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 I would rather stay in one of the TTDC’s hopelessly out-of-date cottages than at the five star Oberoi Grand - or in one of the Socialist reality Standard rooms of the Hotel Akademia, with an unrivalled view of the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.