Another Station: My Railway Adventures.

Phir Milenge India

2007-06-18T07:47:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-14T07:27:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-12T07:41:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-08T04:46:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-05T04:49:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-28T06:51:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-26T07:06:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-25T01:45:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-16T01:53:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-05T02:21:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-03T08:54:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-02T04:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-10T01:01:00.000-08:00

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.

Night Train To Madras

2007-03-02T22:59:00.000-08:00

I leave the Ghandra Hotel at 3am for the early morning slow passenger train to the state capital Bhubaneswar, and then wait on platform 4 with a cup of chai for the Howrah-Chennai Superfast Mail. It is running an hour behind schedule and finally pulls in at 7.30 behind a WAG-7 electric – ostensibly a freight-only locomotive – sending a kingfisher to flight from it’s perch on the overhead line. The station announcer reels off the carriage formation in Hindi and English, and I find coach AH1 – a 2AC-cum-1AC hybrid – twenty-third place from the engine. The carriage attendant checks my reservation and directs me to ‘Cabin C’, which is in darkness, the curtains drawn and two sleeping figures in the right hand bunks of the 4 berth compartment. I quietly stow my bag beneath the left side lower bunk, and then take my Wills Classics and notebook and stand at the open door so as not to disturb my traveling companions at this early hour. The train is immensely long – 24 coaches including the second class ordinary sleeper behind mine – the WAG-7 disappearing from view when we round the long, sweeping curves that follow the coastline of the Bay of Bengal. There are unreserved, sleeper class, first class, two tier and three tier air-conditioned sleepers, a pantry car, a luggage-brake van and a guard-cum brake van. There is even a mobile RPF station in one of the coaches to deal with passengers’ complaints – or to deal with passengers. The RPF – Railway Protection Force – is a small army numbering thousands that is deployed across the 63,000 kilometre system, and in addition to providing security for trains and passengers, it has the power to prosecute 29 types of offences, including the serious ones of sabotage and train wrecking. Everything else is the domain of the GRP – the Government Railway Police, supported by whichever militia or paramilitary unit that happens to be passing by. But the sight of large groups of these AK-47 and Lachti-armed soldiers is not at all reassuring – quite the opposite, in fact. They descend like birds of ill omen on the stations and strut around the platforms and booking halls, staring passengers into silence, stalking the corridors and compartments of trains with impunity. Wherever they land they leach the colour and animation from their surroundings, poisoning the air with menace, tension and the threat of violence. They are looking for trouble; and if they cannot find it, they can make it. But still, Trains At A Glance tells me that I can expect to be compensated if maimed or killed in an Untoward Incident – like rioting, dacoity or violent attack – and that I would receive 5,000 Rupees if grievously injured in what is described as Shootout, something the RPF are no strangers to.

We follow the coastal strip south towards Andhra Pradesh, the bays and inlets netted off into fishing pens the size of paddy fields, the hills inland rising up behind the palms and banyan trees. The line hugs the waters edge, twisting and turning, climbing over viaducts and slicing through cuttings carved through crumbling red rock. It is reminiscent of my journey around Lake Balaton last summer, or the long day trip to the Cambrian Coast line when I was a third of the age I am now. When I return to the compartment I find an elderly Indian gentleman sitting on his lower berth reading the TOI; he greets me politely and we both place orders for food with the pantry car boy – breakfast for him, lunch for me. Of the other passenger, there is no sign; he must have left the train at Khurda Road. For the next two-and-a-half hours the train rattles along at a steady 50mph behind the WAG-7 that looks just like Franco-Indian WAM-4 that crossed the sandy lane outside Puri. I alternate between my seat in ‘Cabin C’ – it is as long as a three-seater settee and the backrest will later be folded down to become my bed – and the open carriage door, where I stand with a Wills Classic and lean out into the slipstream, the air seeming to become hotter with each passing mile. Although the train is called a Superfast Mail - as opposed to just Mail - it doesn't actually travel any faster than even the most humble Passenger train: it just stops at fewer stations, and only for 2 minutes rather than ten, which is the case with all other Mail and Express trains.

My lunch arrives at Visakhapatnam and my travelling companion departs; I will have the whole first class compartment to myself for the rest of the journey, and have a choice of four tables at which to eat my vegetable biryani and dal. The East Coast Railway freight engine that has brought the train down form Howrah is changed for a Southern Railways WAP-4 during the twenty minute stop; it is a major junction station, with a big engine shed and lines radiating to all points of the compass; some single, some double, sometimes running parallel to form a quadruple main line. We reverse and go back the way we came – my carriage now only one away from the engine – and then turn south towards Kankinda Town, crossing and looping an endless procession of container and coal trains going to and from Kankinda port. We take the line to the west, heading further inland, and cross onto the Vijayawada Division of the South Central Railway. At every station, every level crossing and from the brake van of each freight and passenger train we pass we are ‘green flagged’. The station master will be standing in front of his office whenever a train departs or passes through his station, much like in Hungary or Slovakia; but in India, he will have two flags – one red, one green – and will signal to the train that all is in order, or wave a warning if it is not. Likewise the crossing keeper outside his hut, and the guards inside the brake vans of the trains we overtake or meet coming in the opposite direction. Our train has no cab-to-shore radio to warn of danger, but the driver and guard each have a walkie-talkie and use them to communicate the flag signals: even if we are ‘red flagged’ because a problem is spotted further down the train when the engine has already passed, the guard will alert the driver to bring us to a stop. Simple, but effective.

The dinner I ordered at Visakhapatnam is served to my compartment when we stop at Samalakot; it is 6.30pm and already nearly full dark. Although I simply specified a ‘veg meal’, I know exactly what I will be eating: there are two whole pages of Trains At A Glance covering the standard menus of IRCTC (Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation). I know that a Standard Mail/Express Breakfast (In Casserole) Vegetarian will consist of either: A) bread butter, 2 slice with 10gms butter chiplet + cutlet, total weight 70gms; B) idli & vada (4 nos); C) upma & Vada (4 nos); D) pongal & vada (4 nos). And I know that to accompany this I will have coffee in pots (285 ml) + 2 coffee sachets + 2 sugar pouch + 2 disposable paper cups of 170 ml capacity, all of which will be served on a tray with a disposable mat and with good quality and stainless steel cutlery. The Rajdahni and Shatabdi trains serve a higher quality breakfast, lunch and dinner than the Mails and Expresses, and fill an entire page with dense, complex smallprint. I eat the Rice Pulao or Jira Rice or Plain Rice of Fine Quality (150 gms) with the Paratha (2 nos) or Chapati (4 nos) or Poories (5 nos) and Dal or Sambar (thick consistency 150 gms) and drink my Packaged Drinking Water in Ealed Glass (300 ml) which would probably be better described as a sealed glass. I Smoke a Wills Classic at the open carriage door and buy a cup of hot, sweet coffee from a wallah on the platform at Vijayawada. The carriage attendant makes up the lower right bunk of my compartment with military precision, and I sit in on the cushions opposite with my book bathed in the glow of the reading light. I am tired but cannot sleep, despite having been on the train for 15 hours already; besides, it is impossible to ignore the WAP-4’s blaring air horns, and my cabin is directly over the carriage’s leading wheels, which clatter and bang over junctions and points. I turn off the reading light, open the curtains and lie on my bed: I can see out, but nobody outside can see into my darkened room. It is totally black outside the window, not even a distant cooking fire to be seen, the stars hidden behind a blanket of night-cloud. Surrounded by darkness and deprived of any visual reference point, my fatigued mind plays tricks with me as I bounce and roll with the motion of the train: suddenly the carriage is plummeting downwards, then it is climbing at forty-five degrees; is the train really sliding sideways, or is it chasing it’s tail in tight circles? At some point exhaustion must have overcome my deceptive imagination, because it is now 4 o'clock in the morning and the outskirts of Chennai are beginning to gather by the lineside.

The Improbable Wallah

2007-02-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-23T00:37:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-12T01:19:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-04T00:30:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-04T00:29:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-03T00:18:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-02T23:49:00.000-08:00

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.

A Night On The Punjab Mail

2007-01-30T21:13:00.000-08:00

An hour before my train is due to depart I pay my hotel bill, cross the road and buy a bottle of water and some Wills Classics from one of the street hawkers, then take a cycle-rickshaw that will take me to Lucknow station . I find my name posted on the noticeboard on platform 1: coach S1, compartment C, Upper Berth; the carriage is marshalled 3 back from the engine - perfect. Unlike Allahbad, the platform is clearly displayed, and there are constant " For your kind attention...." announcements over the tannoy. Train 3006 - The Amritsar-Howrah Punjab Mail - is running 30 minutes late; it has already travelled 700 kms through the dense passenger and freight traffic of the Northern Railways coalfields area, and I'm surprised is not later than it is. I buy a bottle of water and drink a chai while I wait. The Punjab Mail pulls into the station behind a single blue and silver WDM; with a 24 coach train of 1,200 tons it is at the very limit of it's haulage capacity: an express train of this weight would normally have a pair of diesels at the front, and the WDM will need every bit of it's 3,300 horsepower to get it up to any speed.
The carriage attendant is waiting at the door of S1 with the reservation list; he checks-off my name and walks me along the corridor to compartment C. It is a 2-berth Coupe in the first class section of the carriage; there are only two other 4-berth compartments in this section - the rest of the coach - separated by a door - is 2-berth air-conditioned sleeper class. The coupe is spacious and comfortable; it has a vanity mirror on the wall, a table for each passenger, and a small wardrobe. As I stow my bag under the table, my travelling companion arrives with a cooli carrying his luggage; he is an elderly Indian gentleman; he is very quiet and well-mannered; and thankfully seems not to want any conversation. As the train pulls out of Lucknow, we take our seats on the lower berth - he reading the paper in the corner near the corridor, while I sit in the window with my notebook on the table. The back of the lower berth will be folded down to make a bed after 9pm; until this time I have use of it as a seating area, after which time I may only use my upper berth.
The door slides open; the pantry car boy asks if I would like lunch. I order the vegetarian meal, which arrives as we reach the outskirts of the city: Aloo Zeera, Dal, rice, 4 chapatis and some lime chutney. It has been cooked at Lucknow station, and picked-up by the Mail's pantry car staff; it is extremely inexpensive and surprisingly good.
I walk down to the end vestibule, open the door and smoke a Wills Classic sitting on the step with my feet resting on the steps outside. The carriage attendant appears behind me.
"You must hold on with door open", he says with an edge of panic in his voice. He points to a Hindi/English sign on the wall outside the toilet compartment - 'Footboard riding is dangerous and should not be encouraged'. If a Westerner fell from the open door of his first class coach, he would be in serious trouble. He folds down the little jumpseat outside his cupboard-sized Train Attendant's compartment, and asks me to: "please sit down". I apologise, sit down in his seat, and tell him that I will not fall out of the train, and will be very careful.
The line across Uddar Pradesh is level and straight. The WDM rattles along at a steady 60mph, it's smoke and noise filling the open vestibule. We stop at several small stations to allow other passenger trains to pass, and while we wait I climb down onto the platform and walk up to the locomotive. The WDM, with its ALCO 251 engine, has a strange, rumbling tick-over; it sounds like some huge, deep-chested animal snoring with slow breaths: chug-chug-chug-CHUG-chug-chug. The design dates back to the 1960s, long before electronic fuel management systems appeared; the WDM uses a mechanical governor to regulate the flow of diesel to the engine - and this is what gives it the uneven tickover. I walk back to my coach, and stand in the open doorway on the far side. Passengers from the crowded unreserved coaches have climbed down onto the tracks to smoke, wait and relieve themselves. Suddenly there is a shout and someone points to a dot that has appeared on the horizon. There is a mad scramble to get back on the train, even though our WDM hasn't blasted it's horns to signal departure. Within a few seconds the dot has turned into a Jumbo - a strange hybrid, part WDM, part full-cabbed passenger locomotive - rocketing towards us at 70mph with an express in tow. It passes in a storm of noise and exhaust fumes, airhorns locked on full; it is an awesome sight, but not one you would want to witness at track-level.
We get a clear signal and move off. I lean from the door and listen to the blatting exhaust note of the WDM. They really are quirky machines: they tick-over at 300rpm - barely turning - and reach maximum power at just 1000rpm - hardly more than a car's petrol engine at idle. The ALCO engine uses sheer brute force rather than speed to turn the generator that drives the electric traction motors; the huge pistons slug away like a heavyweight boxer, each blow accompanied by a massive blat from the exhaust. Then there's the lurch effect produced by the electro-mechanical relays switching. The WDM will accelerate to 30mph using the first relay - something like the dimmer-switch on your living-room light, limiting the amount of current to the traction motors to prevent the wheels simply spinning - before it changes over to the second relay and produces full power. These relays take a several seconds to switch over -they're linked to the power-handle, so this happens automatically as it is pulled wide-open - and train starts to slow down while the engine drops back to idle. Then the second relay kicks in, putting full load back onto the ALCO engine, and the speed suddenly picks-up again. This lurch is what produces the thick clouds of black exhaust fumes, too - something the WDMs are noted for.
I chat to the Train Attendant about his job while he shows me the little room in the vestibule where he sleeps, taking turns with the Train Conductor. It is 4 feet wide and 6 feet long; there is a metal locker against the wall and a thin mattress covered with a sheet takes up the entire floorspace. There is no window. The train left Howrah five days ago - as number 3005 - scheduled to depart at 7pm on it's 2000km trek to Amritsar. After a lay-over of eight hours it then started the return leg as train number 3006 - The Punjab Mail. The Attendant will have been on the train for 6 days - including delays - before he gets home to Kolkata for his one day off - living in his small compartment, eating, sleeping and working on the move. I ask him if he likes his work; he smiles and says:"It's my job."
The pantry car boy comes around as we reach Rae Bareli and I ask for a vegetarian dinner; the food orders will be passed to Rea Bareli who will call them through to the next providing station; the meals are prepared at Varanasi and loaded into the pantry car during the 7.30pm stop. I eat my Dal and rice as the train crawls across the Ganges bridge, then sit in the vestibule jumpseat with the door open and smoke. It is pitch dark outside, just the flicker of the odd cooking fire penetrating the gloom.
I go back to the coupe and find that the Train Attendant has made up the bunks. The old gentleman is sleeping, so I turn off the overhead lights, quietly climb up to my bunk, and open my book under the glow of the reading light.
The trains swaying, rolling motion is more pronounced up in my berth; the WDMs airhorns and exhaust clearly audible above the track-noise inside the closed compartment.
I cannot sleep. I slip out of the compartment and walk down to the vestibule; the Attendant is fast asleep in his tiny cell. I open the door, sit on the step with my Wills Classics, and footboard ride into the early hours. Exhausted, I lie on my bunk and eventually fall into a parody of sleep.

I wake at 5.00 to a tickling on my left forearm; I flick the cockroach off and watch in dismay as it ricochets off the wardrobe door and lands in one of the highly polished black shoes the Indian gentleman has partially tucked under his lower berth.
At 5.30am we reach Asansol; there is a local passenger train waiting alongside the Mail, one of the carriage doors perfectly lined up opposite mine. The train is empty. I climb over and look inside: bare metal floor covered in spit, bits of stale food, drifts of rubbish in the corners; pale yellow paint flaking off the walls; barred open windows; it is filthy and has no toilet other than the floor and the tracks outside at station stops. The smell of decay and human excreta snags in the back of my throat. The carriage is identical to the two unreserved coaches infront of mine, except that they are packed full of people. Last night - from the comfort of my first class air-conditioned coach - I watched a young man jump onto the footboards as the train pulled out of a station; there was so many people in the coach that they were spilling out of the open doors. The young man was clinging to the side of the train, balanced on tiptoes, only able to hold on with his left hand; I timed the next stop at 23 minutes - covered at speeds of between 40 and 60mph. I hope he made it.
The Mail reaches Howrah - one of Kolkata's two main stations - at 10.45am, more than three hours late. I am bleary-eyed, lank-haired and unshaven. I have spent 22 hours on the Mail and travelled 1000kms across Uddar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. I thank the Train Attendant and Conductor and walk down the platform in the hot sunshine. They will be on another gruelling 6 day haul to Amritsar the day after tomorrow; I will be exploring their home city.

