latticed steel or solid wooden posts – their arms dropping to 45 degrees to signal ‘line clear' – just as you would have found on Brunel’s railway in the 1950s. But when you remember that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was consulting engineer to the East India Railway Company when railways first came here in 1862, the similarities should come as no surprise. It was Brunel who designed Kolkata’s Sealdah terminus, and the British owned Great Indian Peninsular Railway Company that ran the country’s first trains from Bombay to Thane behind three steam engines built in the Vulcan Foundry in Lancashire – Sultan, Sindh and Sahib. Sealdah is still in use today, as is the line to Thane – the original, modest wooden terminus at Bori Bunder now the burgeoning Mumbai CST.
I get off the train at the end of the line and walk into the sunshine and find a cycle-rickshaw to take me to the Ghanhara Hotel on CT Road. My room is clean, well furnished and spacious; I have a table and two chairs on the sitout (veranda), and I can walk through the leafy garden to the kitchen door and ask the cook to make me some dinner or breakfast, or help myself to drinks from the cooler outside. There is a roof-top terrace where I can sit with a cold Kingfisher and cool off in the breeze from the Bay of Bengal, and the garden is home to birds, bats, small darting lizards and tiny frogs. I leave my bag in my room and follow Waterworks Road to the back of the station; I buy a platform ticket and walk off the far end of the station and sit by the tracks in the shade of Banyan tree strung with lianas. A few locals pass and say ‘hello’, but I am otherwise alone. Across the four running-lines in front of me is the locomotive stabling point; a line-up of WAP-4 electrics, WAG-4-6Ps and WDM-2s and 3s. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around and there certainly is no security. I walk across the tracks and wander amongst the massive, towering engines; a door opens in the depot building and a railway man walks past without challenging me –" I am looking for the booking office. Could you help me please?" the confused and bewildered tourist clutching a map will ask.
The WDM-2 is old and battle-weary; the design dates from 1962 when ALCO imported the first of their pioneering locomotives from the United States, but this is undoubtedly one of the Indian produced ones made after DLW began building then in 1964. The WDM-3 is a later, more powerful version, and in better condition. The 2600hp WDM-2 could handle a 9 coach express in it’s day, but has been put out to pasture shunting stock from the carriage sidings to the station; the 3100hp WDM-3 still hauls 18 coach trains out on the mainline and can be found at the head of The Pearl City Express, The Black Diamond, The Grand Trunk Express, The Golden Temple Mail and countless others. I walk alongside the tracks to the level crossing on Waterworks Road, buy a bottle of water and watch as the old WDM-2 starts up and moves off the stabling point towards me; I take a photograph as it passes and listen with alarm to the shouts that come from the open cab window. I’m still on railway property where photography is forbidden. But the crew isn’t berating me, they’re calling: “Station? Station?” They’re offering me a lift. I cross over and climb up the forward steps, walk along the gangway past the heat, noise and hot, oily smell of the ALCO diesel engine and go into the cab.
The last time I sat in the Second man’s seat of a diesel was on the way to Esztergom from Budapest; that time it was the one of the rare, classic M61s of Hungarian Railways – another example of an American engined locomotive abroad. The M61 was preserved after withdrawal from service, but this WDM-2 will be cannibalized for spares and the remains scrapped before too much longer. It is dirty, smoky and dark inside the cab; and hot, too – easily 45 degrees. The sweat streams off me as I watch the driver throw the brakes off and pull the power-handle back to notch 2; we slowly begin to roll forward, the huge locomotive vibrating and slamming its weight onto the tracks. The chug of the ALCO engine is far louder inside the locomotive; I can feel each exhaust blast in the pit of my stomach. The driver shuts-off at notch 3 and we coast towards the station; I doubt this engine will ever see notch 8 and full power again. I thank the crew and walk through the carriage sidings to the platform edge. I didn’t expect for one moment that I’d actually get to ride in a WDM; so Indian Railways is not just RPF officers and endless prohibitions after all?
I take a cycle-rickshaw back to CT Road and ask for a Kingfisher in the Bravery Bar; it is a purely Indian place, a dingy concrete floored hole full of overweight local men swilling Yatari Black Label Strong and bottles of lethal Haywards 9000 Super Strong beer. They have to send a boy out to buy my Kingfisher; 10 minutes later he parks his bicycle by the door and places the bottle on the table before me. I ask to use the toilet: “Indian style. Is okay?” I am led through a door at the back of the bar and pointed to a pile of garbage in one corner of the kitchen; the old Indian woman wiping a chipped Formica tabletop with chopped onions piled on it is shooed away; as I urinate on the kitchen floor, I watch flies swarming over the food and the dirty rag cloth the woman has left unattended on the table.
I eat a meal of grilled tuna, rice and vegetable masala in the Ghandhara’s garden and then take a bottle of Kingfisher up to the roof and watch the moon rise over the Bay of Bengal. Tomorrow, I will hire a motorbike and explore Puri and the countryside around; tonight, I am going to drink a Kingfisher beer for the engine crew and the old, white and orange WDM-2.

