Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

With this bewildering epigraph he told me about his work. He had worked for Shell for twenty years, but discovered he loathed the English so much that he finally quit. His sense of grievance was strong and his memory for the humiliations he had been subjected to amounted to total recall. The English were domineering and exclusive, he said, but he was quick to add, 'Mind you, we Indians can be the same. But the English had their chance If only,' he said, and prodded his hamburger, 'if only the English had become Indians.'

'Was that ever on the cards?'

'Yes, they could have done it. No trouble at all. I went to a T-group session in Darjeeling. Debates and discussions. Very interesting. The wife of the director had just arrived from the States, and the second day she was there that lady was wearing a sari. '

I was sceptical about this proving anything and asked him how long the lady would stay in her sari.

'That's a point,' said Mr Radia.

Now he was the Deputy General Manager for a joint Japanese-Indian effort, making dry-cell batteries in Gujarat. He had had several run-ins with the Japanese -'Head-on-collisions – I had no choice!' I asked him how he found the Japanese. He said, 'Loyal, yes! Clean and hard-working, yes! But intelligent, not at allV It turned out that they were getting under his skin, though he preferred them to the English. The company was run on Japanese lines: uniforms, no sweepers or bearers, morning assembly, a joint staff-worker canteen, and common toilets ('That was a shock'). What nettled Mr Radia was that the Japanese insisted on dating the factory girls.

'That's the best way I know to demoralize the others,' he said, 'but when I asked them about it they said it would make the workers friendlier if the bosses took the girls out on dates. And they smiled at me. Have you ever seen a Japanese smile? I wasn't going to have it. "Nothing doing!" I said. "You want to argue? Okay, we'll argue. Let's take it to the manager!" Now I will be quite frank with you. I think these Japanese were going in twos and threes and having group sex.'

'Especially in twos,' I said. But Mr Radia was too worked up to hear me.

'I told them it was just not on! Prostitutes – okay, it happens all over the world! Girls from town – all right! Clean, healthy fun – fine! Picnics – count me in! I'll bring my wife, I'll bring my children, we'll all have a good time. But workers? Never!'

Mr Radia grew increasingly peevish about the Japanese. I complained of a headache and went to bed.

The conductor brought tea at half-past six and said we were in Gujarat. Bullocks and cows cropped grass at the edge of the line, and at one station a goat skittered on the platform. Gujarat, Gandhi's birthplace, is a hot, flat, but apparently very fertile state. There were guava orchards and fields of lentils, cotton, papaya, and tobacco stretching to the tilted palm trees at the horizon, and the irrigation ditches were cut like chevrons in these sleeves of landscape. Occasionally, a marquee of trees identified a village and dusty people could be seen washing in brown streams where the mud banks were covered with footprints like the tracks of stray birds.

'And here we are at Baroda,' said Mr Radia, turning to the window.

In the foreground a migration of ragged people carried bundles on their heads, following a bullock cart mounded with bruised furniture. The white hairless patches on the children's heads spoke of overcrowding, malnutrition, and disease, and they were all grinning in the glare of the sun.

'That, I believe is the new petrochemical plant. It's already in operation,' said Mr Radia.

We were passing a shantytown made entirely of flattened cardboard boxes and bits of hammered tin. Women squatted, slapping cow turds into pies, and inside the terrifying huts I could see people lying with their arms crossed over their faces. A man screamed at a running child; another howled at the train.

'Everything's coming up. Patel's factory. It's completely industrial here. Jyoti Industries. Worth crores, I tell you. Crores!'

Mr Radia was looking past the muddy ditch, over the heads of the skinny cows, the children with streaming noses, the crones in tattered headdresses, the many squatters who were making puzzled faces and shitting, the leathery old men leaning on broken umbrellas.

'Another new factory, already famous – Baroda furniture. I know the director. We've had him around for drinks.'

Then, heartily, Mr Radia the Anglophobe said, 'Well, cheerio!'