News Of The World

2007-01-29T01:01:00.000-08:00

I order a coffee in my room and read The Times Of India - otherwise known as TOI - that has been slipped under my door while I slept. 'Eight Killed In Train Accident', a short piece in a side-bar on page five. A coal train in Ranchi derailed as it crossed a bridge on Friday night on it's way to Panipath; the brake van, guards van and two wagons fell into the rivulet below, taking the eight people 'travelling unauthorisedly' in them to their deaths. Most of them were in the brake van; the Divisional Railway Manager is trying to 'ascertain if any more are still trapped'. Was this the same derailment I passed on the way to Allahbad? I take a cycle-rickshaw to Hazratganj and find an internet cafe. Halfway along Vidhan Sabha Marg we pass the state government's palatial seat of power; the enormous white building isn't marked on my map, or any others I come across. The security is stupendous: sand-bagged machine-gun emplacements; military, police and Rapid Reaction Force units ringing the high, broken-glass topped wall, armed to the teeth with every light weapon imaginable; water-canon trucks and jeeps with racks of tear-gas launchers. There is enough firepower to start - or finish - a full scale war; perhaps that is exactly what they are expecting. I spend the day working at the internet cafe, breaking off for an hour to walk down to the Royal Cafe for lunch; I order some chicken Tikka, salad, popads and chutneys, and watch a group of plump, middle-aged Indian women in expensive saris playing a game of bingo at their table on the other side of the room. One of them calls the numbers in precise, mechanical, nasal English, while the rest mark their home-made cards; I wonder if one will shout "haveli" rather than house - they are obviously well-to-do. There is an air of tension in Lucknow, too; it has nothing to do with an influx of pilgrims and the associated threat of terrorism, but everything to do with the state elections. Stories of corruption are rife; the opposition parties have mobilised student and peasant support. There has been trouble: clashes between demonstrators and the security forces. The TOI reports that the police have instigated a shoot-on-sight policy in the worst affected neighbourhoods. As I walk back to the internet cafe, groups of young men shout "Hallo", or hiss at me then laugh amongst themselves. A beaten-up white Toyota slows next to me; a fat man in a black leather jacket mouths something at me in a low voice from his open window, threatening words spat from thick, moist lips, eyes filled with hate under a quiff of oily black hair. I dodge my way through the insane mix of rickshaws, Vikrams, handcarts and tongas thronging the street and walk through a lane on the opposite side. It is hot and dry, the temperature creeping up day by day, nudging 30 degrees.
I finish at the internet cafe and take a cycle-rickshaw back to Charbagh. Just before Lucknow station I see the Northern Railways Officers Club; it is almost a scaled down version of the government building - a gleaming, opulent and exclusive edifice. Tender Notice No 01/2007 in the TOI - placed by Northern Railways - invites 'approved' contractors to bid for 'Various Types Of Work'. Indian railways are state owned: they spend public money and are obliged to publish tender notices for every procurement. The list of work includes improvements to Officer's Bungalows - replacement of the mosaic tiles in their bathrooms, new roofs, resurfaced parking areas; provision of a wooden shed at the swimming pool; new flooring for the badminton court; repairs to the cricket pitch. The list goes on. Costs are estimated in millions of Rupees; for each section of the tender, 'Earnest Money' is required from the bidder - hundreds of thousands of Rupees to be paid to Northern Railways by the contractor who gets the work. On the road outside The Railway Officer's Club people live in shacks made from scavenged bits of plastic and cardboard tied to stick frames; the even less fortunate sleep on the station platforms, dressed in rags, begging for a few Rupees. How can state-funded extravagance be justified while people starve and die in the street outside?
I drink a Kingfisher at the Deep Palace Hotel. A young, well-dressed man enters the bar and walks unsteadily to the counter; he orders a White Mischief vodka and stares at me. I ignore him. D-5 Bungalow, Sector 31, Noida village: the remains of more than 30 bodies - mostly children - are found in and around the building. Hacked-up torsos in the bedroom and kitchen, the drainage ditch outside filled with heads and limbs. Of the adult victims, only the body of the maid is positively identified. Organ-trading and sexual abuse is mentioned. The police ignored the missing person reports made by local people: they made no investigation into the disappearances; they took no action whatsoever.
"Can I sit?". The drunk young man is at my table. I tell him no, but he begins to pull out a chair anyway. I stand up, lean across the table and push it back into place.
"I do not want you to sit at my table", I tell him, "so just go away". He stands back at the counter drinking more vodka, swaying slightly and looking at me resentfully. When he leaves, he turns back to hurl some verbal abuse at me. I ignore him.
I walk back to my hotel and take the TOI down to the dingy basement bar. I order a Kingfisher as three Indian men sit down at the table next to mine. I check their drinks - Silky Stallion vodka, McDowell's rum and Haywards 5000 Super Strong Beer - and avoid looking in their direction.
A senior police officer dies in a suspicious 'road crash' in Allahbad; he was investigating a 'sensitive' case involving a cabinet member when the 'accident' happened.
"You must join us", the older of the trio calls over to me, "I will pay your bill. Please come and sit". I tell him thank you, but no; I notice this advertisement in the TOI: 'Do you need a Private Detective? If so contact: Introspective Detectives Private Ltd.' My laugh is cut short by the persistent man at the next table:
"You must come to my home. You must meet my family. I have motorbike and it is only ten-minute drive". He is very drunk. I tell him not to bother me again, closing the TOI on an advertisement from The Northeastern Coalfields offering whole trainloads of coal to anyone who can afford the 2455 Rupees per Tonne - 10 rakes at 2,500 Tonnes each - including rail haulage.
The man at the next table will not leave me alone - he is pleading and begging for me to come to his house.
"Please, please come. Just stay for one minute," he whines. "Why should you worry? You have no bag with you, no big money." He can see my daypack on the seat next to me, and saw the camera that I quickly put back into it as he sat down; I also have 15,000 Rupees in my safety-wallet. He is drunk, unpleasant and irritating. I call the waiter for my bill; he apologises and says he is ashamed of the trio's behaviour. I gather my bag and stand infront of the men's table:
"Thank you so much for spoiling my evening," I tell them. "Are you satisfied with yourselves?" All three of them stare down at the table; the older one begins some high-pitched, maudlin apology. I cut him off: "I thought not."
I order a vegetable Thali in my room and re-pack my bag for the morning train; the room-service waiter brings a bottle of Kingfisher, too - a gift from the barman who shook his head as I left the bar, murmuring: "Indians and drink - no good."

Escape From Civil Lines

2007-01-25T00:27:00.000-08:00

I have most of the day to kill before my train. I leave my bag in the hotel luggage room and go to The Indian Coffee House on MG Marg, where the waiters dash between tables in white Dhotis with trays of glasses filled with coffee and chai. It is a huge, airy place with enormous ceiling fans and faded blue walls; there are no women here at all: the coffee house is a male preserve. I walk over to The Big Bazaar. It is a modern shopping mall with one department store, dozens of half-finished empty units, and a McDonalds. Guards armed with assault rifles eye me casually as I check my daypack in before entering, removing everything of value as advised by a large sign over the counter. I order a McAloo Tikki burger for lunch; it arrives twenty minutes later and tastes of nothing other than unidentifiable spices, swimming in a bland Tikka sauce the consistency of non-drip gloss. I buy a sturdy brass padlock and a length of chain in the department store to secure my bag on the train, then collect my daypack and get my luggage from The Bungalow. I take a cycle-rickshaw to Allahbad Junction and check the dot-matrix display for train number 2506 - The North East Express, due to depart at 3.45pm; as I walk over to platform 8, I notice 2506 displayed above the stairs down to platform 4, and a handwritten sign indicating platform 1. I ask one of the train controllers at the enquiries desk which is the correct platform, and I am told to go to platform 5; while I trudge back across the long footbridge, the station announcement system goes down: my only reliable source of information is replaced by a shrill Indian voice repeating 1-2-3-4-5- test-test-test-5-4-3-2-1 into the microphone. I wait on the bridge between platforms four and five and read the destination boards on the carriages of the two trains that arrive, neither, of which is 2506. I walk back to platform 1 and check the departures screen again: The North East Express has disappeared completely. It has probably slipped out of some distant platform while I waited pointlessly on the footbridge. I give up and leave the station: it is now 6pm. I go to the booking center and spend an hour working through Trains At A Glance, filling out reservation slips, queuing, being turned back because the train is full, reworking permutations and going back to the counter again. I finally get a reservation on The Amritsar-Howrah Punjab Mail by booking a seat on The Ganga Gompti Express back to Lucknow to make the connection; it means another day in Allahbad and a further two in Lucknow, and I am forced to buy the only remaining First Class Sleeper berth. I take a cycle-rickshaw back to The Tourist Bungalow; it is full of people in town for the Mela. I spend the next hour trying all the hotels and guesthouses I can find; everything decent is full, and I finally accept a grotty room at The Milan Hotel at an extortionate 660 Rupees. I walk down to the Tandoor restaurant and treat myself to a chicken tikka biryani, then pick up a couple of bottles of Kingfisher and go back to my grim, depressing cell.
I waste the morning trying to work at an internet cafe; it has three slow PCs, none of which have a CD drive or USB port. The connection fails every few minutes, and there are constant power-cuts. I walk through Civil Lines to The Allahbad Regency and sit in the garden bar with my notebook, slowly sipping an ice-cold Kingfisher beneath the tall palms, the white uniformed waiters gliding across the neatly clipped lawn infront of my table. Just along the street from The Regency I passed a large crowd gathered around a building site. There was a strange, unpleasant smell in the air, and a lot of security guards keeping people back as a gang of coolis dug into a mound of rubble at the side of the half-finished building. I check the Times at The Regency: an unknown number of labourers were buried when the side of the building collapsed two days ago. Corruption and sub-standard materials are cited, and nearby residents are complaining about the smell of decaying bodies. I take a cycle-rickshaw to Allahbad City Station. We are stopped at a crossroads as a procession to the Sangam passes by. The police cordon the road off with a length of rope, blowing their whistles, screaming at people to get back, smashing their Lachtis - thick bamboo sticks - across the bonnets of auto-rickshaws, denting panels and breaking off mirrors. There are guns everywhere - bolt action Lee Enfields, AK-47s, shotguns, Armalites, Sten guns, revolvers, pistols - and the tension is palpable. Convoys of colourful floats snake across the junction, speaker systems blaring music and prayers, dignitaries and pilgrims standing on their open decks.
I sit on a bench on platform 1 at Allahbad City with a bottle of mineral water, scanning the station for possible picture angles. Across the tracks a transit camp has been set up for the pilgrims, row upon row of safari tents, and security is tight. In the distance I hear crump-crump-crump - shotgun blasts, some trouble down near the Sangam ground - and the guards finger their weapons nervously.
"From which country?" An officer from the RPF ( Railway Protection Force ) is standing infront of my bench, arms folded behind his back. I tell him.
"What are you doing here?" I make up a story about trying to find a train to Howrah, and explain that I will go to Allahbad Junction and try there once I have rested for a few minutes. He is small, neat and intelligent, and clearly doesn't believe a word I say. A group of guards and onlookers have crowded around the bench by now; I try to remain as relaxed and friendly as possible, and offer to show him my passport.
"That is not necessary", he says in his clipped, heavily accented English. He leans over me: "You have consumed some whisky?"
"No" I reply, my throat suddenly very dry.
"Some rum?"
"I drank one beer at The Regency earlier. I do not drink strong liquor", I tell him with rising panic. "Is there a problem?" I ask him.
He turns on his heel without another word and marches off in the direction of the RPF headquarters in a compound at the end of the station. The guards and onlookers start to wander off, but not very far, and after a few minutes I gather my bag and bottle of water and walk leisurely down the platform to the exit. I expect to be stopped at any moment, and I have to force myself not to hurry and attract attention. I wave a 50 Rupee note at a rickshaw wallah and climb into the seat without any negotiation: "Civil Lines. Go. Now".
I use my map to direct him off the main road and through the Ox-herder's quarter; there are stables and paddocks full of beasts being bucket washed by coolis, scores of women gathering dung to flatten and dry at the roadside, serried ranks of two-foot long dung-sticks along the verge ready to be used as fuel. A river of effluent flows down a culvert at the edge of the narrow lane; the smell is overpowering but there are no guns or guards. I hide eight floors up in the Khana Shyam for an hour, and then creep back to my awful room.
I eat at Tandoor and walk over to The Cold Beer Shop. I am standing in the shadows at the side of the bar with a Kingfisher, out of the way of the jostling crowd of Indians at the counter, when a jeep with blue flashing lights pulls off MG Marg onto the dirt infront of the shack. The shopkeeper shakes his head worriedly at me, the fear in his eyes clear to see. Suddenly the drinkers at the counter are wheeling away as policemen swarm out of the jeep and wade into them, Lachtis flailing, smashing bottles off the counter, pushing them backwards into the dust with a violent shove in the chest from the end of their thick sticks. I drop everything and dodge through the rubbish piled at the back of the shack, between a couple of parked-up Ambassadors, and walk quickly along the parallel service road, keeping in the shadows. I look behind me and see the jeep pulling around the back of the shack behind me. I cut right, cross the mud strip, and push my way through the pedestrians at the side of the road; I take my life in my hands and walk straight out into the mad traffic - tyres screeching, horns and bells all around me - and zigzag across MG Marg as fast as I can. I don't know how I make the other side without being hit by anything. I go back to the safety of my disgusting room and lock and bolt the door; I have no idea why the Cold Beer Shop was raided - there is nothing illegal about it. It is a long time before I can sleep.
I wake at 4am, dress quickly and gather my bags. The reception desk is unstaffed, the lobby dark. Three blanketed forms are sleeping on the floor, and I gently nudge one of them awake with the toe of my boot: "Check-out", I tell him quietly.
"No check-out", he mumbles and goes back to sleep. I try one of the others, but get no response. I have left a deposit of 500 Rupees - far too much for the quality of the room - and owe another 160; I also have a train to catch. The idea of missing it and being stuck here again is enough to make up my mind: there is no-one to pay the money to, and simply leaving it with the key is out of the question - it would disappear in an instant, and I would have no receipt. The front door is unlocked. Anyone could walk in off the street while the three guards sleep. I place the key on the desk and walk out into the dark, cold morning; I find a cycle-rickshaw and reach Allahbad Junction station at 5.15am. My only hope is that the hotel won't pursue the matter of 160 Rupees, knowing full well they have already ripped me off for 500; however, they do have my passport details and onward destination, and a phone call to RPF at Lucknow would be all it would take to cause me some real problems. I go straight to the Train Controllers office and find my train waiting at platform 9, just as they said it would be. I double-check with the Conductor then buy a hot chai from one of the wallahs, which I drink by the open door to my carriage. The station is quiet at this hour, and I watch dozens of rats scuttling around the platforms, nosing in the stinking drifts of waste, scurrying into holes if a coolis footsteps come too close. The bright orange WDM at the head of the train rumbles at a slow tick-over, the headlight slicing out into the misty darkness; behind it, the unreserved coaches are packed solid, people hanging from the doorways, faces pressed against the barred windows. I would like to photograph the early morning scene, but my shredded nerves won't allow me to take the risk. I place my empty mud cup on a low wall; there is litter everywhere and no bins, but I can't bring myself to do as the locals do and simply throw it to the ground the moment I have finished with it. An RPF guard stops me as I go to board the train. He points at my cup: "Why do you just leave this here?" He seems genuinely offended by my seemingly thoughtless behavior. I apologise and he tells me to throw it onto the tracks instead: it lands with a splash in a stinking pool of sewage that has been squat-jettisoned from the platform edge by passengers wrapped in thin sheets to preserve the privacy of their pulled-down dhoti pants and raised saris, surrounded by ripped plastic bags, rotting half-eaten food, bits of paper and vermin-gnawed chicken bones. The guard is satisfied with this. My paranoia is in full flight; I am sure I will be picked-up and questioned about the unpaid hotel balance or my appearance at Allahbad City station. Just before departure, three RPF guards with sub-machineguns enter the coach; my blood freezes. They pay little attention to me as I sit and wait for the train to leave, a knot of tension in my stomach, and stay onboard as we leave Allahbad Junction behind and cross the Ganges. I arrive in Lucknow at 1pm; there are no RPF guards waiting for me on the platform. I check into the Deep Avadh again. They recognise me and ask with some surprise: "You like our hotel?". I tell them yes, adding the lie that although I said I was going to Darjeeling when I completed the Foreign Registration form last time, I must now go to Delhi instead. I will pick fictitous onward destinations at random from now on, and never let any hotel know where I am going next. I wash and change, then walk back through the lobby to the bar. I order a Kingfisher and allow myself to relax at last; then I drink a toast to The Ganga Gompti Express.

