Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

'You come,' said the taxi driver, parking in front of the door. I heard giggling and saw at the windows round black faces and gleaming hair. A man in a white turban leaned against the wall, just out of the light.

We went inside the dirty room. I found a chair and sat down. A dim electric bulb burned on a cord in the centre of the low ceiling. I was sitting in the good chair – the others were broken or had burst cushions. Some girls were sitting on a long wooden bench. They watched me, while the rest gathered around me, pinching my arm and laughing. They were very small, and they looked awkward and a bit comic, too young to be wearing lipstick, nose jewels, earrings, and slipping bracelets. Sprigs of white jasmine plaited into their hair made them look appropriately girlish, but the smudged lipstick and large jewellery also exaggerated their youth. One stout sulky girl held a buzzing transistor radio to the side of her head and looked me over. They gave the impression of schoolgirls in their mothers' clothes. None could have been older than fifteen.

'Which one you like?' This was the man in the turban. He was stocky and looked tough in a rather grizzled way. His turban was a bath towel knotted on his head.

'Sorry,' I said.

A thin man walked in through the door. He had a sly, bony face and his hands were stuck into the top of his lungi. He nodded at one. 'Take her – she good.'

'One hundred rupees all night,' said the man with the turban. 'Fifty for one jig.'

'He said it costs twenty-five.'

The taxi driver wrung his hands.

'Fifty,' said the grizzled man, standing firm.

'Anyway, forget it,' I said. 'I just came for a drink.'

'No drink,' said the thin man.

'He said he had an English girl.'

'What English girl?' said the thin man, now twisting the knot on his lungi. 'These Kerala girls – young, small, from Malabar Coast.'

The man in the turban caught one by the arm and shoved her against me. She shrieked delightedly and hopped away.

'You look at room,' said the man in the turban.

The room was right through the door. He switched on the light. This was the bedroom; it was the same size as the outside one, but dirtier and more cluttered. And it smelled horrible. In the centre of the room was a wooden bed with a stained bamboo mat on it, and on the wall six shelves, each holding a small tin padlocked suitcase. In a corner of the room a battered table held some medicine bottles, big and small, and a basin of water. There were scorch marks on the beaverboard ceiling, newspapers on the floor, and on the wall over the bed charcoal sketches of dismembered bodies, breasts, and genitals.

'Look!'

The man grinned wildly, rushed to the far wall and threw a switch.

'Fan!'

It began to groan slowly over the filthy bed, stirring the air with its cracked paddles and making the room even smellier.

Two girls came into the room and sat on the bed. Laughing, they began to unwind their saris. I hurried out, into the parlour, through the front door, and found the taxi driver. 'Come on, let's go.'

'You not liking Indian girl? Nice Indian girl?' Skinny was starting to shout. He shouted something in Tamil to the taxi driver, who was in as great a hurry as I to leave the place: he had produced a dud customer. The fault was his, not mine. The girls were still giggling and calling out, and Skinny was still shouting as we swung away from the hut and through the tall grass on to the bumpy back road.

I had a late dinner, served on a banana leaf in a dingy restaurant near my hotel. The windows of my hotel room were open; I could smell sweet flowers. The odour sang as I read Exiles: 'I am sure that no law made by man is sacred before the impulse of passion… There is no law before impulse.' The perfume was familiar; it was jasmine. I thought of the girls, laughing there in that hut, wearing the white flowers with such narrow petals.

I had two ambitions in India: one was to find a train to Ceylon, the other was to have a sleeping car to myself. At Egmore Station in Madras both ambitions were fulfilled. My little cardboard ticket read Madras-Colombo Fort, and when the train pulled out the conductor told me I would be the only passenger in the car for the twenty-two-hour journey to Rameswaram. If I wished, he said, I could move to the second compartment – the fans worked there. It was a local train, and, since no one was going very far, everyone chose third class. Very few people went to Rameswaram, he said, and these days nobody wanted to go to Ceylon: it was a troublesome country, there was no food in the markets, and the prime minister, Mrs Bandaranaike, didn't like Indians. He wondered why I was going there.

'For the ride,' I said.

'It is the slowest train.' He showed me the timetable. I borrowed it and took it into my compartment to study. I had been on slow trains before, but this was perverse. It seemed to stop every five or ten minutes. I held the timetable to the window to verify it in the light.

Madras Egmore

Mambalam

Tambaran

Perungalattur Halt

Vandalur

Guduvanchari

Kattargulattur

Singaperumalkoil

And so forth. I counted. It stopped ninety-four times in all. I had got my wish, but I wondered whether it was worth the penalties.

The train gathered speed; the brakes squeaked; it lurched and stopped. It started again, and no sooner had it begun to roll easily than the brakes gave this metal wail. I dozed in my compartment, and each time the train stopped I heard laughter and the stamping of feet past my door, a muted galloping up and down the passage, doors banging and the ring of metal on metal. The voices ceased when the train was under way and did not start again until the next station, a commotion at the doors, shrieks, and clangs. I looked out the window and saw the strangest sight – children, girls and boys of anywhere from seven to twelve, the younger ones naked, the older ones wearing loincloths, were leaping off the train carrying cans of water. They were wild children, with long lank hair faded brown by the sun, with black shoulders and dusty faces and snub noses – like Australian aborigines – and at every station that morning they dashed into the sleeping car and got water from the sink in the toilet compartment. They raced with their cans to camps by the side of the track where thin older people waited, aged men with yellowing curly hair, women kneeling over cooking pots in front of crude lean-tos. They weren't Tamils. I assumed they were aborigines, like the Gonds. They had few belongings and they lived in this dry zone the monsoon had not yet reached. All morning they raided the sleeping car for water, skipping in and out, shouting and laughing, making their scavenging into a noisy game. I locked the inner door, preventing them from dancing down the corridor, but allowing them access to the water.

I had made no arrangements to eat and had no food with me. In the early afternoon I walked the length of the train but could not find a dining car. I was having a snooze at about two o'clock when there was a rap at the window. It was the conductor. Without a word he passed a tray of food through the bars. I ate Tamil-fashion, squelching the rice into a ball with my right hand, mopping the ball into the soupy vegetables, and stuffing the whole business into my mouth. At the next station the conductor reappeared. He took the empty tray and gave me a drowsy salute.