Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

I left the ashram and paid a last visit to Mr Bhardwaj. He gave me various practical warnings about travelling and advised me to visit Madras, where I would see the real India. He was off to have the carburettor in his car checked and to finish up some accounts at his office. He hoped I had enjoyed Simla and said it was a shame I hadn't seen any snow. He was formal, almost severe in his farewell, but, walking down to Cart Road, he said, 'I will see you in England or America.'

'That would be nice. I hope we do meet again.'

'We will,' he said, with such certainty I challenged it.

'How do you know?'

'I am about to be transferred from Simla. Maybe going to England, maybe to the States. That is what my horoscope says.'

THE RAJDHANI ('CAPITAL') EXPRESS TO BOMBAY

Mr Radia (his name was on a label beside the door, with mine) was sitting on his berth, intoning a Hindi song through his nose. He saw me and sang louder. I took out my electric shaver and began to run it over my face; he drowned the whine of the motor with his lugubrious song. When he sang his expression was rapturous, in repose his face was sour. He looked at my gin bottle with distaste and told me that spirits were not allowed on Indian Railways, and to my owlish reply ('But I thought Indians believed in spirits') he only grunted. Moments later he pleaded with me to put my pipe out. He said he had once vomited in a compartment where an Englishman was smoking.

'I'm not English,' I said.

He grunted. I saw he was trying to read the cover of the book I had opened. It was The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda, a parting gift from Mr Gupta of the Simla ashram.

'Are you interested in yoga?' asked Mr Radia.

'No,' I said, studying the book closely. I wet my finger and turned a page.

'I am,' said Mr Radia. 'Not the physical side, but the mental side. The benefit is there.'

'The physical side is the best part.'

'Not for me. For me it is all mental. I like to exercise my mind with debates and discussions of all kinds.'

I snapped the book shut and left the compartment.

It was late afternoon, but already the orange sun was submerged in the dust haze at the far end of a perfectly flat landscape. Delhi is a city of three million, but a half an hour out of the station and you are in a countryside devoid of people, a green plain as flat as those areas of Turkey and Iran, which were so sunlit and empty they made my eyes ache. I made my way through the classes to the dining car: first class air-conditioned had carpets and cold door handles and fogged windows, and there was a shower in the Indian-style toilet but none in the awful booth designated (and this was an intemperate libel) 'Western-style'; the first-class sleeper had bare cells and plastic-covered berths, the chair car had seats arranged like those on a plane, and people were already tucked in for the night, with blankets over their heads to shut out the air conditioning and the bright overhead lights; there were card games in the wooden second-class compartments, and in the third-class sleeper the bookshelf berths were fixed to the wall in tiers like those on trains in old Russian movies. People reclined on the boards with their bony knees sticking out, and others queued in puddles at the toilet doors.

The dining car, at the bottom rung of this Indian social ladder, was a narrow room of broken chairs and slopped-over tables. Meal coupons were being sold. At this point in my trip I had turned vegetarian. The meat I saw in India was foul in any case, so I never had the cravings sometimes referred to as 'meat-fits'. And though I had no side effects (impotence, geniality, gas) I sometimes had second thoughts when I saw, as I did that evening, a fat sweating Indian cook in filthy pyjamas preparing vegetables for the pot by gathering them with his forearms and then slapping and squeezing them into a pulpous mass.

After dark we made a stop at Mathura Junction. I got out, and in the glare of the station platform was the now familiar (but no less horrifying) sight of the railway villagers. They were not locals: they were very black, thin, with small sharp teeth and narrow noses and thick glossy hair; they wore sarongs and camped on the platform with that air of proprietary completeness that suggested permanence. There were rows of charpoys, and at the unsheltered end of the platform greasy tarpaulins had been pitched like tents. They were spitting, eating, pissing, and strolling with such self-possession that they might have been in a remote village in the deepest Madrasi jungle (I took them to be Tamils) instead of under the gaze of the travellers on the Bombay express. One woman snatched up a child and helped him comb for lice in her scalp, and another woman, who I thought was crouching in despair, I saw after a moment to be playing peekaboo with an infant half-hidden in an orange crate.

I had passed these encampments too many times without looking closely at them. I found a man on the train and asked him if he would translate my questions. He agreed, and we found a willing interviewee. This was a fox-faced man with glittering white eyes and buck teeth, wearing a white sarong. He stood with his arms folded and stroked his biceps with slender fingers.

'He says they come from Kerala.'

'But why have they come so far? Are they looking for work?'

'Not looking for work. This is a yatra.'

So it was another pilgrimage.

'Where are they headed?'

'Here, Mathura,' the translator said, pronouncing it Muttra. The fox-faced man spoke again. The translator continued, 'He is asking that do you know this is a holy place?'

'The railway station?'

'The town. Lord Krishna was born here.'

And not only that, I read later. It was in Mathura that the Divine Cowherd was exchanged with the infant daughter of Jasoda in order to save him from being murdered by the giant Kans, a parallel of the Herod story. The town is also the scene of Krishna's youth, where he sported with the milkmaids and played his flute. The legends were pretty; the place itself seemed a grim contradiction.

'How long will the yatris stay?'

'For some days.'

'Why are they at the station instead of in town?'

'There is water and light here, and it is safe. There are robbers in town and some people get chased by rogues.'

'What do they do for food?'

'He says they have brought some, and some they get in town. The people on the train also give some.' The translator added, 'He is asking where are you from?'

I told him. In a corner of the platform, I saw the silhouette of a pot-bellied child with spindly legs, naked and clinging to a waterspout. It was alone, holding on, waiting for nothing; the sight of this futile patience cracked my heart.

'He is asking for money.'

'I will give him one rupee if he says a prayer for me at the Mathura temple.'

This was translated. The man from Kerala laughed and said something.

'He would have said a prayer for you even if you had given him nothing.'

The whistle blew and I boarded. Mr Radia had stopped singing. He was sitting in the compartment reading Blitz. Blitz is a noisy, irresponsible weekly paper in English that retails scandals in a semiliterate but bouncy style of which the following, from the film page, is a fair example:

Star-producer-director of JUHU, one of four bhais, hotted up his birthday like nobody's business.

The guest control order was out of bounds there! There were booze and broads and brawls by the host himself! He was high and headstrong, lording it over all. Hurled abuse at some and then fisted a guest. That's the time few walked out. Some hospitality that! What does he think himself to be? GODFATHER?…

Mr Radia continued to read, scowling with appreciation. Then our dinner trays were brought, and I noticed his was non-vegetarian. His hamburger came apart under his knife and he poked at it disgustedly. But he ate it. 'The first time I took meat I was violently sick,' he said. 'But that happens when you do anything for the first time, isn't it?'