Nice 'N' Sleazy

2007-01-21T21:20:00.001-08:00

I'm woken with a start by the morning call to prayers from the mosque; it is 5am and still dark. Everytime the bus station announcer screams into the tannoy, the room lights flicker from the power overload. I call down for coffee, waking the sleeping houseboy. I pull myself together and put Trains At A Glance, my camera, and my notebook in my bag; I stop off at the restaurant and wolf down a spicy vegetable stuffed omelette and some more coffee, then take a cycle-rickshaw to Allahbad Junction. The booking centre is in a huge red building next to the main station, and I sit on the steps outside with a Wills Classic filling out a wad of reservation forms for all the possible connections to New Japaiguri - the railhead for the Darjeeling And Himalayan Railway. The booking hall is in turmoil: Allahbad's Sangam ( a sacred area alongside the Ganges ) is host to the Mela, and 100,000 pilgrims have arrived in the city on 450 special trains - half of them are trying to book their return tickets this morning. I notice one counter that has no queue, even though it's open for business; it is a dedicated credit card window, and as I approach, two Indians are turned away with their handfulls of Rupees. The train via Patna has a wait list of 403 people, the other route through Gaya 497. On the last possible train - The New Delhi-Guwahati North East Express - there is one second class two-tier berth left: I push my Visa card into the clerks hand and take my ticket. This is a Confirmed reservation - I definately have a place on the train; other possibilities are Reservation Against Cancellation and Wait Listed, which get you a seat or berth if one is available on the day, otherwise you travel in the crammed Unreserved coaches -which is something I fully intend to avoid at all costs.
I walk back to the station and watch a pair of WDMs waiting on platform 6 with a local passenger train I sit in the sun on a low railing with a mud cup of chai. I do not drink it. I have just watched it being brewed: milk poured into a filthy, dented metal pan, handfuls of tea-leaf dust and coarsely ground sugar tossed in afterward by the wallah’s dirty fingers, the whole lot warmed over a calor-gas ring. The lead one is orange and white, the paint faded and peeling, a garland draped around the headlight set high up in the front hood; the second one is red, white and blue, oil-stained and sooty. They are both lettered in Hindi, apart form their running numbers, their class – WDM 2a – and N.R. for Northern Railways. The elderly, bespectacled driver stands in the forward cab filling out his paperwork, more forms to add to the reams generated at every level of Indian railways, while his assistant climbs around the walkways outside the cab, cleaning the running lights with an oily rag. Without looking up from his reports, the driver leans forward and locks on the locomotive's air-horns. Startled by the blast, a goat trots off up the track in front of the engine, while a big green monkey jumps up onto the platform and struts past me with a sideways look. The assistant returns to the cab with a green flag and hangs it out of the door; the driver files his reports on a clipboard wedged into the driving stand, then pulls the power-handle back to notch 1. He sets about dusting-off the plastic armrest in his open window as the WDMs start to roll; he is casual and uninterested: he doesn’t bother to look ahead for obstructions on the line, or back down the train for to ensure all is in order. People surge past me to jump onto the moving train, and I notice a large brown rat scurrying along in the flow, somehow managing to avoid all the feet, even when it pauses to sniff something of interest. The driver pulls the power-handle even further back, still standing up in the cab, picking fluff from his jacket sleeve and the diesels slide the train out of the station and out of view in a cloud of black exhaust fumes. As I cross the footbridge over the station, I see a pall of smoke drifting over Allahbad: it’s not a fire, but the driver giving the WDMs full-throttle.
I go to The State Bank Of India to change a cheque. I am directed to the first floor Foreign Currency Cell, where I fill out two long and complex forms. I am called to the desk and wait while the Officer idly looks in his drawer, rearranges some papers, checks his PC screen and slowly drinks a cup of chai.
“Five minute wait”, he says to me, then strolls off without another word. He has done nothing about my transaction, not even looked at the forms. He is the worst sort of petty bureaucrat: he has the power to waste as much of my time as he wants, and make things as difficult as he wishes. And he knows it. I study the office: a concrete box with pale green walls and tattered orange curtains fluttering at the barred windows; grey metal desks with old PCs, brand new flat-screen monitors, their shipping boxes dumped in a corner. I hate the place.
After fifteen minutes I walk over to the Cell Supervisors desk and demand some action is taken. He takes over my case for a while, until the Bureaucrat returns and sits down to begin a conversation with his colleagues.
“Are you dealing with my case?” I ask him sharply, my patience exhausted.
“I am dealing with it”, he replies without conviction.
“Then do so. Now. Do you understand?”. This makes him jump.
Eventually I am issued with a form to take to the Chief Cashier at the end of the linoleum floored corridor - which he rejects immediately. I go back to the Cell and make the Bureaucrat correct his error. I walk back to the Cashier who then demands a token. The Cell issues me with the brass token number 6, which I throw at the Cashier. He reluctantly counts out my cash – all 50 Dollars of it. It has taken an hour.
I walk back to Civil Lines – the residential area of Raj administered Allahbad. I drink a milky coffee at the Aao Ji Dhaba, sitting in a brown plastic garden chair at a table facing the street. It is a local café in a cavernous, dark, open fronted room at the back of the old Palace Theatre. There are yellow serviettes and plastic flowers in little pots on the table, big cauldrons of curries and masalas simmering over gas-rings in the kitchen area at the back. A vegetable Thali is 35 Rupees, an Aloo Ghobi just 30, topped up constantly until you have eaten enough. An Indian boy balances on a rickety wooden stepladder and hangs strings of chillis and limes from the ceiling rafters. Everywhere I go I attract attention: four gentle-eyed pilgrims in orange robes and yellow headscarves squat on the street infront of my table, quietly watching me; the street traders outside and the other customers inside the Dhaba look away quickly whenever I glance up from my notebook. When I used the toilet at Allahbad Junction station this morning, a group of Indians gathered around the urinal to watch - commenting, correcting, agreeing with each other. There was no point in being embarrassed.
I walk to the Khana Shayam hotel and drink a beer in the 8th floor bar. On the way I pass another adaptation of the bicycle: a wallah, perfectly poised in the saddle, holds a knife to a spinning grinding wheel as he pedals; the chain has been disconnected from the rear wheel and attached to a sprocket driving the abrasive wheel. The doorman at the hotel is a tall Sikh with a bright red turban and a ceremonial dagger tucked into an orange sash; the waiters wear white dinner jackets, black bow-ties and yellow silk cummerbunds as they pour my drink. As the glass starts to become empty, a waiter will appear and quietly top it up for me. It is very nice, and the view of the sunset over Allahbad spectacular. A well dressed young English couple enters the bar. She is bossy and demanding, he silent and downtrodden. She complains in a loud plumy voice about the wine. Why haven’t you got red? Why is the white not chilled? How much is the champagne? What juices do you have? Which restaurant is the best in the hotel? On and on, constantly picking-up the helpful staff on their English, repeating back to them anything they say, poking at them with rhetorical, impatient questions. Her glum partner listens to her humiliate the waiters and doesn’t say a word. I hate these privileged people who come to India expecting a well stocked wine cellar waiting to be served at their preferred temperature; if you can’t make allowances for the difficult local conditions, then don’t come.
On the way back to the Tourist Bungalow I stop at a roadside bar counter called The Cold Beer Shop. It is a shack set-up on the mud alongside the street, and has a rope cordon around the litter strewn patch at the front. It is stocked with strong beer and bottles of Silky Stallion and White Mischief vodka. The owner takes a dusty bottle of Kingfisher from an old chest-freezer filled with ice, flips the cap out into the street and hands it to me; there is no nowhere to sit - I drink my beer standing up at the counter. Indian men scream up on scooters and Enfield Bullets and quickly drink the 100ml bottles of spirit standing at the counter before tearing off again. A couple of desperately alcoholic Indians stumble around, begging customers for drinks; one leans across the counter and wraps his trembling fingers around my Kingfisher bottle. I snatch it away, his watering eyes locked onto it. It reminds me of the booths I visited in Central Europe, the sordid drinking enclaves so popular with the less fortunate in life. Yet a booth in Allahbad? Dark hotel bars, yes: but a booth?
I take a cycle-rickshaw back to my room. The wallah has rigged up a line of bicycle bells on the front forks which ring whenever he pulls on a lever; a piece of string lifts a row of nails that bounce off the spinning spokes and strike the bells. It is very clever.
I order a room-service Aloo Dum and Naan, some mineral water, and wait for the call to evening prayers.

Slow Train To Allahbad

2007-01-20T22:09:00.000-08:00

I wake at 4am and order coffee from room service; I spend the next ten minutes trying to check-out, and resort to constantly pointing at the clock in the lobby and reminding the manager that I must catch a train. I take a cycle-rickshaw to the station and take a photograph before going in; the building looks spectacular, lit up against the faint pink glow of the approaching sunrise. I find my train posted to depart from platform 10 and cross the network of footbridges to get to track-level. A train is in the platform but it is empty; I ask the train controller and he tells me to wait on platform 9, which an announcement over the tannoy confirms a few minutes later. The train from platform 10 pulls out and backs onto my platform; a small army of barefoot coolis load a mountain of cloth-wrapped packages and metal trunks into the two luggage cars, just as they had been doing on platform 10. Then the train suddenly moves off, disappearing into the darkness beyond the carriage sidings. I ask the controller what is going on, just as an announcement booms that the train will now leave from platform 3 instead. I see the red warning light at the back of the last carriage coming back into the station, way over on the other side. If I take the footbridges, I'll miss it: I jump down onto the track and pick my way across the tangle of lines. I walk past the massive bulk a WDM diesel on platform 4; as soon as I step infront of it the driver fires off an ear-splitting horn blast to signal departure, and I climb onto the platform just before it begins to move towards me. More parcels and bales are being loaded on platform 3: why make the coolis carry them between platforms when you can move the whole train instead? My name is posted at the door of the sole Chair Car; the rest of the 15 coach train is unreserved second class. There are no guaranteed seats in these carriages, it's just a free-for-all, and they are the ones you see with passengers hanging out of the doors and riding on the roofs.
We depart 40 minutes late after all the shunting around the station, and barely a mile later spend twenty minutes waiting for a local passenger train to clear the single track Northern Line. It passes behind a strange looking EMD built ( Electro Motive Division, part of the American General Motors Corporation ) diesel, known to Indian railwaymen as Jumbos, for a reason no-one can tell me. The WDM at the front locks the airhorns on, throws out a huge pall of black smoke, and I sit in the open doorway at 60mph, feet on the outside steps, the slipstream whipping away the smoke from my Wills Classic. The train bounces, bangs, rattles and sways; it jumps over level crossings, drops slightly on subsiding bridges, as unstable as an airliner in turbulence. I hear the tell-tale rustle of insufficient ballast shifting under the track as we hurtle along, the crunch and bash of worn out points. The track is as bad as the line from the Slovakian border to Krakow; the speed is more than double. I am sure the train will derail. The driver keeps the throttle wide open until we reach an old iron bridge over a small river. We creep by the mangled and twisted remains of a derailed freight train, the wagons upside down and on their sides, trailing down the embankment into the muddy water; axles and broken wheelsets are scattered everywhere, fractured and bent lengths of rail sticking up out of the lineside rice paddys and grass. The driver winds the WDM back up on the far side of the bridge and I tighten my grip on the railings outside my door. We cross a train of limestone bound for Bakaro Steel City at Harchandpur - I imagine it as an Indian equivalent of Ostrava: unvisited, industrialised, interesting - and I buy a mud cup of sickly sweet chai from a wallah on the platform. The station has a small, functional concrete building, the up and down lines separated by a wide, tree-lined mud strip where women squat in the dust and wait with timeless patience for the local passenger train; it is in the middle of nowhere, quiet, surrounded by fields and trees, it's customers people from the villages nearby. It is far from the bustle of Lucknow: the kind of place I would like to explore. After we leave Raebarelli the TTE ( Travelling Ticket Examiner ) checks my ticket. He has a handle-bar moustache and a tatty brown cardigan under his worn out uniform. He studies my ticket at length, checks it off on his reservation list, initials it and hands it back. He doesn't mention that I should be sitting in seat 43 and not number 12 with my luggage on 13 - so much for all the form-filling and rules and regulations.
We slow for a level crossing at a small town somewhere in the rural backwaters. The driver locks the locomotives horn, and creeps forward, waiting for the blue-uniformed crossing guard to hand-wind the barriers down across the road. A few pedestrians dash across in front of us as the guard holds up a green flag and the WDM bursts into life, the ALCO ( American Locomotive Company ) made 251 diesel engine churning out black smoke and deep-throated chugs. We rocket through a small station on the far side of the crossing, scattering chickens and goats that are poking around on the platform; as I lean out of the door, two sacks fly out of one of the luggage vans coupled behind the engine and thud onto the platform in a cloud of dust: the morning post has just arrived.
We cross the Ganges into the outskirts of Allahbad on a long, groaning iron bridge, the thick brown water far below, stretching to the horizon in either direction, the Ghats flocked with washing pilgrims. I pay one of the hundreds of cycle-rickshaw wallahs outside Allahbad Junction station 20 Rupees and tell him to "take me to the Tourist Bungalow only, and no shopping". Rickshaw wallahs can get commission from stall-holders and hotel owners for bringing foreign customers to their shops and flea-ridden guesthouses. I get the last single room at the state run Tourist Bungalow. It is small, fairly clean and has no hot water or glass in the windows; outside - beyond the fly-screens and bars, just over the wall of the Bungalow's compound is MG Marg bus stand; outside my door is a small garden fenced off from the veranda by monkey-mesh, another perimeter wall, then a mosque. The noise is incredible. I drink an ice-cold Kingfisher in the hotel bar, take a cold bucket-shower, then call down for some food and more beer. I eat my dinner to the sound of buses horns and revving engines and drink my beer while listening to the call to evening prayer. Every now and again these are drowned out by the screeching, over-amplified announcements from the bus stations tannoy. I call down twice more for Kingfisher before I fall into a fitful sleep; even through the numbing alcohol and a pair of earplugs, it sounds as if I'm sharing my room with half of Allahbad.