City Of Temples

I wake early after a fitful, nightmare laden half-sleep and go downstairs for breakfast. There are six waiters hovering inside the dark restaurant, a fifteen foot buffet table stretching the length of the back wall, and no other customers. The waiters fall into orbit around my table as I drink my coffee, then form a line behind me as I work my way along the buffet table, replacing lids, rearranging the platters of food, adjusting the bowls of salad by a few millimetres to make them a little more attractive should anyone else turn up for breakfast. There is masses of food: parathas, rotis, chapatis, popads; mango, onion, tomato and chilli salads and chutneys; pokoras, rice cakes, chicken masala and two different vegetable curries. I help myself to a small portion of each dish; the waiters loiter around my table and take it in turns to lean over me and inspect my progress.I walk down to the station in the hot morning sunshine, sweat beading on my forehead from the humidity and chilli chicken masala. I buy a ticket for the following days Sambal-Puri Express then walk over the footbridge to platform 4. No RPF officers challenge me as I walk its length and climb down onto the tracks. On my left a bastee stretches away into the forest of palms and banyan trees; on my right, a beaten earth path crosses the lines and disappears through a gap in the wall behind the Easter Railway's Officers' Rest Rooms. I wait for a Howrah-bound passenger train pulled by an orange and white WAG4-6P electric to pass, and then pick my way across the tangle of points, turn-outs and running lines. I walk trackside for a few hundred metres, sit on a pile of discarded sleepers beneath the shade of a coconut palm and wait for the WDS shunter that moves coaches in and out of the station to pass. The path climbs the embankment behind me into a cluster of rag and plastic sheet shanties; a few feet away, a woman with a naked baby squats by a cooking fire outside the open doorway of her shack, stirring a steaming cauldron of rice. When she looks over at me I smile and wave; she smiles back shyly, satisfied that my sudden appearance in her poor neighborhood represents no threat. Other women emerge from the darkness of their huts, throwing back the thin sheets that cover the entrance, curious to see the unusual visitor sitting beside the railway line. They call out "Hallo!", and I acknowledge them with a smile and wave. They accept my presence and go about the daily business of struggling to survive in this place, glancing in my direction now and again to see if I am still here. People who pass on the path stop for a few minutes to ask "where from?" Otherwise, I am alone. I don't feel in the least bit threatened or unsafe here. I wonder what the locals must think seeing an Englishman sitting on this pile of sleepers; the same surprise I would feel if I saw an Eskimo sitting next to the Great Western mainline outside Swindon station? They are warm, friendly and welcoming nonetheless. The defensive body language and aggressive attitude needed to survive in central Europe isn't necessary here; some humanity and compassion, and a genuine smile is all that is required.There are more than 1,000 temples in and around Bhubaneswar; I could have taken a rickshaw to any one of them this morning. That's what everyone who visits the city does, isn't it?
Not me.
The WDS pushes some stock into one of the station platforms, and then comes forward to the points in front of me to run around its train. The crew takes little notice of me as I take some photographs. It is a fascinating tableau: a hundred tons of hot spinning metal, hissing airbrakes, oil fumes and exhaust a few feet from the woman preparing a meal at the edge of the slum. The ground trembles as the WDS blasts its horns and rumbles past the candlelit hovels with the familiar ALCO chug, hundreds of volts surging through the copper traction motor cables, enough current to light every bastee for miles around.