At Broach, fifty miles south of Baroda, we crossed the wide Narmada River. I was standing by the door. A man tapped me on the shoulder.

'Excuse me.' He was a dark bespectacled Indian in a flowered shirt, holding two coconuts and a garland of flowers. He moved to the door and, bracing himself on the handrail, pitched the garland, then the coconuts, in the river.

'Offerings,' he explained. 'I live in Singapore. I am so happy to be home.'

Late in the afternoon we were in the lowland of Maharashtra, gleaming swamps, the green inlets of the Gulf of Cambray, and just at the horizon the Arabian Sea. It had been cool in the morning, and pleasant at Baroda, but the afternoon ride to Bombay from Broach was stifling: the air was dense with humidity, and the feathery fronds on the tall palms drooped in the heat. At every siding I saw the feet of napping Indians sticking out from under packing cases and makeshift shelters. And then Bombay began. We were still quite far from the city centre – twenty miles or more – but the sight of a single sway-backed hut swelled to a hamlet of shacks, and then to an unbroken parade of low dwellings, their roofs littered with plastic sheets, bits of wood and paper, a rubber tyre, shingles held down with stones, and thatch tied with vines, as if this accumulated rubbish would keep the shacks from blowing away. The hovels became bungalows the colour of rotten cheese, then three-storey houses bandaged with laundry, and eight-storey apartment blocks with rusty fire escapes, getting larger and larger as we neared Bombay.

On the outskirts of the city the Rajdhani Express came to several alarming stops – so sudden, one of them toppled my water pitcher on to the floor and the next smashed a glass. We did not appear to be at stations for these stops, although there were people leaving the train. I saw them throwing their suitcases on to the tracks and leaping out themselves with the speed of deserters, picking up their baggage and racing across the line. I discovered they had pulled the emergency alarm cord (penalty for improper use rupees 250) because they were passing their houses. This was an express train, but by pulling the alarm the Indian could turn it into a local.

There was a fat boy, a recent graduate from the Dehra Dun School of Engineering. He was on his way to Poona for a job interview. He told me why the train was stopping with such force, and he described how the alarm worked.

He said, 'Person who wishes to leave train pulls cord and dewice inside releases wacuum causing brakes to seize in that particular bogie. Conductor is sure which bogie alarm is pulled, but there are so many people he does not know who has pulled chain. Conductor must reconnect dewice and create wacuum in order for train to move.'

He spoke so slowly and methodically that by the time he finished this explanation we were in Bombay.

It was at a railway station in Bombay that V. S. Naipaul panicked and fled, fearing that he 'might sink without a trace into that Indian crowd'. The story is told in An Area of Darkness. But I did not find Bombay Central especially scarifying; a closer acquaintance with it made me think of it as a place of refugees and fortune hunters, smelling of dirt and money, in a neighbourhood that had the look of the neglected half of Chicago. The hurrying daytime crowds might have frightened me more if they had been idly prowling, but in their mass there was no sense of aimlessness. The direction of those speeding white shirts gave to these thousands of marchers the aspect of a dignified parade of clerks and their wives and cattle, preparing to riot according to some long-held custom, among the most distinguished architecture the British Empire produced (cover your good eye, squint at Victoria Station in Bombay, and you see the grey majesty of St Paul's Cathedral). Bombay fulfils the big-city requirements of age, depth, and frenzy, inspiring a chauvinism in its inhabitants, a threadbare metropolitan hauteur rivalled only by Calcutta. My one disappointment came at the Towers of Silence, where the Parsis place their dead to be eaten by vultures. This may strike a casual visitor as solemn barbarity, but it is based on an ecologically sound proposition. The Zoroastrian at the gate would not let me in to verify it. I had been brought there by Mushtaq, my driver, and, leaving, I said perhaps the stories were not true – I couldn't see any vultures. Mushtaq said they were all down at the towers feeding on a corpse. He looked at his watch: 'Lunchtime.' But he meant mine.