An Ambassador To The Residency

2007-01-17T23:28:00.000-08:00

I wake to my alarm at 8am, collect the copy of The Times Of India that has been slid under the door, and call down for coffee. The 24-hour hot water is tepid, but I bucket-shower anyway, take my notebook and some cash, camera and map, and head off to Lucknow station. The booking centre is in a separate building and is a splendid piece of architecture, built along the same mosque-like lines as the huge main station. I fill out the booking form for my train to Allahbad and take it up to the counter; there is the usual jostling queue at each of the 20 windows, except one - the credit card payment counter. I walk up as two Indians are being turned away for trying to pay in Rupees, and slide my form under the disinterested clerk's nose. Within five minutes I have a confirmed ticket; I am amazed how stress free this booking was, and will make it policy to use my Visa whenever possible, as very few locals can afford this luxury. I walk back to the heaving carpark infront of the station and search for one of the few Ambassador taxis that hide amongst the cycle-rickshaws and oversize auto-rickshaws called Vikrams - six seat three-wheelers that operate fixed routes on which up to eight passengers share for a small fare. The street vendors sell everything a prospective rail traveller might need for their journey: shoeshines, padlocks, luggage repairs, food, ear cleans and "erotic" magazines - printed on rough, thin paper, the Hindi text smudged with no pictures other than the one on the cover showing a demur looking young lady with almost all of her clothes on. I find a big, white Ambassador with leather-sheathed chrome uprights on the wings and a chrome-trimmed visor extending out over the top of the windscreen; the windows are deeply tinted and have neatly tied net curtains for even further privacy. These cars have been produced by Hindustan Motors in West Bengal since the 1940s, and although improved over the years, are basically the same British Morris Oxford that they were modelled on. They epitomize motoring in India, even if they are primitive: weighing in at over a ton, with a 1500cc diesel engine that struggles to produce a paltry 37 horsepower ( about half that of a basic Ford Fiesta ), they're not particularly fast, and all four wheels use old-fashioned drum-brakes. I ask the driver to take me to The Residency, and we set off at a leisurely pace through the crazy traffic; I slide across the smooth leather back seat when we swerve to avoid suicidal rickshaw wallahs and Leyland bus drivers. The drive is a delightful experience, the car a fascinating piece of living history, eccentric and lovable. I pay the driver off after the journey - I will take a cheaper rickshaw back.
The Residency of Lucknow was besieged in 1857 after the British takeover of Avadh, and is preserved in the condition it was in after months of desperate fighting and sustained canon-fire. The red-brick walls are pocked and scarred, the tower half-destroyed but still standing. Over 2000 people - loyal Indians, women, children and British soldiers - died before the siege was lifted, many from cholera and gangrenous wounds in the appalling conditions. I walk around the well kept grounds, chipmunks scurrying along the path infront of me, parrots startled from the tall palms flying overhead. As with everywhere in Lucknow, there are very few women to be seen, and any I do see avert their eyes quickly; I'm used to the attention of the locals by now, but for an Indian woman to look at a foreign man would be unthinkable, perhaps punishable, although I'm sure they are as curious about me as the men are.
I take a cycle-rickshaw back to Charbagh. The wallah has a neat grey beard, a white skull cap, cooli shirt and pants, thick wool socks under sandals, and one dark brown tooth at the corner of his mouth. His rickshaw is brand new - black framed with big chrome mudgaurds, a red plastic passenger bench, the hood decorated with gold muslim embroidery; it is a Nirmgl DX model, made in steel by Khalsa Products, and he is very proud when I compliment him on his machine. We ride slowly through the bazaar, one of the streets lined with gun shops - like the Azad Gun House - the dull black gleam of the weapons seen behind flimsy glass fronted cabinets in open doorways. There are shops selling barbed wire, plastic pipes, and Butan Tuff 5-Ply Vimal Socks; Alico Furnishers claims to be "A place Of Latest Wooden And Steel Furniture", while the Imperial Cycle Co offers Atlas, Hermes and BSA bicycles. The wallah calls out "Hallo! Hallo!" whenever anyone gets too close to us - the cycle-rickshaw's horn. Past The Sadar Bearing House and Kanpur Delhi Goods Carriers, then I gently shake the wallah's shoulder and point to a bookstall set up under the shade of a corrugated iron lean-to. My eye was caught by a cheap counterfeit copy of the official railway timetable - trains at a glance - and the colour photograph on the cover. It is a badly printed, error ridden copy of my genuine publication, and the editor has unwisely selected a picture of an American EMD F-Unit diesel instead of an Indian train of any description; the classic, 1940's locomotive carries a yellow livery and is lettered for the Royal Gorge route, a preserved tourist train running on the old Rio Grande route from Georgetown in Colorado. Why on earth did they use this picture, and how did they find it?
I direct the wallah to drop me at the Chief Guest bar not far from the Deep Avadh hotel; it is the usual dimly lit and curtained drinking hole, a handful of Indian men drinking Haywards 5000 - the strongest beer on the drinks menu - at the tables. They have run out of Kingfisher, so I order a McDowells rum with a Deep's Fire ( Light Up The Fire Within ) soda mixer. It is 42 percent proof and tastes like methanol; it catches my breath and makes my eyes water even when diluted with all of the Deep's Fire. I ask the waiter for Will Classics, but he only has cheap Gold Flake Navy Cut; I buy two single cigarettes and he gives me a matchbox too: in India it is matchbox, not a box of matches. An Indian man walks into the bar with a massive double-barrel shoutgun slung over his shoulder, orders a neat White Mischief vodka, downs it in one and leaves. I leave the bar and the half-finished drink and walk out into the gathering dusk; I am as drunk after two large sips of the raw alcohol as I was after the unknown drink in the awful Bus Pub in Hungary: will I ever learn?
I drink a cold Kingfisher in the dingy bar to get the taste of the McDowells out of my mouth; the walk back to my hotel in the dark enough to sober even the most intoxicated traveller. I order a vegetable biryani to eat in my room and have an early night; as I lie in bed I can still feel the bump-bump-bump of the rickshaw ride: in spite of being new, one of the wheels was already buckled.

Into The Northern State

2007-01-17T00:45:00.000-08:00

I wake a few minutes before my 4am alarm, wash and dress at the same time, then order a coffee from room service. It arrives twenty minutes later;I drink the hot sweet liquid while the manager conducts a pre-checkout inspection of the dilapidated room. A small cockroach scales the bedroom wall as the manager cranes his head into the filthy toilet cubicle. I pick my way down the darkened Bazar to New Delhi station in the pre-dawn chill of a dry Himalayan wind.
My train is waiting on platefrom 12 and I check the list posted next to coach 13's door; I am the only western reserved, my Irish name an interloper among the Sonals and Singhs, alien and undoubtedly unpronounceable to my fellow passengers. I buy an "espresso" from a wallah - the polar opposite of Hungarian espresso: sweet, milky, thick - and smoke a Wills on the plateform while I wait for departure time, checking the canopy above me for monkeys, whose specialty is aerial defecation from their perches in the rafters. A station announcement:
"For your kind attention: firearms and explosives are not allowed to travel on the train. This includes kerosene, petrol and cooking gas". Followed by: "Spitting on the platform is unhygienic; containers for this purpose are placed around the station".
The train is wide and spacious - thanks to the Imerial Broad gauge - with comfortable reclining seats in rows of five, complete with fold-down airline style tables; there are 24 coaches with a WAP electric locomotive at the head, which sounds a long blast of it's horn just before we pull out at 6.10am with a violent jolt of the couplings. It is pitch dark as the train crawls through the Delhi suburbs, the glow of cooking fires with shadows moving around them the only thing outside my window. Once into the countryside, the WAP picks up speed and dawn begins to tinge the horizon a misty pink. An announcement informs passengers that "The toilet doors must be locked before starting their usage", going on to give detailed instructions in Hindi and English on how this is successfully achieved. Breakfast is served to my table as the sun rises, washing the landscape with a velvety light: two vegetable cutlets, some chiplets, a couple of slices of sweet-tasting white bread and jam. The train rolls across the table-top flat Gangetic Plain at a constant speed of around 70mph; the line is completely straight and there are no gradients to negotiate, just the occasional junction or signal check to slow for. I watch dun-coloured mud-and-thatch villages pass the window; the geometric shapes of bamboo stands; rice paddies with low mist rising from them, as if simmering; grand Havelis, their pastel washed walls glowing against the emerald background of the land. I stand in the end vestibule and smoke a Wills Classic. Sometimes a narrow road will hug the line for a while, but there is no traffic and it soon disappears to leave the train alone in this huge open space. Indian music is broadcast over the tannoy for a few minutes before each stop to alert passengers that we are coming to a station, then an announcement is made. After a two minute pause at Kanpur, we slowly cross the Ganges on a long trestle bridge. After 7 hours I finally reach Lucknow; the music starts and the Hindi/English announcement gives details of the city, and it's cultural highlights - in this case Mughali cuisine and mosques, but no mention of the once besieged residency.
I walk out of Lucknow station and am immediately surrounded by a crowd of rickshaw wallahs, each frantically shouting, tugging at my clothes, desperate for my business; a gaggle of coolis wearing brown dhotis stand off to one side and watch me hopefully: they are employed by the railway and expressly forbidden from approaching me and asking whether they could carry my luggage - on their heads - to a destination of my choice for a small pittance. I negotiate a cycle-rickshaw fare with some difficulty, the standard and incidence of spoken English far lower here than in Delhi, and check into the Deep Avadh hotel. I produce my passport, leave a deposit and fill out a series of forms. I deposit my money in their safe - an enormously complex procedure involving the cashier, manager and head receptionist, who insist I count it all infront of them. The staff, from cleaners to doormen watch all of this in stunned silence, and I feel awful being forced to show what must be a vast sum of money to these people. The porter carries my bag to my room and enquires whether "Sir would like tea or coffee?"; he returns with a flask and places it next to The Times Of India on the table. I give him a generous tip and he smiles with rotten teeth and bows his head, backing out of the room, thanking me over and again.
The phone rings: reception requesting: "To please return to lobby bringing passport"; it seems I have omitted a signature from one of the forms, which can only be remedied on sight of my passport, just in case I have changed my identity since it was last seen a few minutes ago.
I take a rickshaw to Asaf-ud-Daula's mosque mid-afternoon and return form the 4km trip at 6.30pm after a jarring, painfully slow crawl through the city. I am filthy, my hair scrubbing-brush thick with dust, tired and thirsty. I buy a Kingfisher in the bar, dimly lit and hidden from view in the hotel's basement, decorated with kitsch paintings and furnished with cheap plastic club chairs; drinking is a guilty and secretive affair in many Indian states, and conducted behind closed doors and curtained windows in Uddar Pradesh. I order an Aloo Zeera and some paratha back in my room, scrubbing off the day's grime in the Indian style bucket-shower while I wait for it to arrive. Tomorrow I will go to the station with my timetable and spend whatever time necessary to book my onward ticket; then I will explore Lucknow properly.

Delhi, New and Old

2007-01-11T22:13:00.000-08:00

I walk to a little Dhaba for breakfast of sweet milky coffe and omelette with paratha; there are a few other western travellers and a lot of locals eating at the fomica tables that are open to the street. A constant stream of rickshaws and scooters pass by, then two turbaned men swathed in bright cloth on elephants. I take a cycle-rickshaw to Connaught Place. The wallah in called Surav, and although only 20, he looks forty years old. As we pass chronically overloaded ox-carts and cripples begging in rags, I watch as three well-dressed Indian men scream at their scared cooli because he cannot carry all of their heavy boxes on his head. Surav isn't married and doesn't know if any of his family back in Bihar are still alive; he lives in a shack in Arem Bagh, and he would one day like to become a car driver. As we turn onto one of the radial roads toward Connaught Place I see a roadside stall piled with pyramids of exquisitely coloured spices; behind it, wretched hovels surrounded by pools of human waste, diseased and malnourished children covered in open sores and excrement.
I take one of the shared jeeps to the Red Fort in Old Delhi. While I sit on a wall and smoke a Wills Classic, three young Indian men walk over and shyly ask if they could be photographed with me; they thank me and keep turning to smile and wave as they cross the carpark. I walk down to Old Delhi station, stopping here and there to take photographs of my own; various people say "Hello, Sir" as I pass, and almost everyone looks at me curiously - they are fascinated by my appearance, but I don't feel in the least bit threatened. I have seen no other westerners since leaving the Red Fort. I take an enormous risk sneaking pictures at the station. Photography is strictly forbidden unless you go through the lengthy process of obtaining a permit, and I would probably be arrested if caught, or at the very least heavily fined. When my nerve fails me, I walk through the bazar towards fort and become completely lost in the packed, bustling alleys. After an hour of dead-ends and wrong turns I hail a cycle-rickshaw; I realise I have walked probably a mile in the wrong direction, and it takes the wallah a hard half-hour pedal to drop me back in to the jeep stand.
I have my boots cleaned in Connaught Place by Amerchand who has been doing this since leaving Madhai Pardesh when he was 10.
I drink an expensive Kingfisher Premium in the Standard Coffee House. The tablecloths are linen, the waiters discreet and impeccably dressed; cut glass chandeliers hang from the huge ceiling and the high paneled walls are decorated with enormous paintings and mirrors. The place oozes Raj era elegance and opulence, but loud modern music shatters any illusion that those days are anything other than firmly in the past. I take an auto-rickshaw back to my room in Pahar Ganj, studying the incredible variety of movement screaming,walking, trotting or crawling around the city. Cycle-rickshaws in passenger, cargo, chai dispensing, mobile food-stall and travelling telephone box versions, the latter with two or three mis-matched old domestic phones precariously wired up to the innards of a cell-phone. Auto-rickshaws can be cargo or passenger, while bicycles provide a platform for smaller food-outlets and the carriage of gas canisters and jerrycans of kerosene and petrol. The iconic Ambassador cars are garishly or gracefully embellished according to the drivers taste and market, and sometimes have the same attention lavished on them as Czech Railways 754 diesels merit - net curtains, interior grooming mirrors, homemade sun-visors. Battered Suzuki mini-van taxis made under licence in India by Maruti; beaten-up Leyland buses with crumpled and fading panels, intricately decorated Tata trucks in bright primary colours. Ox-carts piled high with cotton bales and sheets of wood; donkeys with panniers of bricks. Elephants, jeeps, scooters, Enfield Bullets - another icon. Cows, goats, monkeys and pedestrians. It is both alien and fascinating; I am exhausted when I reach my hotel.
I eat at the Metropolis Hotel and chat to two young American travellers over a bottle of Kingfisher; a drunk, middle-aged Australian man staggers to our table and begins to shout at us, something about knowing what happened in Vietnam; we ignore him and watch as he crashes through the door and out into the darkness of the bazar.
I set my alarm and go to bed listening to the endless tooting of traffic horns; I hear the long pre-departure blast of a locomotive from nearby New Delhi station, which is where early tomorrow morning I will catch my first train.