I walk back down the line to the gap in the wall, and then follow a narrow lane through the middle of the shanty town. Families pose outside their homes for photographs and whoop with delight when I show them their images on the digital screen. They are heartrendingly poor but not bitter or defeated; they show real affection to me and their gratitude for the brief look at their portraits is utterly humbling. I catch a fleeting glimpse of some essential truth that has long since been extinguished by greed and excess in Western Europe, but it is gone before I can catch it, examine it and describe it. I find a Wine Shop that sells nothing but beer at the side of the main road; I order a cold Kingfisher and drink it in a little open-fronted breezeblock hut facing the road. I stand under the ceiling fan and watch two slow-minded Labrador puppies scavenge in the pile of chicken bones and Paan leaf in the corner; they have soft brown eyes which shine with delirious, innocent happiness.
I walk back to Station Square in the pummeling afternoon heat; I stop at a roadside hut and buy a bottle of water, my shirt clinging to me in dark, damp patches.
"May I sit?" I ask the wallah, pointing to four plastic chairs in the shade of the stall.
"Of course," he says with an air of quiet surprise, "They are there for you". It is as if he has been waiting for me to arrive; arranging his chairs each morning - the Englishman might come today, tomorrow, next week.
I go back to the Arya Mahal as the sun sets, shower and then go down for dinner. The same six waiters are on duty, and a handful of people are dotted around the dark, neon light restaurant. A small stage has been set up where the morning buffet was. A fat, sweating Indian man in an ill-fitting white shirt tunes up with random notes on an enormous electronic organ while a small, stout, middle-aged woman in a green sari adjusts her microphone. I order a Kingfisher, an Aloo Ghobi and some rice; each is served by its own waiter. The duo opens up the night's entertainment with an ear-splitting Bollywood film song; the shrieking woman is barely audible above the deafening keyboards. The waiters tap their feet, drum on the tabletops and shuffle in time to the music. There are a few handclaps as the song grinds to a halt. The musicians have a strange, detached look about them; their movements are wooden, mechanical, like a pair of bad actors unenthusiastically going through the motions. The waiters overact their part: they are too enthusiastic, too eager for the next appalling tune to begin; they clap too loudly and dance with jerky, out-of-time movements. The whole scene is surreal; the entire spectacle contrived to serve some unknown purpose, some ritual. I drain my Kingfisher and quickly order another. The duo launch into a Country and Western number and I watch with a kind of detached horror as an elderly Indian couple take to the dance-floor. He is wearing a pair of overly-tight, white flared slacks over platform shoes, the buttons of his bright red polyester shirt straining to contain his overhanging stomach; she struggles to keep her voluminous blue sari form revealing too much of her flabby hips. They appear to be trying to perform something like The Twist to what sounds like the Bhubsville Bluegrass Hillbilly Band. As the badly synthesized guitar-picking solo winds up to full power, the old Indian man in the sprayed-on flares quickly slides his black, combed nylon toupee back into place and then grasps the woman's wobbling hips again. I am back in my room within two minutes.
I turn out the light and listen to the evening traffic on the road outside, in the distance I hear the faint but distinct sound of a waltz being played on something that sounds a little like a sitar.