Indian Imperial Broad

2007-01-06T22:55:00.000-08:00

I am walking along the Main Bazar in Pahar Ganj towards New Delhi railway station when I feel a thump on my right shoulder; the blow propels me into a pile of brightly coloured woven blankets heaped on the dusty roadside by one of the hundreds of street traders. It is my first day in Delhi, and I have just been run over for the first time by a cycle-rickshaw. More embarrassed than injured, I dust myself off and rejoin the mass of people, cars, cows, scooters, and rickshaws squeezed into the narrow dusty street between the ramshackle buildings and the street vendors. The blaring horns, noise, smells, fumes and dust are awe inspiring; the random and conflicting trajectories of pedestrians, cattle, and traffic is bewildering.
Since leaving Hungary in early November I have stayed with my sister in a quintessential Cotswold village on the Thames, where seeing the postman peddling his bright red bicycle around the lanes is something of note. The teashop at Kelmscott, Blackwell's in Oxford, and discovering the simple pleasure of gardening have been welcome respite from week upon week of railway journeys in central Europe; but they have not prepared me in the least for three months in India. Could anything?
Nairobi is quiet and conservative when compared to Delhi - calm, peaceful, ordered; Capetown and Harare quaint, relaxed, uncrowded.
I dodge through the heaving traffic at the junction opposite the station, skimming off auto-rickshaws, missing buses and bicycles by fractions of an inch, stumbling in potholes and breathing blue diesel fumes and dust. I buy a 3 Rupee platform ticket and a timetable that is as thick as a coffee-table book: it contains every major train in India, from Amritsar in the far north of Punjab on the Pakistan border to Rameshwaram at the bottom of Tamil Nadu a few kilometers across the Gulf of Mannar from Sri Lanka. It would take a year to explore it all, but for the next three months this book will be the blueprint for my railway travels around the subcontinent.
I sit on a bale of cotton at the end of plateform (not "platform") 16, surrounded by hundreds of boxes, parcels, and other bales of cloth - and some very inquisitive locals - and watch a huge WDM diesel waiting to leave with a twenty-plus carriage passenger train. Indian railways come in different sizes; there are narrow gauge lines in the hill states, and broad and meter gauge lines elsewhere. There is a whole litany between the width of two rails: Bosnian Gauge for 2ft 5 and 7/8in; Supreme Metric Narrow is 1000mm wide, while Suez Walhalla Whitfield (people? places?) sit 2ft 6in apart. My favorite is Decauville Portable Narrow: not because the rails are exactly 1ft 11 and 5/8in distant, but for the mental picture of someone picking them up and walking away with them. The WDM diesel runs on 5ft 6in Imperial Broad gauge - the standard for Indian mainlines - and as I circle in my timetable train number 2004 departing New Delhi at 6.15 in the morning for Lucknow, the driver sounds a long blast of the airhorns to signal departure, drowning out all other noise and leaving my ears ringing and feeling strangely pressurised. My train will be a Shatabdi Express - fast, air-conditioned, expensive at 700 Rupees - and will take nearly 8 hours to reach Lucknow. It will be a far cry from the wooden slatted seats and barred windows of the passenger train. He lowers and waves a green flag from the cab window and moves the throttle to notch 1 as people dash across the plateform and tracks and climb onto the train, clinging in the open doorways, faces crammed against the barred windows, imprisoned in the dark, packed coaches. The WDM opens up with a growl and slides the train out of the station, the airhorns blaring every few seconds, a dictat of the bureaucratic railway rules: too few warning blasts would be noted and the driver disciplined.
I go to the foreigners Booking Office on the first floor above the Public Grievances Cell and The superintendent Of Parcel Bookings office and fill out a booking/cancellation of booking form for my train. I sit on a battered brown vinyl settee and wait to be called to the agents desk. My passport and visa details are entered into an MS-DOS era computer, along with my name, age, sex, and address, and once I have produced an Encashment Certificate I exchange a wad of Rupees for my ticket.
I leave the station and take an auto-rickshaw to Connaught Place; the driver carves his way through the anarchic traffic using his tinny sounding horn and occasionally the brakes, and I am stunned into silence by the frightening near misses and last minute swerves to avoid head-on collisions. I find a small restaurant behind the colonnaded circle and eat some dal and bread, then walk to a bar for a Kingfisher beer - dutch courage for the rickshaw ride back to my small, unclean, budget hotel.

The View From The Train

2006-11-23T11:49:00.000-08:00

I've added pictures to some of the posts in my blog, which I hope will give you a small glimpse of the places I have seen, and some of the trains that carried me there. I took them with a Ricoh GR1V using B&W film and a yellow-orange filter, then scanned the finished prints; in retrospect, a digital camera would have been a wise investment.......
I hope you've enjoyed reading about my adventures, and would welcome any comments or questions you may have; my travels are not over yet, and in a few weeks I hope to be spicing up my blog with more tales of railway journeys in far away places.

Zuge Endet Hier

2006-11-21T12:31:00.000-08:00

In the morning I repack my rucksack for the flight back to England; I rationalise the contents and discard some of the unused things I have carried around central Europe for the last eleven weeks, wondering why I didn’t do so sooner. I leave my battered copy of Fatherland on the table next to some unwanted shower gel and an airline-prohibited aerosol can, and place a stack of small Forint coins in front of these for the maid. As I eat a breakfast of omelette and coffee, the owner of the Panzio strikes up a stilted conversation about the town and my travel plans; he speaks a few words of English and is fluent in Hungarian; but my limping and limited German is his preference. He tells me he is from Hamburg, and I suddenly realise my mistake in leaving a particular book in my room; but there is nothing I can do about this: I have settled my bill and deposited the keys. My only hope is that the maid does not discover her treasures before I have finished breakfast and reached the safety of the station.
My last train is the 11.32 to Budapest Keleti Palyuadvar. It is a typical Saturday in Hungary: the shops are winding down for the weekend and the bustle of last minute shoppers is only countered by the relaxed atmosphere of the cafes and bars, the unhurried stroll back from the river front market. I walk across the Platz for the last time, cross the square, and pause at the booth outside the station to buy water for the journey; the steps into the station are already host to shoppers returning to the countryside, their bulging plastic bags gathered around them as they sit patiently on the freezing stone for what might be a wait of several hours. The train is standing at platform 3 behind a V43 electric in the InterCity colours of blue and grey, distinguishing it from the utilitarian flat blue of the locally based engines. One of the four second class coaches is an old 1st class that has been downgraded but not changed, and I find a comfortable single window seat with armrests and enough room to stretch my legs out; the train heating, although welcome after the insidious cold of the platform, is set at full and within a few minutes I am peeling off layers of outer clothing, trying to acclimatise to my new environment. There are few other passengers, and only a handful of people join the train at each stop; one or two backpackers and a small family share my coach, sometimes a local gets on for a couple of stops, but few people seem to want to travel to Budapest on a Saturday morning. I arrive at Keleti and drink an espresso at a booth beneath the statues guarding entrance. There is a bustling energy to the Palyaudvar that never seems to dissipate, regardless of the day or the hour; the improbably distant destinations, the excitement, anticipation, and despair, the beginnings and endings – the possibilities – reverberate around the spectacular train shed. The epitome of a railway terminus: history, architecture, romance, and the promise of adventure. The striking new Berlin Hauptbahnhof, New York’s Grand Central station, or Paris’ Gare Du Nord are inspiring places to begin or end a journey, and each have some of these ingredients - but never all together; this is why Budapest Keleti Palyuadvar is my favourite station and a kind of spiritual home for all that I love about railways.
I walk down to the Metro and find that M2 to Deak Ter – where I need to connect to M3 - is closed for rebuilding. I take tram 24 to Nagyvarad Ter instead, and take M3 to the end of the line at Kobanya-Kispest and the sprawling train-bus-tram interchange. A long, wide, enclosed footbridge spans the tracks and bus station, lined with booths and shops, groups of seedy looking men drinking Borok and vodka in the dark corners and recesses. The wind drives waves of sleet across the dirty windows that overlook the car park below and rattles the corrugated steel walls. I find a bar halfway across the bridge and drink a Borsodi while I wait for the airport bus; the windows are blanked out, and a heavy curtain hangs over the door as if to shield passers-by from witnessing some sordid encounter. A portable gas heater battles against the draughts that seem to come from everywhere at once, and I can feel the cold seeping through the bridge’s floor: a less amenable venue for a farewell drink I cannot imagine. The bus drops me across the main road from the airport, the sleet turned to snow, the wind howling down the dual carriageway as I weave through the traffic to terminal one. I check in and go through to departures without any delays or searches, my passport barely even looked at. When my flight is called I walk downstairs to the WC and smoke a cigarette; there is a group of probably 10 people hovering around the door smoking; most of them are airport staff and security guards, and the air is thick enough to make my eyes water. I reach the gate as the last of the passengers walk out to the 737 and find a window seat over the wings. There’s a twenty minute delay as the ground crew de-ice the aircraft, then a quick push-back and taxi, the engines throttling to full power just before the jets nose swings out of the taxiway and lines up with the runway. Half an hour later the captain announces we are cruising at 11 kilometres above the Czech border with an outside air temperature of -63oC, something it’s impossible to relate with the warm aircraft cabin or cruising round the Balaton shore behind an old M41 diesel on a hot and sunny afternoon.
My sister is waiting at Luton to meet me. The airport is functional, stark and unwelcoming. It has a temporary, pre-fabricated feel, as if the thin partition internal walls might be moved at any moment; disembarking passengers are funnelled through walkways that shake beneath their feet and herded into cordoned pens for passport control before being spat out into the arrivals hall as quickly as possible. We drive through the grimy Luton suburbs and out into the unseen English landscape; the darkened fields and silhouetted trees are indefinably different from those of central Europe; the country feels distinctly different even though it is so familiar and clearly unchanged. Or perhaps it is me that is no longer the same, an outside observer of a strange country: could I really have changed so much in 77 days?
We arrive in the Cotswolds late in the evening; I go to bed in the peace of rural England, my map folded and stowed, no train times jotted in the back page of my notebook for the morning. An owl calls from the trees outside my window, and I imagine I hear the distant blast of an M41 or M62s air horns somewhere far away in the night - but its just the wind. The journey is over.

Last Train To Budapest

2006-11-13T11:28:00.000-08:00

I have a breakfast of black coffee in the Panzio then take the Metro to Nguyati to change some money. As I walk down Oktober 6 Utca to the K&H bank, I find a second-hand bookshop with English titles tucked away in a courtyard, almost invisible from the street. They have a small selection of paperbacks and I buy a tattered copy of Fatherland for a few hundred Forints. From the bank I cross back to the station for an espresso and study the timetable, looking for a destination where I can eek out the last of my funds for the next week. There are trains to Balaton, Pecs, and Esztergom, but little more than commuter services make up the rest of the departures. There are no M41 diesels here and certainly no Russian M62s; the M61 has made its last run of the year and is back in the museum, and only rows of V43 electrics occupy the platforms. I take the Metro to Keleti and resume my study there. There are departures to Minsk, Moscow, Berlin, Beograd, and Vienna; Zagreb, Kiev, Warsaw, and Hamburg. They are pulled by an assortment of V43s, V63s, Taurus electrics, and even a solitary M41 – I would catch them all if I could. I note down the times for Gyor instead; Budapest is too expensive to stay for very long, although I am grateful for its facilities after so long in the provinces. I take the tram back to Nagyvarad Ter and shop in the Prosi Elemmizer for food. I eat in my room, shower, change, and walk to the Metro station; for my last night in Budapest I take M3 to Deak Ter and sit in a dimly lit little bar off Deak Utca. There are no tourists here – they are drawn to the bright lights and high prices of the bars and restaurants that line the Danube – and I feel perfectly comfortable and at ease with the local crowd, much more so than I would on the banks of the river. A television on the wall is showing a national football match and there’s a great deal of good natured rivalry between the customers; nobody pays the slightest attention to the Englishman sitting in the corner in his Hungarian jacket reading a book about Germany. It is almost midnight when I catch the Metro back to my room; the underground station is quiet and eerie, echoing footsteps and the distant rumble of an approaching train enough to raise the hairs at the back of the neck. The train is empty and dimly lit; the entrance to Nagyvarad Ter, by contrast, is brightly illuminated and full of people lying on cardboard mattresses and old cushions. I tiptoe between the sleeping bundles, trying not to disturb what little comfort they have managed to find, thankful I will be sleeping between clean sheets in a warm room and not wrapped in a filthy blanket in a freezing station.
I take the 11.10 to Gyor in the morning and arrive two hours later in a rainstorm. I walk to the TourInform booth in the Platz and book a room in a charming little Panzio down a cobbled alley in the old town. I am soaked to the skin by the time I reach my room, and as soon as I close the door the rain stops. I walk through the old baroque town to the riverfront where the market is held a couple of times a week. The traders are local people with produce from their smallholdings and gardens, the paprika and onions and leafy headed bunches of carrots displayed on upturned cardboard boxes; business is brisk, and the half dozen stalls cooking sausages for the shoppers to eat with hunks of bread are doing a roaring trade. As the afternoon draws in and the traders start packing up for the day there is a flurry of snow: the thermometer in the square says 2 degrees and falling, and a bitter wind has sprung up. I eat a meal of catfish soup at a tiny bar facing the River Raba under a low vaulted brick ceiling, adding a spoonful of chilli sauce as the locals do; the result is delicious and spicy, more of a stew than a soup to eat with the basket of bread that accompanies it. The temperature is zero when I walk back to my room, the snow falling in big soft flakes to settle on the cobblestones and terracotta roofs.
In the morning sky is blue and the snow crystallised against the small crooked window of my attic room. A table has been set for breakfast – not something that is usually included in the price of a room – and they cook me an enormous plate of scrambled eggs with ham and paprika, topping up my coffee cup constantly. The thermometer in the square flickers between zero and minus one as I walk to the station, and as I approach, I hear a familiar but unexpected diesel exhaust note: an M61 is sitting in platform one with a three coach train decorated for the 50th anniversary of the uprising. One of the carriages has been converted into a mobile museum which is touring the country, stopping for a morning or an afternoon at every town and city in Hungary; there is a seating coach and a separate sleeping car for the support crew behind this, and the gleaming M61 at the front. I am surprised to find that it’s not the same engine I rode to Esztergom – I was convinced that was the only survivor – but a beautifully restored model owned and maintained by MAV Technik, Hungarian Railways’ engineering department. This makes me feel slightly less guilty about breaking the door handle off the M61 at the museum. Some modern touches have been added to the engine – an in-cab computer, aluminium identification plates bearing its European wide recognition number, a revised colour scheme – but the wooden window frames, body side portholes, and cast Nohab builder’s plate are all original. A small panel near the cab reads MY Class - 50 Anniversary Tour: Budapest–Odense-Budapest: in 2004 all the surviving locomotives made by this builder were brought together in the Danish city for display, and this one travelled there and back under its own power from Hungary - a feat in itself for a forty year old locomotive – at a cost of 17,000 Euros to the organisers. The engine shuts down and I walk through the museum coach; I am unable to read any of the panels of text, but the photographs of a devastated Budapest and the chattering of small arms fire behind the audio commentary is quite enough to bring the story to life as I follow the uprising from 23rd October to the crushing deployment of 1000 Soviet tanks.
Back on the platform, the M61 is attracting more attention than the museum exhibits: both cabs are crammed with people being given a guided tour of the engine compartment; people climb down onto the track to take photographs or pose in front of the engines distinctive swooping nose, the national flag in a roundel at its centre where once there was a Soviet star. Several people set up video cameras at the trackside to film the M61 as it starts up and takes the travelling museum eastwards out of the station, the vintage locomotive looking and sounding as fresh as if it had just this day rolled out of the Nohab factory in Trondheim.
It is snowing again as I leave the station and walk to the internet café. I email my sister in England and confirm the arrangements for flying back the following evening, then change the last of my Euros into Forints. I divide the notes into separate piles for train and Metro fares to Budapest airport; a large pile for the Panzio room; a smaller pile for food and drinks for the journey. I wash and change and take what’s left to the riverfront bar and sit in a corner with a Borsodi and my notebook. Inside it is as warm and cosy as the sort of snug you would find in an old English pub; outside the night is numb with cold, a low, freezing mist hanging over the river. Tomorrow I will take my last train to Budapest and will sleep in a small Cotswold village. It doesn’t seem possible.