On The Eastern Railway

I wake a few minutes before my 4am alarm, wash, dress, unpack the blanket I bought in Delhi and fold it into a carrier bag; I use the wrapper to seal my Berghaus fleece and then compression-strap it to the top of my pack. The lobby is dark and empty; I settled my bill the previous night, so I leave the key on the desk and go downstairs to the blackness of pre-dawn Sudder Street. I knock on the window of an Ambassador to wake the taxi driver sleeping on the back seat; he raises his head briefly before turning over and putting his hands over his ears. I walk towards another taxi parked under a tree halfway down to the junction with Chowingree. An old, homeless woman is lying on the wooden bench that is fixed to the wall where the 'Chopsticks Corner' wallah sets-up his daytime stall, watching me; I stop and turn back - I must have woken her trying to get the taxi driver's attention. Her frail body is wrapped in a thin, faded sari, her pillow a small hessian bag containing her meagre possessions. I hold out the blanket: "This will keep you warm," I tell her gently. She touches her hand to her forehead and breastbone then clutches my hand. It is cold, dry, rough: "Thank you, sir; thank you".
The taxi drives through the dark, deserted streets of Kolkata with the lights off; now and then I see the shadowy bulk of a bus or a Tata truck moving in the gloom. The driver flashes his headlights once as we pass, then we disappear again. I buy a cup of sweet, milky coffee at Howrah and cross the footbridge to platform 18 where the Dhuali Express is already waiting behind an electric WAP-4 locomotive. My reservation is posted at the door of C1 - the only reserved chair-car carriage in the entire train - which is completely full. I take my seat next to a friendly Bengali family on the way to see relatives in Balasore; as the train snakes across the points at the station's throat they ask me where I am from, where in India I have been, what is my 'good name'. The pantry-car boy serves a breakfast of omelette, chiplets, brad and tomato ketchup as we leave the city's suburbs behind; the Bengali family study me as I construct a chip-butty and an egg sandwich, then begin experimenting with permutations of their own.
I stand at the open vestibule door as the sun rises over Kharagpur and smoke a Wills Classic. For the people crushed into the unreserved coaches the 10 minute stop will be their first opportunity to purchase refreshments since leaving Kolkata. The platform is teeming with passengers frantically snapping up bowls of Iddli and Phulka, sliced-open coconuts and leaf rolled Paan. The activity reaches fever pitch as the WAP-4 blows its horn and begins to move, the last of the stragglers climbing onto the moving footboards empty-handed: they will stay hungry and thirsty until we reach Balasore in an hour and a half.
The train leaves the agricultural patchwork of paddy fields and banana plantations and crosses a vast, barren plain. Nothing grows in the reddish-brown dust that stretches in every direction as far as the eye can see.; there are no villages with goats and cattle, not a blade of grass or a single tree. I stand in the doorway as we roll for mile after mile through the desolate landscape; it is barely 9am and already hotter than Kolkata. At Balasore, the Bengali family wish me farewell as they load their luggage onto the heads of three waiting coolis; I stand in the blazing sunshine on the platform and buy water from one of the wallahs as a bead of sweat creeps down my spine. When I go back to my seat I find there is fewer than half a dozen passengers left in the carriage. The landscape has metamorphosised by the time we reach Bhadrak in Orissa: undulating grassy plains dotted with palm groves, huge, isolated hills rising out of nowhere, like up-turned jelly-moulds. The line curves and bends between long, straight sections, running for mile upon mile on a raised earth embankment. The double track splays every so often to cross swamps and tidal rivers on parallel bridges, then comes together again until we reach the next crossing. I am standing in the doorway smoking a Wills Classic. The train slows as we approach a level crossing, the mud, rag and cardboard walls of a Bastee - a slum of makeshift huts - strung along the edge of the line beside me. Suddenly:
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
I slam the door and crouch down just as the plastic window above me shatters; I hear impacts all down the side of the coach, people shouting, glass breaking. The conductor opens the connecting door and asks if I am injured: "stone attack," he assures me, "not gun."
We reach Jaipur Keonjhar Road and the hot, humid air hits me like a hammer blow when I open the track-side door. I am now the only passenger left in coach C1. A young man stumbles across the tracks below me, his eyes wild and bloodshot; he slowly begins to pull himself up the steps to my door with jerky, puppet-like movements. I shove the door in his face, wedging it with my boot while I flip the latch. He hangs outside the broken window and leers in at me:
"Uncle, " he slurs, " let me in. Let me in, uncle." It is the nightmarish, half-speed voice of a horror film.
I stand with my back pressed against the vestibule bulkhead, sweat trickling down my neck.
Slowly, the platform-side door swings open.
"Uncle...." He has crawled under the train and is now swaying in the open doorway, his crimson eyes fixed on me, drooling: "Uncle....."
I cross the vestibule, pry his fingers from the outside handrails and send him cartwheeling onto the platform with a push in his chest. As he shambles forward again, I register a blur of movement over his left shoulder; he is too slow to follow my eyes and does not see the RPF officer bring his Lachti up in a slicing, over-arm arc with all the speed and energy of a fast-bowler. I hear the bone snap as the bamboo stick connects with the zombie's forearm - crump! He reels away form his attacker, his arm hanging uselessly at his side, the hand already darkening and swelling.
I sit in the empty coach until the outskirts of Jaipur Keonjhar peter out into fields and streams, then stand at the open door, the hot slipstream whipping away the smoke from my Wills Classic. We slowly cross a long trestle over a wide tidal estuary; before the train reaches the far side I have lost sight of the other bank. The WAP-4 climbs a curved gradient as we come off the bridge; the tracks separate and the adjacent line runs along a slightly elevated embankment alongside us.
I see a group of men huddled in the ballast on the other line - a trackwork gang, perhaps, taking a chai break. Apart from the one who somehow seems to have crawled halfway under the nearest rail, wedged between two sleepers. But that isn't right because the top of his hips are separated from his lower back by a space of at least a foot, either side of the glinting rail. He is lying face down with his feet stretched out behind him, and is wearing a loose blue shirt and a red dhoti tied where his waste should be. You might think he was sleeping, if it wasn't for the ragged meat and splintered bone bulging from the truncated torso where a train's wheels cut him in two. The hot air is buzzing with flies. I back away from the door, wipe a film of perspiration from my forehead and light a Classic with trembling fingers. Sweat dampens and blurs the Wills logo where my fingers clamp the cigarette; I lick salt from my lips and breathe deeply.
The countryside is now a lush green with swathes of coconut palms rippled with dry, sandy riverbeds; the villages are mud and thatch - quite obviously very poor - the fields worked by peasant women wrapped in brilliantly coloured saris and oxen drawing wooden hoes beneath a blazing blue sky. I close the door whenever one of the impoverished settlements or desperate Bastees comes too close to the line; sometimes I sit in the coolness of the carriage and listen to the rattle of the air-conditioner's fan.
We stop at a small halt and wait for an up-bound passenger train to clear the junction ahead; there is a small concrete hut on the raised earth platform on one side, a ribbon of dusty scrub on the other. I buy a bottle of water from a wallah and stand in the doorway. The crowd of passengers waiting on the beaten earth across the tracks watch me - cool eyes set in dark, lined faces. I lean back and look down the corridor to the far end of the coach; the vestibule is filled with bright sunlight: both doors are wide open.
I slowly close my door and flip the catch, check the lock on the other side and make my way to the other end of the carriage. I am completely alone; the conductor is idling away the rest of the journey sleeping in the Luggage-Cum-Brake Van at the back of the train. There are no AK-47 armed paramilitaries or Lachti wielding RPF men to protect me: it would be a very simple matter to come over and steal everything I have. The small but nonetheless real threat of kidnap is there too - it has been reported in the TOI twice since I arrived in Delhi. I quietly lock both doors and go back to my seat; I sit rigidly, clenching and unclenching my fists, willing the driver to lock the WAP-4's airhorns on and pull back the power-handle. My hair is slick with sweat, my mouth dry. Eventually, with painful slowness, the train begins to move; somebody pounds on the locked door behind me - trackside, the wrong side to have any legitimate business in my isolated carriage.
I step into the suffocating heat at Bhubaneswar station, buy a some water and sit on a bench with my map. An Indo-African leads a chained monkey past me. The monkey stops in front of me and sits down, tired by the heat; the man sits next to it and they both rest. The man strokes the fur behind the monkey's ear and talks quietly to it; it crawls into his lap and curls up; it seems perfectly content. A small boy with leprosy and mad, flashing eyes jigs and wails on the platform in front of me, a skein of loose flesh flapping at his neck, the moist stumps of his fingers outstretched for baksheesh. Everyone is looking at me, watching each move I make. A drop of sweat rolls off the tip of my nose and soaks into my map.
I close my eyes for a few moments and see the words that are at the forefront of my mind:

Show me everything. Every pixel, every celluloid grain of the picture - the death and despair, the opulence and neglect, the suffering and the splendor. I want to see it all. Leave nothing out. Not one thing.

I open my eyes, stand up and shoulder my bag. I smile at the Indo-African and wave to his monkey; he smiles back warmly as the monkey cocks it's head to one side and gazes at me with inquisitive, intelligent eyes. I hold a 10 Rupee note at fingers length for the leper-boy to fumble into the remains of his hand, then walk out of the station. I check into a lime green room at the Arya Mahal hotel; it is a bare concrete cell, but it is clean and cool. I read the instructions on the disinfectant I bought on the way from the station; there are dilutions for cuts, surgery and childbirth: I mix the recommended solution for epidemics and soak my hands up to the wrists in the cracked bathroom sink.
I walk down Station Square to the Richi Bar and order a Kingfisher. The waiter proffers the un-opened bottle for me to test, and I agree it is cold enough; it is encrusted with ice, the contents chilled to a viscous slush.
"Where from, sir?" he asks as he pours the freezing beer into the glass he has just polished for me. He smiles when I tell him I am English: " You are welcome in Orissa."
I pick at some Aloo Zeera and push a Naan around my plate, buy three bottles of frozen beer from the waiter and walk back to my lurid room.
I lie on the bed, the sheet twisted around my feet, and sip icy Kingfisher as I watch the spinning ceiling fan - thud-thud-thud.
I close my eyes and see the calloused black feet and smooth calf muscles extending from the hem of a red dhoti; in the background a ghostly soundtrack echoes:
"Uncle, let me in. Let me in, Uncle. Let me in. Let me in......"

The Last Tram To Park Circus

The crows wake me at first light; I stand in a puddle of water in the toilet cubicle and flip the switch for the hot-water geyser, the frayed wiring fizzing and arcing alarmingly. After a warm bucket-shower I walk over to an open-fronted cafe called Zurich and order coffee, scrambled eggs and toast. I find an internet cafe hidden in a small courtyard behind Sudder Street. There is a little dhaba in the courtyard; the men are outside peeling onions and slaughtering chickens - neatly folding their wings back before hacking off their heads. I watch as a headless bird is thrown neck-down into a plastic bucket to drain, its claws clicking spastically around the rim. Entrails and legs are thrown onto a stinking mound of waste next to the dhaba's side wall where crows, cats and voles vie with each other for the remains: they are suddenly panicked as one of the pariah kites that circle in the air currents above the city swoops through the yard - a huge, dark brown predator, the back draught in its wake ruffling my shirt. A cat slinks back from its hiding place and laps at a crimson slash that bristles with white feathers. I sit on a low wall, unlace my boots, place them outside the door and pad barefoot into the dark interior. It is already hot and the air inside is fetid with the smell of onions and fresh blood. I work for an hour then take a rickshaw to Shakespeare Sarani and the Thomas Cook building. The barefoot wallah tows me along at a brisk trot; he holds a small brass handbell between his right forefinger and thumb to tinkling a melodic warning to other road-users. I pay him the 10 Rupee fare, and the same as baksheesh.

I walk back to the metro station at Maidan with more than 20,000 Rupees in my travel wallet - more than enough to cost me my life should I meet a Dacoit (an Indian term for a bandit, or thief).