Two Beginnings,Two Ends

2006-11-07T06:20:00.000-08:00

It is unusually quiet outside the window of my room in the morning; there is little traffic and few people to be seen. I drink an espresso in the etterem - there is thankfully no sign of The Hag - and walk into town to change some money. The K&H bank is closed, as is almost everything else, and I remember that today is 23rd October: 50 years ago the students rose up to challenge Communist rule, and a public holiday marks the start of a struggle that finally triumphed more than 30 years later. Piac Utca is festooned with Hungarian flags. They hang from every lampost and in every shop window, above every government building and the closed doors of the bank. A group of perhaps 300 people have gathered for a memorial ceremony in the square facing the church; there is vigorous applause for the speakers and a lot of flag waving, the achievement of independance recent enough to be in many of the crowds memories. I pass an apartment block with a cast concrete depiction of Soviet shock workers toiling under a Red Star fixed to the wall, the Hungarian national flag draped over one corner; there is barely any evidence of socialist times in Debrecen, and I am surprised this has survived in plain view when the statues have been removed from the parks and the hammer and sickle prised from the public buildings.
I take the tram to the park and walk the forest paths, past the empty boating lake and boarded up Hot Dogey stands, the zoo and the chained up fairground rides until I find a wood cabin at the edge of a pond where I buy a Borsodi to drink at one of the tables in the late afternoon sun. I watch families and couples stroll by, the younger ones chatting and laughing, the older ones respectfully quiet, perhaps remembering other holidays and walks in the park when times were not quite so free. I walk back to town in the gathering dusk; the square is empty now, the handful of etterems and bars that have opened attracting little custom. I buy some food at the Non-Stop ABC and go back to my room. Setting the alarm for the morning train to Szolnok and Szeged I have an early night, but I’m not tired and lie in the darkness listening to the forlorn sound of the few cars that pass below my window. There are no footfalls or voices from the pavement outside, just the faint echo of the announcer drifting across from the station – a lonely sound in the stillness of an empty night.
There are half a dozen people waiting on the freezing platform for the 5am train to Szeged; two men are sharing a bottle of vodka to ward off the chill, while a third sleeps across a bench, a blanket drawn tightly around him. Nothing moves in the station. The nights’ shunting is done, the sidings are silent, and there are no platform announcements. A V63 looms out of the misty darkness and clatters through the station with a train piled high with turnips. I watch as one tumbles down a heap and falls off the wagon, bouncing along the platform like something from The Dambusters, skimming the shoes of one of the drinkers and hitting the locked platform booth's door with an almighty crash. The man on the bench snores his way through this minor drama. My train arrives shortly before five, pushed into the platform by a diesel shunter while a V43 electric waits to back onto the lead carriage. It is cold and damp inside, the carriages having spent the last three days in the sidings with the doors and some of the windows open; it is fifteen minutes before my compartment seems less cold than the brown fields and grey dawn outside the window.
There is a ten minute stop at Szolnok and I stand on the platform with a cigarette and watch an M41 diesel back onto a commuter train for an unpronounceable town lost on the Great Plain. The driver revs the engine to full power to push the buffers hard together, sending a huge cloud of grey-brown exhaust rolling down the platform funnelled beneath the canopy, while the shunter climbs down between the locomotive and train to couple them up. When he emerges he is holding a posey of weeds he has picked from the track and offers them to the driver at his open cab window, eyelids fluttering, legs chastely crossed at the knees. There’s a ripple of laughter from the waiting passengers and the flushed driver retreats to hide his embarrassment in the darkened engine room of the M41.
I arrive at Szeged a few minutes past midday and walk into town to find the TourInform office. There is no map outside the station, but my research has provided general directions and fifteen minutes later I am standing outside the office: it is closed. I spend the next hour walking round the old town and a good deal of the newer town but can find nowhere to stay for less than two days budget. A cold wind whips of the Great Hungarian Plain, rattling street signs and chasing litter along the gutters. There is nothing to see in town, nothing that would make it an attractive place to explore, and there is a frightening number of impoverished and homeless beggars, many of which look as if they have crossed the nearby Romanian border. It is the last place in Hungary, literally and metaphorically, that I would care to spend time in, the very end of South-Central Europe. I walk back to the station and buy a ticket for the Bucaresti-Budapest EuroCity.
The train is full to capacity even this early in its journey; there are no seats, so I stand in the corridor. More and more people pile onto the train at every stop, until the corridors, connecting gangways – even the toilets – are shoulder to shoulder and crammed with luggage. Somehow the conductor still manages to squeeze through and frowns as he inspects my ticket. He slashes two diagonal lines across it, turns it over and writes 3950 Forints on the back, holding his hand out for the money. The ticket clerk in Szeged has booked me onto a later InterCity departure, even though I specified EC and have been charged the supplement. I try to explain this to the conductor, but he is insistent and produces his timetable, pointing out the difference between my ticket and the train number in his book. I tell him I have no money, producing a few travellers cheques to back up my deceit, but he ignores this plea and handwrites a new ticket. I refuse to take the ticket and adopt a tactic I have seen people just like this Hungarian ticket inspector use many times: I shrug, shake my head, and look out of the window – it is not my problem; it is not possible.
After three hours standing in the corridor I arrive at Keleti Palyaudvar. Through the carriage window I see the ticket inspector already on the platform, talking to two mean looking policemen, pointing to his book and scanning the mass of faces pouring off the train. I walk two coaches forward and find a door directly opposite the side entrance to Baross Ter, walk quickly out of the station, turn right, follow its length then turn right again back into the station and join the crowd of people descending the Metro stairs. I expect to hear a shout or feel a restraining hand on my arm, but there is nothing, my escape a success. I catch M2 to Deak Ter and change for M3 to Nagyvarad Ter; I walk to the pension I have used previously and they give me a room at a discounted rate – not through any loyalty, but to fill one of the 27 vacancies they have. I eat in the Etterem which has now moved inside from the summer terrace and contemplate the unsettling effect 10 hours on a train has on the digestive system; and that I am nearing the end of my journey on the railways of central Europe.

Through An Open Door

2006-10-22T02:00:00.000-07:00

It is a dull and wet Saturday in Debrecen; from my hotel window I watch the low, grey rainclouds skim the chimney tops of the power station behind the Palyvaudvar. By lunchtime almost everything in the city will be closed or closing, the streets empty, the shops shuttered. I walk into town and spend the morning in the internet cafe, until that too closes. I catch one of the few afternoon trams back to my hotel and sit in the sagging armchair and read. I walk over to the station mid-afternoon and buy a drink in the Bufe. There is something deeply melancholy about a grey weekend in Central Europe; its as if the town and it's people have just given up and left Debrecen to the rain and the falling autumn leaves. There are no trains for me to catch today; the station is still busy, though. People come in from the countryside to the town's markets on a Saturday morning - their once weekly shopping trip - and carry their loads back to the station for the train home. The trains are infrequent, and people settle in to wait for hours for the only departure to their village or halt. I sit in a corner of the Bufe where I can look through the open door into the booking hall. To my left are the windows over the platform and I watch as an M62 stops to change drivers in the station. It has been rebuilt - the staggered cab doors moved, air-conditioning radiators fitted, it's engine silenced and it's bodywork painted - and it seems reduced by this: the Russian bear tamed, it's appearance and behavior altered, domesticated, made more acceptable.
Through the Bufe's open door I watch as three women spread out a blanket and sit along one wall of the booking hall; the faces beneath their headscarves are dark and deeply lined - they are, I think, Romanians from the countryside - and they sit upright with legs straight out as they lay out a meal of black bread and dark, fatty sausage. They build a protective wall around their camp of bulging woven nylon sacks - much like the blue and white laundry sacks you would see in Britain - and endure the stares of passers-by with blank features. An old man with a greasy homburg and dirt-encrusted fingernails sits at my table, his overcoat reeking of stale food, and drinks a glass of Borok; through the Bufe door I see his wife silently watching him, waiting outside for him to finish his drink, surrounded by bags of shopping. He does not hurry, and she makes no complaint.
The Bufe door is always open. Now a younger man walks in and joins the queue at the counter. His jeans are too long and he has turned them up on the outside; the hems wobble just below his knees as he throws his head back and downs a glass of vodka in one swallow and leaves. He has a thin multi-coloured shell top over a faded lumber-shirt, and his brown plastic shoes are split at the heels. There is an air of despair around the people in the Bufe; when I look into the eyes of a man who hovers at the counter drinking shot after shot of some clear spirit, I am reminded of Don McCullin's photograph of the Marine at Hue. If I could read his thoughts, would they be about a new lover, a promotion, an unexpected windfall, or would the only thing going through his mind be what is the point? Another man stands just outside the Bufe door and counts out his loose change, glancing from the pricelist to his small handful of Forint coins; his cheap holdall is crammed with cabbages, bread, and bags of pale ill-shaped pasta, the thin metal clasps at the handles pulling apart under the strain, the zipper toothless and gaping. He affords a small glass of Borok diluted with tonic water; the plastic lenses of his thick glasses are yellowed and scratched, the sunset-red eyes behind them magnified horrifically. For these people the Bufe is some respite, and the train a lifeline. All those seemingly pointless, perfunctory stops on the way to Putnock or between Kosice and Debrecen are for people like these. An old Wartburg or tiny Polski Fiat 126 is an aspiration these people cannot afford to have, and the local train to town is the only means escape from the village or housing scheme, even if only for a few hours. In Britain, the rail traveling public are those who can afford the price privatisation has levied; in Central Europe it is the people that capitalism has left behind who travel by train.
As I walk through the Bufe's open door I see a little boy surrounded by cotton pillowcases stuffed with empty Coca-Cola cans and discarded plastic mineral water bottles, collected from the litter-bins of Debrecen to be sold for recycling; he chews distractedly at a crust of stale bread while he guards the bags: his parents are getting drunk at the booth outside the station.
For a moment, I think of turning and closing the Bufe's door behind me; I feel sympathy for these lost people, and realise that to close the door on them would be to close my mind to what I see around me.
I walk to the Non-Stop and buy six bottles of Borsodi to take back to my room. It is still raining and the pavements are slick and washed with reflected streetlight, empty, uninviting. I walk straight past the Etterem, go upstairs and draw the curtains, and set about drinking myself to sleep.

No More Heroes

2006-10-21T02:34:00.000-07:00

My new room is not quite the bargain it first seemed; my window overlooks a busy road junction outside the Palyvaudvar, and the traffic noise is staggering. I eat in the hotel's Ettrem. The waitress cum barmaid is rude and resents my distracting her from her crossword puzzle, and my order is met with a firm it is not possible. I convince her that I will not leave until she takes my order and I have eaten exactly what I have chosen; she admits defeat with a desolutory "ok" and I eat an inexpensive and acceptable Paprika stew with rice. The ashtray she provides is a dirty saucer, there is a group of jobbing Romanian builders conducting a small riot in the corner, and the jukebox is playing a Bryan Adams song with his vocals removed and replaced with a wailing Hungarian woman. However, it is warm.
In the morning I order an espresso from the surly waitress, which sets her face as hard as concrete. I dare not risk provoking her further with a request for food, and keep this in reserve in case I need to eat here tonight. I walk over to the station and buy another coffee at the Hot-Dogey-Burgery booth on the platform and survey the fallout from last night's shunting: a box car with broken buffers leans in the ballast at the end of a rake of container wagons - it must have hit them at some speed to derail itself. I buy a ticket for Fuzesabony - for no other reason than it's curious and entertaining name - and take a seat in the lead coach behind the M41 diesel. As I get on, I notice the Ganz-Budapest builder's plate behind it's cab door; it was built in 1977, it's engine being bolted together and it's bodywork welded as I was riding around on what was then British Rail. I used to spend a lot of Saturdays at Peterborough station - who would think of doing such a thing now? - watching Deltic diesels on the East Coast Mainline. Light, fast, and powerful, their name derived from the delta shape of their engines, which had originally been developed to power Second World War torpedo boats. The triangular, two-stroke engines had a unique sound - part Spitfire, part cow mooing in labour. They disappeared from BR in the early 1980s, along with a dozen other types of diesel, some to be preserved, most to be scrapped, all of them missed. The nicknames around these diesels reflected the times: Rats, Skinheads, Growlers, Slim Jims, all tearing up the tracks to the sound of The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Jam. The Deltics carried the names of racehorses - Alycidon, Nimbus - and regiments - The Black Watch, Royal Highland Fusilier, while the Peaks bore the names of mountains like Great Gable and Scaffel Pike. The class 45s carried on the military theme with names like 3rd Carabiner and Royal Ordnance Corps, while the class 40s took the names of Merchant Navy vessels; Aquitania was one of my personal favourites, and a preserved example was named Atlantic Conveyor after the ship was lost during the Falklands conflict. The Warship class diesels plied the rails with names like Benbow, Onslaught, Greyhound, and Dreadnought; all 72 of the Western class used their official nickname as a prefix - Western Lady, Western Patriot, Western Enterprise - and real tears were shed by their drivers when these engines were scrapped. The smaller engines remained anonymous and largely ignored until mass scrapping started in the run-up to privatisation, by which time it was too late. By the late 1980s most of the Rats and Peaks had gone, and all of the Warships and Westerns were consigned to history. Identical Intercity 125s took their places, and British Railways was never the same again, never as interesting and diverse.
As I sit on the platform at Fuzebody an M41 drifts through the station with two wagons of sawn timber; an M62 arrives from the fuelling point and couples onto a mixed freight that the M63 shunter has put together. Over the border, goggle-eyed 754 diesels and frowning 749s are everywhere, as are the smaller class 742s, and it is not unusual to see a Russian TEM2. None of them carry names, but that doesn't matter: they are real trains, characteristic and idiosyncratic.
I catch the late afternoon train back to Debrecen and drink a Kozel in the Bufe, listening to the crashes and clangs of another night's shunting over the jukebox playing Making Your Mind Up by Brotherhood Of Man - quite why this should be a selection in a station bar in Eastern Hungary is beyond reasonable logic, but I can't say it surprises me. The Hag Of The Etterem is hunched over her crossword when I poke my head round the door, but I really can't face her tonight and sneak back to my room. I wash and change and walk across the park to a little bistro called Kino; I sit at table in the corner with a plate of pasta and study the film posters and photographs that decorate the walls - John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando. Perhaps there really are no more heroes anymore.

On The Edge Of The Great Plain

2006-10-20T01:27:00.000-07:00

I take the OS7962 over the border to Hungary in the morning. Strangely, the international train consists of just two coaches. I trace the train's progress on my map and find that it's routed along a series of interconnected rural secondary lines. Every few miles it stops at small halts and stations surrounded by farmland; sometimes there are a couple of smallholdings nearby, but often there is nothing but fields as far as the eye can see. The stops are brief - a formality - and no one gets on or off as far as I can tell. At the border, the two carriages are joined to a waiting Hungarian train, and a flood of people get on. Three women with a teenage girl share my compartment. They have bags of textiles and produce bought cheaply in Slovakia which they compare with each other, smoothing creases and rubbing sweet scented leaves between their fingers. The girl plays idly with her mobile phone and chews and pops gum, bored and interested in the women's bargains; when the gum popping irritates me sufficiently, I stand in the corridor and smoke, watching the brown and grey fields rush by, the bright reds and oranges of the autumnal trees flashing by the lineside. At each station, even the ones we pass through, the station master is framed in his office door, standing to attention in his blue uniform and tall hat, a railway tradition. I change trains at Miskolc, and again at Nyiregyhaza. The sun is going down and I'm surprised by how cold it is; my Czech fleece is no defence as I huddle in a shelter on the platform. I find an empty compartment for the last leg of the journey, slide the door shut and turn the heater to full. The sky is as dark and cold as an ocean and threads of chimney smoke shiver in the air over the villages we pass; only the occasional glow of some distant town hints at any warmth outside the window. I have called ahead and booked a room in Debrecen for my late arrival. There is a portable television balanced on the chest of drawers and the forecast says it will be -2 tonight; the radiators are cold, but when I ask the receptionist she shakes her head and returns to her Ciao magazine. I find a shop and buy some bread and spicy ham, some Borsodi, and a can of herring fillets in mustard sauce; I eat this with some pickled paprika and feel warmer, if a little sour mouthed and acidic. At 11pm the radiators clunk and gurgle, and for fifteen minutes, I embrace them like long lost friends until the heating is cut off again.
In the morning I dress quickly against the chill. When I draw back the curtains, the sky is crystal clear and the rooftops are dusted with frost. The horizon disappears in a misty haze that reminds me of a January morning in England. The only person I can find downstairs is the cleaning woman, who is quite eccentric. She talks at me incessantly despite my lack of understanding. She gibbers and giggles, wrings her hands and nods her head, and finally concludes: Sindane? Fruhstuck? She makes me the worst espresso I have ever tasted - where is the cook, the receptionist, anybody? - and shakes her head and wags a forbidding finger when I ask for a second cup. Clearly the coffee is as strictly rationed as the meager heating, and I am not going to try negotiating with a deranged cleaner at this hour of the morning.
I am ill-prepared for the change in weather, and set about rectifying this with a visit to Kaiser's supermarket. I have my worthless Czech fleece over my British polo shirt and a highly unfashionable zip-up Slovakian sweatshirt; to this I add a Hungarian waterproof jacket that costs me seven pounds and is branded Cherokee - sets off the headress and tomahawk beautifully, if I may be so bold, Sir. I am now warmer and truly Pan-European in my dress - even if the whole lot has been made cheaply in Bangladesh or Vietnam.
I walk to Debrecen Palyvaudvar and drink a Borsodi in the Bufe that looks out over the platforms and sidings. A Russian built M62 brings in a long freight train from the East and leaves it in one of the holding tracks; the veteran diesel is in a deplorable condition and a thick fog of exhaust drifts through the station as it heads off. It is probably 40 years old and still running on it's original engine if the noise and smoke are anything to go by; never the most economical or reliable of machines, it is a wonder it has survived this long. An M43 shunting engine flies around the sidings, splitting and joining the trains - a couple of tankers from that one, three or four coal wagons from this one, all backed onto the string of timber wagons over there. The man who hooks and unhooks the couplings hangs precariously from the engine's front steps, leaping off before it comes to a stop and diving between the moving wagons, an acrobat. Sometimes the engine driver simply nudges a wagon and lets it roll down the siding alone, where the acrobat is waiting with a wedge to throw under the leading wheels, a primitive brake. I watch as a tanker of corrosive liquid rolls slowly towards him and hits the rail-wedge; it pushes the brake a good 30 feet, the front wheels locked, shuddering and screaming along the rails. I can feel the floor of the Bufe shaking under my feet. It comes to a stop in a cloud of dust, and when the wedge is pulled away, limps slowly forward again, the wheels worn flat in the skid and seriously damaged; it bounces back a few feet on it's buffer springs then finally meets and is joined with the waiting train. It is a risky business and relies on split second timing and the skill of the engine driver. When it gets dark I stand on the platform and watch as a wagon of steel coil rolls silently out of the darkness, as slowly and stealthily as a ship with doused lights. Somewhere beyond the reach of the station's lights I hear a metallic scream followed by a crash as the wagon touches down. I do not envy the shunter's nightshift.
As I walk back, I go into the Debrecen Hotel for a drink; I enquire about rates and find that a warm room with as much coffee as I can drink is available for two-thirds of the price I am paying to freeze. I walk back to the room and pack my bag. I leave the key on the deserted reception desk, unlock the front door and let myself out. Nobody sees me leave or asks whether I would care to settle the bill before I walk away.

Strange Town

2006-10-15T02:39:00.000-07:00

In the morning I feel quite a bit better and walk to the confusingly named Cafe Cafe for an espresso. I go to the Agro supermarket on the corner and buy some Titan washing powder, bread, cheese, and orange juice. I ask for a bag; it has the face of a large ginger cat printed on it. As I walk back to the Panzion, people look at my carrier bag and laugh; an old woman crosses the street to avoid me; a Skoda 120 with hand painted white wheels and a scorpion sticker in the blacked-out back window slows as it passes and I try to ignore the Meow from the open passenger window. I wash out and soak some socks and pants in the sink - I use the carrier bag in place of the missing plug, the only reason I brought that embarrassment on myself.
I walk to the Stanice and catch the train to Roznava; it is a regional express with five coaches behind a 754 diesel. The engine cuts out every time power is reduced, and there is a loud whine from one of the axles. It makes hard work of the climb into the mountains, and has developed a rattle from the engine compartment by the time I get off at Roznava: I doubt it will make it to Zvolem, another 100 kilometers of steep climbing to the West.
The town was little more than a village in the middle of a wide mountain plain until socialism began to exploit the surrounding ore deposits; from the early 1960s it developed quickly into an industrial new town of tower blocks and steelworks, and there is hardly anything other than a few cottages that are older than these. The sides of the surrounding hills have been gouged and chewed away by mineral extraction, enormous orange-brown scars against the densely wooded sides. The station is far too big for the modest size of the community it serves, and is as silent and echoing as an empty church; the architecture is slab-sided and purely utilitarian, unattractive and underused. There is nobody around. The Bufe looks as though it locked up for the last time decades ago; there is no shop, no booth, and absolutely nobody here but me. It has an eerie quality, and I feel like a trespasser in this ghost town's desolate station. Across the vacant carpark I can see the smokestacks of a factory in the distance; there is no traffic on the wide and crumbling road that leads to it. The tower blocks of the town rise further down the same road, just the odd cottage in the lonely expanse of plain between the two, and a stillness hangs over the whole scene. There is the faint sound of traffic on the main road which seems to bypass the town completely, but other than that, only birdcalls and the occasional ring of an unanswered phone somewhere in the station. I hear the blast of airhorns and watch from the platform as two 749 diesels head through the station with a long train of logs, another pair on the rear rumbling and smoking as they help push the train up the long gradients. A minute later a solitary 751 pulls into the platform with a dozen ore wagons; a wheeltapper emerges from somewhere in the station and uncouples the locomotive, which sets off back in the same direction. Twenty minutes later it returns with another string of wagons. The wheeltapper hooks the whole ensemble together, and the 751 continues it's journey West. Twin sets of engines for the heaviest trains, along with two helpers, and if you run out of engines, split the train at the bottom of the hill and make two trips with one engine. I spend a long time waiting for a train back to Kosice, and when it arrives it is a single railcar: it is packed and more and more people squeeze in at every stop. I spend an hour wedged sideways into a narrow seat, unable to move but grateful I am not standing in the crush of the gangway.
At Kosice I drink a Kava at one of the booths strung along the crumbling walkway between the station and the Autobusovy Stanice. The booth has a small fenced off area to the side which offers some protection from unwanted attention, and a view of the elevated railway lines; there is a patch of litter strewn wasteland behind it, ending in the damp-stained side wall of the station itself. I watch as the serving woman emerges from the booth, a cigarette dangling form her mouth, and throws a vat of old cooking oil over the fence into the patch of scrubby ground. A few minutes after she goes back in, I hear rustling in the weeds and turn to see half a dozen rats sniffing and lapping at the discarded fat; as I watch, one sits upright and nibbles daintily on the brown husk of an overfried chip that is held in it's front paws.
I walk back into town and drink a Zlanty Bazant at a bar near the tram stop on Sturova. There is an old television fixed to the wall over the counter; everytime a tram passes, the picture flickers and rolls before settling back down to some awful, woodenly acted soap-opera. I frame up the tower block across the street in the bar's window: it is leaning 1 or 2 degrees to the left - will it be pulled down before it can fall down? I walk back to my room and make dinner of my provisions. I drain the sink and notice that the printing from the carrier bag has transposed onto a pair of white pants - the blurred but discernible nose and whiskers of the ginger tom refuse any attempt to rub them away. I finish the last of the brandy and lemon and go to bed. With any luck, I will be at the station for that train to Debrecen in the morning.

The Kosican And The Revenge Of The Dragon

2006-10-12T03:10:00.000-07:00

As soon as I wake I have a fit of sneezing, and my throat feels dry and itchy. I seem to have lost a good deal of my hearing, too. Perhaps the Chinese waiter's infectious mucus wasn't confined to his shirtsleeve alone. I go to the ornate restaurace for breakfast. There are four waitresses and two other guests all of whom throw glances at each other and quickly look away again; an uncomfortable silence hangs over the room. I feel a sense of guilt as I serve myself at the buffet table, as if the staff are monitoring every crumb I consume. Not that I have much of an appetite; I'm feeling lightheaded and constantly blow my nose as discreetly as possible on my serviette. There are two receptionists to speed the process of checking out three guests. In the car park, an old woman lives in a caravan as grey and faded as her old clothes. Her job is to move cones about to free and block parking spaces, and at night the flicker of a television set plays on the frayed curtains in the window of her home. Outside the caravan door she has optimistically placed a bucket of red roses to sell to romantic couples- let me take you to the steelworks of Ostrava, darling. I leave the hotel and go to the station. I buy a ticket for the EuroCity Kosican which will take me through the Tatra mountains into Slovakia, where I plan to change and make Debrecen late in the day. The train is almost empty and I walk it's length looking for the smoking car. There isn't one; it is a five hour trip. I make myself comfortable in the last coach and watch the industrial skyline of Ostrava recede. At Bohumin I am joined in the coach by two men. They have brought beer, wine, bread, cheese, and sausage for the journey and lay their provisions out on the table between them. One of them takes an 8 inch hunting knife from his belt and dices the sausage as the other opens the beer and wine. The meal finished, they take turns in visiting the toilet and return smelling strongly of nicotine; I duly take my turn and return their knowing nods. There is no passport check at the Cacda border crossing - no guards, militia, nothing. As the train leaves, there is the usual announcement over the tannoy detailing the next stop; then another voice takes over and I pick out the words Zakaz, Toalette, and Korouni - no smoking in the toilet. The three of us look sheepishly at each other, and stare fixedly out of the windows whenever the conductor walks by. The journey is as spectacular as any I have made. First forested hills, then deep gorges with crystal clear streams as the train climbs; then the lower wooded mountains, and in the distance, the steep craggy peaks of the High Tatras. These rise dramatically from the plains of a high plateau the train reaches at Liptovsky Mikulas. There is a pure quality to the light, the sky a thin palest blue; it reminds me of pictures I have seen of Patagonia. Towns are scattered around the base of the mountains, and even the tower blocks and factories seem cleansed by nature, white concrete and glittering glass, the chimney smoke lost in the vast surroundings. The trains airconditioning is making me shiver, and I use the last of the paper handtowels from the toilet to stem my streaming nose. We stop at Poprad-Tatry, with it's thermal pools and baths steaming gently in the mountain air, then descend from the plain, back through the foothills and forests to Kosice.
By the time I get off The Kosican I am running a temperature; my legs are shaky, I cannot stop the fits of sneezing, and my right ear is ringing. I cannot imagine another five hours traveling, not today, not in this condition. I start to walk into town to find a room, but turn back halfway across Mestsky Park and take a taxi - my bag is three times it's normal weight and I am drenched with sweat. The taxi takes me to Panzion Nad Bankou - the driver knows the owners - and I climb the stairs to my room and flop onto the bed. The room is small and a television is blaring somewhere; with my partial hearing and fever it sounds like the disturbing, echoing sountrack to a nasty horror film. I wrap myself in the duvet and fall into a horribly nightmare laden sleep, populated by knife wielding Chinese waiters and sneezing dragons. When I wake my alarm clock tells me it is 7 o'clock. I pull back the curtains and am surprised to see early morning sunshine: I have slept of 12 hours solid.

Prosim Pozor

2006-10-11T01:09:00.000-07:00

In the morning I buy a ticket to Frydlant Nad Ostravici and stand near the booth at the station with an espresso. I light a cigarette and an untidy young woman with Asiatic features wanders over, proffering a handful of worthless coins and pointing at the pack. I refuse the money; she makes some murmuring sounds, and smiling, lifts her top to expose her skinny, malnourished chest - offering herself. Her teeth are brown against her white speckled gums. The train is waiting at Nastupiste IV behind a 754 diesel, with a second attached to the rear. As I look out of the window, another is attached to the back of this - somewhere in the region of 5500 Horsepower for the four coach local, more than a British InterCity 125. The journey isn't particularly fast, though: the two at the back give a half-hearted push as we leave the station, just to get things moving, and leave the train at Frydek-Mistek - just hitching a lift. Frydant lies on the Ostravici river and is the last outpost of Ostrava's sprawl before the Roravskoslezke Beskydy mountains begin. The peaks of Smrk and Kuchyne rise behind the town, green tapering to grey in the autumn sunshine; within a month the summer walking resort will become basecamp for snowboarders and skiers, the sharp edge to the wind that blows through the river valley already hinting at the snow to come. I zip my fleece and stuff my hands deep into the pockets, but to little effect: I bought it in a market in Plzen for a few pounds and it is of the poorest quality. Thin, shapeless, and ill-fitting, it is almost useless except as a kind of camoflauge, something a local could afford to wear, not something a Western European would entertain. I find a cafe in town and sit in the sun, sheltered from the wind. I order a coffee, take out my notebook and try to capture the essence and atmosphere of train travel in Central Europe:

The Buffe at the Nadrazi with it's ebb and flow people, dark corners, and shared tables: a brief encounter if you could only manage more than an awkward drinks order, let alone flirt. The station booth with a jukebox blasting out Hungarian rock ballads on a Saturday night, and a grey concrete shelter on a weed-infested platform on a Monday morning. Slow trains, fast trains, no trains for hours. Five kilometers, five countries, or start walking. Local, regional, Intercity, EuroCity, NachtZuge, SchnellZuge; cross country, cross border, across town. Locomotive nicknames: an M41 is a Rattler, an M62 Sergei; there are Rabbits and Pershings, Nohabs and Gagarins, and even a Ludmilla. Where do these names come from and what do they mean? Wheel-tappers and shunters at every stop, the clang and clunk of hammers echoing around the station. The Hungarian railway uniform with it's circular marching band hat, the dowdy Polish ticket inspector with a peaked peasant's cap. Seedy toilet attendants, hatchet faced Slovakian ticket clerks, the friendly old conductor on the local railbus to Tapolca, the tension as your passport is checked for the third time by a suspicious border guard. Windows that open, doors that don't. The smell of sewage mixed with cheap perfume and strong tobacco; diesel exhaust and the tang of brake-dust. Fried food, sweat, alcohol, and the bitter smell of Sunflower fields; creosote and engine oil, the ozone smell of an electric locomotive breaking contact with the overhead wires. The Informace office that tells you it is not possible when you know it is. The hooker you give a light - we go to hotel now? The station attendant who walks you all the way to the correct train, opens the door, and wishes you a nice ride. The Czech station annoucement preceeded by a few notes that sound like the prelude to a mysterious discovery in a corny film; the ominous DONG of a trains arrival. The supermarket checkout call of Hungary, the elaborate fanfare of Slovakia. The incredibly scenic climb into the Tatra mountains on a crystal clear morning, the stomach-dropping arrival in a Polish industrial town late in the evening. And, of course, the trains. How could anyone not find all this compelling and absorbing?

I take a tram into town from the Nadrazi and drink a Radegast at a little bar on the edge of the square. I notice a dim sign in the first-floor window of a building across the square: Asienche Kuchey. My table is watched over by a huge, moulded plastic Golden Dragon; the entire ceiling is decorated with artificial foliage. The waiter is rake-thin and stooped despite his early age. Halfway through taking my order he sneezes and without apology wipes his nose on his shirtsleeve, from cuff to elbow. I hear his dry cough from the kitchen as he barks some harsh words at the chef. The food is good and inexpensive, but I feel as if I'm having a picnic on the set of some bad martial arts film in the middle of production. I lament not finding this goldmine earlier in my stay, if only for it's entertainment value. I walk to my hotel and finish the evening with a Gambrinus in the grand surroundings of it's Art Deco bar, the only and most reliable customer.