I buy a ticket to Esplanade and wait on the empty platform. Television screens are mounted in the ceiling above me, their flickering light throwing ghostly shadows across the tunnel walls, the soundtrack of a Bollywood film echoing around the deserted cavern: it is a surreal, hallucinatory wait. I put my ticket into the turnstile at Esplanade; it disappears but the barrier steadfastly refuses to open. I consider climbing over it, but decide this would be difficult to explain if I am seen; instead, I wait for 15 minutes until a guard appears and then another 10 minutes while he consults his superior. I walk out of the suffocating heat of the station into dazzling sunshine, turn right, cross the Bagh and buy a ferry ticket to Howrah at Chandpal Ghat. The square, flat-bottomed boat pushes upstream through the brown, churning River Hooghly towards the massive structure of Howrah Bridge. Built in 1943 to speed the Allied advance to the Second World War Burmese front, the engineers pioneered the use of rivet-construction for what is the longest cantilever bridge in the world, and its busiest river crossing. I try to take some discreet pictures of a WDS diesel at Howrah (a smaller version of the WDM, used as a shunter and station pilot) but security is too tight. While I watch the ferry struggling over from the east bank of the river, the back of a huge, pink scaled fish arcs out of the murky water; I am amazed by its sheer size, and see it twice more. I count exactly eight life-rings lashed to the ferry's railings, and estimate 200 passengers onboard; as we approach Armenian Ghat, people mass at the shore-side exits and the vessel lists to the point of capsize. I walk to the Eastern Railway's booking office at Fairlie Place and buy a ticket for the morning's Howrah-Bhubaneswar Dhauli Express, then make my way back to Esplanade. Then I take a tram around town - something I haven't done since leaving central Europe.

The tram is indefinably ancient; it is battered and dented, the trolley-bus pole that connects with the overhead wire roped to the end buffer. The windows are glassless and shuttered, the floor bare steel plates, the seating hard wooden benches lining the walls. I sit in the cupola - the rounded end - of the rear car and look down at the tracks; they are jagged and uneven, completely worn out, sinking into the dusty ground. Tram number 22 drags itself slowly along Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road, plunging across collapsed crossovers and junctions, grinding through ragged bends formed of short lengths of straight rail. It is a slow, bone-shaking, painful journey. I'm jolted out of my seat when the tram hits a dip in the rails and slam back into the hard wooden seat, jarring my spine. The streets are narrow and choked with traffic, the tram unwelcome; every few metres we stop abruptly when a Tata truck or an auto-rickshaw cuts across our route. I pay the conductor 3 Rupees for a thin paper ticket to Park Circus and watch the ruined tracks unwind behind us, lost and indiscernible in the cracked and pot-holed roads. How Kolkata's trams have survived since the 1880s - when they were drawn by a stable of 1000 horses - is a mystery; where the trams of Kosice or Plzen are an essential part of the transport system, those of Kolkata are little more than an historic oddity. While it has some charm, the moribund network is really a vignette of the problems that beset modern urban India - the lack of funding, the neglect; impoverished and defeated.

I walk back to Sudder Street and the Fairlawn Hotel for a drink; I sit in the garden with a Kingfisher, shaded by a tall Banyan tree and surrounded by potted bamboos and palms. Flocks of crows call from the branches above me; the walled courtyard is a quiet retreat from the constant street noise outside and I can hear the shrill cry of the kites that soar in the thermals hundreds of feet overhead. I order a meal of Bhetki - a freshwater fish from the Hooghly that is marinated in garlic, oil and spices, baked in the Tandoor, then mixed into a thick, hot masala and served with rice, roti and onion chutney. I spend the rest of the evening reading in the Fairlawn's garden then go back to my room for an early night and the 6am train from Howrah to Orissa. As I lie in bed with the faint smell of wood-smoke drifting in from the cooking fires in the darkness outside, beyond the chattering of the crows, I hear the gentle chime of a rickshaw wallah's handbell - the sound an instant memory of Kolkata.

Along The Hooghly To Dum Dum

I walk out of Howrah station and take a pre-paid taxi from the stand outside; I pay 65 Rupees for the trip by Ambassador across town to Sudder Street, but half-way there the driver starts repeating: "Sudder Street - 30 Rupee. Sudder Street 30 Rupee". I lean forward and point to the driver's chit in my left hand - 'Do not pay the driver more money' it says below the fare and destination.

"Don't mess me around," I tell the driver. "Take me to Sudder Street. Now. Or this" - I switch the chit to my right hand and dangle it out of the open back window - "goes out here". Without a copy of the chit to submit to the office he will not be paid for the journey; his eyes dart nervously between the road ahead and his wing-mirror where he can see the piece of paper fluttering in the slipstream outside the Ambassador.