Kolonie Viktovice

2006-10-09T01:32:00.000-07:00

I validate my ticket on tram 1 to Dublina and do a long loop through the city, changing lines three times. There are distinct areas, almost separate communities; Ostrava Slezska, Moravska Ostrava, Svinov, Marianske-Hory. Each is supported by the coalmines, steel works, and foundries that are an integral part of the city; industry, commerce, and housing overlap, intertwine, and adjoin. I pass by housing estates dwarfed by towering chimneys and huge cranes, pleasant little bungalows wedged between steel pressing plants and coal loading docks; everywhere, the spindly winding towers of collieries rise in the most unlikely settings, factories appear unexpectedly in the middle of quiet suburbs. Railway lines penetrate every part of the city, bringing in ore and coiled steel, taking out coal and iron ingots; spurs, forks, branches, criss-crossing and snaking into every corner. The tram stops at a crossing on an ordinary high street for a rake of loaded coal wagons to be pushed over the road by an old shunting engine. Every few-hundred meters another line bisects the road, and we slow again in anticipation of a warning blast from a trains airhorns. I change trams at Belsky Les. The stop is in the centre of a large roundabout surrounded by concentric circles of massive tower blocks, built to house the workers of the steel works glimpsed between them. It is a barren and unattractive place to spend a few minutes, let alone a lifetime. On the tram to Hulvaky a kid of no more than fifteen sits in front of me; he takes a bottle of Malibu from his bag and drinks, then a few minutes later, a bottle of sherry. I watch him get off and walk unsteadily towards a dingy block of flats with rotten window frames. I get off at Ostrava Kuncice and consult my map: I can walk a kilometer along Vratimovska to the bridge at Rudna, then back on Frydecka to the railway station for a train back; or I can walk a short distance along Sypky and across the tracks. The railway is as wide as a motorway - six mainlines splitting in three directions to the North, three freight branches joining where I stand. I cross the first line and hear the points behind me change. Suddenly an empty freight train is rattling past behind me with a furious blast of it's horn; then a passenger train rounds the curve to the North. I look to my left and see the headlight of another train about to depart the station. There is no way to tell which of the five lines infront of me either will take. I do the only thing possible: I stand as close to the rushing freight train as I dare and hope nothing takes the next track. Both trains pass on the far lines, and I pick my way across as fast as possible. I am shaking slightly as I reach safety, and walk nervously along the edge of the line to the station.
Kuncice Nadrazi is a large station, and almost completely derelict. It looks almost industrial in it's construction: corrugated iron roofing, redbrick and concrete, a footbridge made of latticed steel framework with a wooden floor, parts of some redundant industrial plant. I take a train to Hlavna Nadrazi, the city's main station, built in the crook of two diverging lines. I notice a plaque on the wall outside with a Soviet star and an inscription: I can only read "1939-1944" and assume its a memorial to liberation, hidden in the most obscure place. I take the tram back to town and try to find something to eat. I walk past strip clubs and casinos, past a shop with a glinting array of machettes, and another selling only taxidermy - a dusty badger staring sightlessly at a small lumpy bear in the window. The streetlights are out in the centre and it reminds me of walking through an African city at night, the glow from the bar's windows casting deep shadows, the warm dusty light fading to deepest blue. It has that edge of fear and excitement; the slash of headlights and wash of receding red then back in the shadows. There are no Restaurace open. The town is quiet, almost empty. I notice movement and watch a big rat scuttle along the gutter ahead of me; it hears me and squeezes it's thick body through the grate of a drain and is gone. I find a street lined with bars; on the pavement outside traders have set up foodstalls and are cooking over charcoal embers. I point to a piece of chicken and eat it with salad and bread standing up next to the stall, then drink an Ostravar in one of the bars before going back to the hotel.
As I walk, I can't help wondering exactly what I have just eaten: the stalls looked makeshift and possibly unlicensed, there was little light, and the "chicken" looked about the right size.

To Moravia

2006-10-06T02:01:00.000-07:00

I leave Krakow on InterCity 240 and find myself in Katowice again. This time, I have researched the connections myself and check the departues board for EuroCity 106; there are no departues after 10.17 according to the display, so I check the printed timetable on the wall. Platform 1 at 10.32, daily. There is a crowd of people on the platform, huddled round their luggage and clutching International tickets. The overhead display remains blank as the clock ticks round to11.05, then suddenly flutters over with a sound like cards being shuffled to: EC106 Praha. The train is made up of four domestic Polish coaches, which I find suspicious. I confirm the destination with the platfrom staff and get on. A few minutes pass, then the conductor walks down the train ordering everyone off. The platform display shuffles back to blank and theres an announcement; two platforms away I see an EC train pulling in and can just make out the display showing Praha. There is a stampede for the subway - pushing, shoving, toes stepped on, shins cracked with suitcases - as the mass of people race for platform 3, where impatient staff are waiting to harry them onto the train, the conductor already standing in a doorway with his whistle to his lips. As the train starts to move, the last of the stragglers make the platform and I watch a man in a suit drop his case and throw his hands up in frustration. The train stops at a station just before the Czech border and I hear the hiss of the airbrakes discharging; a Russian TEM2 diesel couples onto the back of the train where I sit and drags it out of the station. Memories of the Italian man sitting in the detached restaurant car, unaware that his luggage was continuing it's journey alone on the shores of Lake Balaton. I pull the window down and with relief see the entire train behind me, the electric locomotive left in the station. We attach to the back of another EC and leave behind a lurid orange EP05 electric, built by Skoda, and identical to the Czech 242s - which thankfully wear more conservative colours. The militia board the train at Petrovice while passports are checked, automatic rifles slung over their shoulders and a pair of Alsatians straining at their leashes. They ignore me, and as we pull off, I see them sitting lazily on a bench smoking cigarettes beneath a sign which reads Zakaz Korouni.
The train travels a lot faster in the Czech Republic, the track smooth and well maintained. I found Polish railways disappointing - the monotonous decay and neglect, the bland trains and miles of decrepit track sapping my pleasure and enthusiasm. There is variety on the Czech railways, and they have a vitality about them - a value that Polish politics and economics no longer recognise.
I arrive at Ostrava and like the place on sight alone. The station is big and busy; the winding towers of a coalmine rise above the town centre; the main street has a Victorian English feel about it - ornates frontages facing each other across the narrow tramlined road. There are four Informace offices in town, including one at the Hlavna Nadrazi where I book a room a few minutes walk away. I buy a 24 hour tram ticket and take a map.
At the hotel I ask for a safe-deposit box. It takes 10 minutes for the receptionist to prepare the paperwork and I am obliged to sign three seperate documents. I am told in no uncertain terms that if I lose my copies I will be unable to access the safe. I ask if it is possible to lock it in the safe too, which stumps the receptionist. I take a tram down Nadrazi into town and eventually find an internet cafe. Its on the second floor of a tower block and looks like an insurance office thats been left in a hurry; plain office desks and hardwearing grey carpet, the network cables snaking across the floor, ready to trip the unwary. In the corner there is a table with a jar of instant coffee and a kettle, bottles of warm Coca-Cola, a basket of browning bananas and a few brusied apples - the cafe.
I wander through town and follow my map to a bar next to the railway. There is an endless procession of trains - passenger and freight - on this line; its a North-South route through the middle of town between the mainlines on the outskirts, and has never been electrified. Of course theres the Goggle-eyed diesels and Soviet 742s, but in this part of the country theres another sort, too. The class 749 is another distinctive and characteristic piece of Czech engineering; it has a peaked nose, and the slanted overhang of the cab roof gives it a frowning appearance - it could be cast as the villain in Thomas The Tank Engine, or perhaps a Slovakian ticket-office clerk. It starts to rain - low grey cloud hanging over the city - and I watch a pair of 749s rumble past with a long freight train; one engine is red and yellow, the second maroon and grey, soot and oil streaked down it's sides. They have an almost herioc appearance as they battle through the elements, faces set in frowning determination, a thick cloud of diesel fumes hanging in the damp air behind them. The bar's windows rattle in their frames. I stay in the bar for a long time until the rain slows, then catch a tram back to station. I drink an Ostravar beer at the booth outside; I am the only customer, the earlier rain having driven the drunks away sleep it off somewhere, anywhere. I eat something that resembles Chop Suey at the Asiante Kuchey bistro near the tram station. I try a small spoonful of the chilli sauce - it is increbibly hot and seems to dissolve my tastebuds on contact. I alternate between a fork-full of searing food and a sip of Ostravar, a sheen of sweat on my brow and burning coals in my stomach.
I sleep fitfully, the hot chilli sauce providing an unwanted source of central heating, the late night trams rattling by on the edge of my dreams.

Rendezvous In Krakow

2006-10-02T06:45:00.000-07:00

I have a busy morning. I change some money at a Kantor - a cheque at a punitive rate 10% below cash - then walk around town looking at hotels. My sister and her partner are flying over to meet me at the weekend and need a room. One 3 star, middle-of-the-road place quotes me 170 pounds a night. I point out that this is more than a 5 star hotel in London ( I don't know if this is true, but it can't be far off ), so they offer me a suite at 230 Pounds instead. At the fourth hotel, I manage to book a room just inside the town wall; when I walk by later in the day I find the road is being dug up with pneumatic drills and diggers - the noise is horrendous.
I try to buy a map of the tram system, but the Information office don't have any; there are so many roadworks that the lines keep being dug up or closed, so they don't bother publishing a map. I walk everywhere instead: through the cobbled streets, the parks with their misty autumnal shades, past synagogues and run-down tenements. I walk through Kazimierz and cross the River Wilsna, pass beneath the railway lines, turn right, then left and left again, and stand infront of Oskar Schindler's factory. It is an unremarkable building next door to a bakery in a bland industrial estate. There isn't much to see: the gates and the offices are original, as is one of the workshops. The rest was added later - after wartime bomb damage - by which time Schindler and his workers were in Czechoslovakia. I climb the stairs to his office and flick through the visitors book. Someone from Bristol asks "why did it happen?", while Jim - from Brisbane - gives his endorsement: "GR8 M8".
I find a Vietnamese bistro hidden in a back alley in the old town and eat for a pittance, then sip a beer at a bar overlooking the square.
In the morning I take the airport shuttle from Krakow Glowny to meet my visitors. It is a modern diesel multiple unit, and the service is franchised out to a private operator who've made great efforts to market it. There are posters and glossy leaflets at the station which promise a fast, efficient service - your best connection to the airport. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite make it all the way to the airport: after a slow wander across fields and un-gated level crossings where we squeeze past cars that get too close to the line, the train stops at a halt. Here there is a bus waiting to take us the last half-mile to the terminal, and a scene of chaos as people heave and drag their luggage between the two.
Once Clodagh and Iain are checked into the hotel - the noise of the roadworks having been replaced by buskers as its a Saturday - we retrace my steps to Schindler's factory, then set out to find the remaining pieces of the ghetto walls. I ask the guide at the factory for directions and he points me towards the ringroad and tells me to walk for a kilometer. We decide to take a tram instead, and find that the station is actually in the former ghetto, no more than five minutes from the factory. We find one short section of wall overlooked by an old townhouse that would have been inside the ghetto, and wonder who could live in a place with such a dark past.
Iain has brought a guide book and finds a nice restaurant with good food and reasonable prices; I haven't room to carry a guide so usually take pot-luck, but can't deny their usefulness. We arrange to meet in the morning for a train to Oswiecim, a town overshadowed by the name it was given by occupying German forces - Auschwitz.
We have no problem buying tickets, and although slow, we arrive at the town's main station with the best part of a day at our disposal. We have decided to tour the camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau independently, and later agree that it was wise to do so: the organised tours are hurried and allow no time whatsoever for personal contemplation, skimming over a few details before moving to the next exhibit.
I am not going to write my impressions or observations of the two museums - there really is nothing I could say that is not deeply personal and private, not to mention inadequate.
Clodagh and Iain have brought me books, socks, and English conversation; each of these have assumed immeasurable value over the weeks I have been traveling, things to be savored and treasured. They return to England on Tuesday; I leave them at their hotel after breakfast and walk to the station, feeling a little sad, wondering when - and where - our next rendezvous will be.

One Day, Three Countries

2006-10-02T03:01:00.000-07:00

I leave Bratislava on EuroCity 174 on it's long trek from Budapest to Hamburg as directed by the information desk's timetable. Its crowded and I stand in the corridor for an hour before changing at Breclav. The Slovakians inspect my passport at the border - even though I am leaving - but the Czechs don't bother. My schedule should now put me on the connecting EC to Krakow. I find that it doesn't run on a Wednesday; the next departure is on Saturday. My Slovakian ticket is handwritten and includes a seat reservation charge for the non-existent train. Surely the woman at the ticket office knew there was no train today. This means the schedule is useless too: I will have to work out my own route. I consult my map and the departure board in the booking hall and settle on a train to Katowice, the nearest point to Krakow I can get to. It is leaving in three minutes, and if I miss it, I will be stuck in the Czech Republic until the next train late in the evening. I run through the underpass and climb onto the train seconds before the conductor blows his whistle. The train is almost empty and I have my own compartment in one of the Polish InterCity carriages. There is a brief stop at the Polish border for passport control and a swap of locomotive for a faded green EU07 electric with three oversized headlights that make it look like a toy, then the train sets off again, but at a much slower pace. I assume there is a signal check or a freight train ahead that we will overtake shortly in a passing loop, but I am wrong. I look out of the window at the tangle of tracks that seem to head off in every direction, sometimes disappearing into the undergrowth at the side of the line, unused for years, other times fanning out into a marshalling yard a mile long in the middle of the forest we travel through. Wooden sleepers, jointed rails, countless worn-out crossovers and points, weeds and grass growing between the rails. The train manages 50kmh at best - often less - shuddering and jarring over the junctions, squealing round bends, thumping over the worn out railway. We pass huge mines with skeletal gantries and conveyors dropping coal into lines of waiting wagons; every mile or so there is a passing loop with a long coal train awaiting our passage, and more marshalling yards with hundreds of loaded freight cars. The constant hammering of the coal trains, the old rails and sleepers, the overall neglect would derail the train should the driver try coax another 10kmh from the aging EU07. At one station the hulks of half a dozen steam engines fill a siding, bushes growing around them, a sapling poking from one rusted-through tender. Not scrapped, not preserved, just dumped - state sanctioned fly-tipping. At another station, the train waits for 15 minutes for some unknown reason: nobody gets on or off, nothing passes in either direction. I wait for an hour at Katowice - I might try to find a room but the city is unattractive and there is no information in or around the station. I would like a cold beer but there is no bar at the station and nowhere to buy my own. There is no booth, no alcohol, and most noticeably, no alcoholics around the station. There is no litter, the foodstalls are selling things you could actually eat, and no homeless people are sleeping on the benches outside the booking hall. I am shocked. The Polish have obviously realised that alcohol isn't the best traveling companion, and railway stations are not the best place for a night's sleep.
The train to Krakow is even slower. The carriages are a dull grey and pulled by a peeling ET21 electric, the compartments hot and stuffy and crowded. I have finished all of my water before the train is even halfway there. Before each station there is a ding-dong from the tannoy followed by a deafening announcement; every time this happens the old lady sitting opposite tries to answer her mobile phone, then gives an oh-silly-me laugh when she realises her mistake; when it does eventually ring - sounding nothing like ding-dong - she ignores it. We crawl into Krakow and I stagger onto the platform and head straight for the nearest foodstall. I drink almost a litre of water straight down and feel immediately better.
I book a room with the IT information office at the station and walk into town. At every turn there is something to see; churches, medieval architecture, courtyards and alleyways. I pass the American consulate under the watchful gaze of two guards armed with sub-machineguns, then cross the main square and find my hotel at the edge of the park that encircles the old town. As fascinating as the town is, it is also unpleasantly crowded and very commercialised. I no longer feel I'm in Central Europe; this could just as easily be Luxembourg or Koln. It is as wealthy, as expensive, and has the same designer boutiques and upmarket hotels as any city in the West. I go out to eat and find dozens of identical street cafes around the edge of the square. They all have broadly the same uninspiring menu of pizza, grills, chips, and ice cream. There are hordes of noisy people and the constant strobe of camera flashes, street entertainers working the square in front of the tables, and someone handing out flyers every few paces. I drink a beer at the least expensive place I can find but dismiss the menu. I go to a delicatessen opposite my hotel and eat perfectly well in my room in peace and quiet, a bottle of Okocim tonight instead of Kozel.