I take a small, bare room at the optimistically named Plaza Hotel; there is a broken air-conditioning unit hanging out of the window, and a haphazardly wired hot-water geyser in the toilet cubicle. A family of big, grey and black crows has made their home in the rusted tangle of a disused fire escape that leans against the outside wall, and lizards dart out of a whole in the bedroom wall in search of insects and spiders. I sleep for a couple of hours, then bucket-shower, shave and change my shirt. I take my map and set out for Thomas Cook on AJC Bose Road to change some money. It is hot and humid as I walk down Chowringhee Road and turn left at the junction. I am looking for The Chitrakoot Building at number 230; I walk for more than an hour - covering a couple of mile in the staggering heat - but still can't find it. I flag down a rickshaw and show him my map; we set off in the direction I have come from and find the building back near the start of my walk. Kolkata is the only city in India with human-drawn rickshaws. The barefoot wallahs jog along the streets with their wooden-wheeled carts -the passengers leaning slightly forward to maintain balance - and are tough, ravaged looking individuals; I feel a sense of guilt, as if I am perpetrating an almost slave-like abuse of another human being. Without my Rupees the wallah would be that much poorer, and my moral stance would be of no benefit to anyone but myself and my fragile conscience.

Thomas Cook is no longer in The Chitrakoot Building; they have moved to Shakespeare Sarani. When I find the office, the exchange desk is closed and will not re-open until the morning: I have wasted half the day.

Kolkata is a surprise. In parts, it reminds me of my time in the Slovakian city of Kosice: there are trams - far older and more decrepit than those in central Europe - and there is a dancing fountain in Maidan Park, an incredibly kitsch monument to tastelessness that completely overwhelms the quiet Slovakian version. And then there is the familiar hammer and sickle motif - almost eradicated in post-Soviet European states but seen everywhere in communist governed West Bengal. Where streets and roads in Slovakia and Hungary have been renamed to honour the heroes of their struggle for independence, those in Kolkata celebrate a history some in the West would rather forget: Lenin Sarani, Red Road and Ho Chi Minh Sarani - where, ironically, you will find the American Consulate. Other streets still echo of the Raj - which came into being on the banks of the River Hooghly after the British establishment finally removed the East India Company's remit to govern the country. Crumbling and flaking colonial buildings still line Middleton Row and Russel Street, Albert Road and Park Lane. The vast, white Victoria Memorial in dominates Maidan Park and Kolkotans still speak of the monarchy with affection. Everywhere there is Mother Theresa, but I cannot find the GPO building and the site of the Black Hole of Calcutta that it houses.

I do something I have not done since leaving Hungary: I take a ride on the underground. There is only one North-South line serving the city, and I buy a ticket to the terminus at Dum Dum, where - during the Boer War - a local factory produced the notorious exploding bullet that carries its name. The system is Russian designed - as is the Budapest Metro - and tries to emulate the efficiency of its central European counterpart with limited success: there are no automated ticket machines, no escalators and no maps; the staff are slow, lazy and disinterested, the trains dirty and ill-maintained. It is, however, far quicker than negotiating the chaotic traffic above, and therefore a popular means of transport for middle-class Kolkatans. I catch a local train on the Circular Railway from Dum Dum Junction as far as Eden Park. The lines loops down through the suburbs to the East bank of the Hooghly before swinging north to Sealdah station, the single track operated by an electric multiple unit that would look quite at home on a Surrey commuter service but for the bright purple and orange paintwork. I walk over to the Esplanade Bus stand and take a rickshaw back to Sudder Street; the sun is sinking over the city and the worst of the heat backing-off. I find the Super Pub Bar on the corner of Mirza Ghalib Street and order a Kingfisher to drink in the cool semi-darkness; there is a mix of Indian men with bottles of Hayward's Super Strong beer and spaced-out, hippy type Korean travellers at the tables near me. I avoid eye contact with the Indians and ignore the high-pitched gable of the Koreans as they take macro-focused pictures of their plates of food with expensive looking digital cameras. My grueling train journey is catching up with me, and I can just manage to walk down the street to the Blue Sky Cafe for a plate of Hakka noodles before I have to go back to the Plaza and bed. I barely notice the crows cawing on the fire escape outside, and even the tickle of a tiny lizard skimming across my fingers can't prevent me from falling into a deep sleep.