Night train to Doon

[A part of my travel diary from the trip to India this summer. This bit chronicles the trip on the Mussoorie Express from Delhi to Dehradun. Enjoy!]

August 17, 2005

Dinner in the evening I received permanent residency in the United States was, appropriately at the Micky D’s in Khan Market (which is nothing like in the US). At 9:15p the chauffeur took me across town to the Old Delhi Railway Station. The traffic suddenly becomes chaotic as one leaves the broad boulevards of New Delhi. At Civil Lines, past the imposing, illuminated rampart of the Red Fort, cycles, rickshaws, cars, buses, ox-carts and various clusters of picnicking bovines, jostle for space. The signs are almost all in the flowing nastliq script of Urdu, and the road on the left leads to Meena Bazaar, the market in front of Asia’s largest mosque, the Jam’a Masjid.

The street in front of Old Delhi Station is clogged, and we slow to a snail’s pace, horn constantly blaring. The huge red sandstone façade rises above the melee, exactly as I remember it. I think back to a similar hot evening some twenty four years ago. We’d come to Old Delhi to drop my brother off, on the night train to Kanpur. He was going off to college (IIT-K, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur). I recall falling asleep on the back seat of our black Fiat Padmini, on the ride back home.

I tell Kishore that it’s pointless to try and actually get to the station, and I leave the air-conditioned confines of the Tata Indigo and weave my way through the crowd to the main entrance. Big Indian railway stations always have a sea of humanity seemingly residing in them, and Old Delhi is no exception. I go through a set of unmanned, pointless metal detectors, and up the stairs to the platforms. The noise from the crowd in the entrance hallway, in front of the “Unreserved Ticket Counters” rises like the roar of a giant motor.

There are no signs anywhere indicating where the Mussoorie Express might be departing from. I flag a red uniform clad porter who snarls, “No. 7” and hurries off to find paying clientele. At the platform, I’ve no idea which end the 2A.C. (Second Class, Air-Conditioned. Though there’s officially only two classes of travel, there’s a rather bewildering hierarchy of comfort, if one can call it that, on Indian Railways) coaches (bogies, in Indian English) are. Another porter points the way. None of the coaches has a seating chart, and my ticket doesn’t list my berth (i.e. bed) number, since it was waitlisted. I find a T.C. (ticket collector), surrounded by hopeful waitlisted passengers trying to find a berth in Sleeper Class (or, as we used to say, Janta class – janta being Hindi for “the people.”). He doesn’t look up from his chart at all, and mumbles “A-1, number eleven.”

As I’d dreaded, berth eleven in coach A-1 is a “side-berth,” squeezed against one side of the coach, and about five inches shorter than I am. It is also occupied. A short, squat dhoti-clad man is sitting on the berth. “This is my berth,” I say. “Yes sir. I only want to go to Ghaziabad. Just 20 mintes out. After that you can sleep.” Oh lord, not this! Darn north Indians! Unruly, barbaric. This would never happen on a long-distance train in Bombay in Second AC! “Nothing doing,” I retort, in that tone Indians use for their social inferiors, “This is a reserved coach!” In my mind, I hear Papa’s warning, “This is the barbaric North. Don’t get into a fight!” The gentleman in the berth above me backs me. “Just making a requesht sir.” He smiles. I pause, and then, in a flash of NIMBYA insight, I say, “Go to the next berth, it’s empty!” Thankfully, he complies, mumbling to the occupants of the other berths next door, “Arrey, ye to barey log hain.” “Oh, these are big people” (i.e. those who think very highly of themselves, short for “upper class”). His neighbors, quite obviously “barey log” themselves, give him a look of utter contempt, and return to their conversation.

In the compartment behind me, a bunch of giggly Italian tourists are unrolling sleeping bags onto their births. One of them rubs an aromatic unguent vigorously on his feet and arms. “Won’t help with the mosquitoes, trust me!” I say to myself. The Tamil family across the corridor from me are arranging their linens on the berth, the mother’s bright Kanchipuram sari, lined with an improbably brilliant gold border, almost hurtful in the dimness of the compartment. I settle in for a long, uncomfortable night. It’s warm and stuffy – the air will certainly kick in later, and in good Indian Railway tradition, freeze everyone solid. The Mussoorie Express lurches to life on the dot at 2215, and I finally fall asleep to a stream of loud Tamil emanating from across the corridor.

Shortly before 6:00a, the same sound wakes me from a fitful sleep – a constant torrent of Tamil from the father. It’s possible that he’s reading something, but it’s just as possible that he’s not. He keeps it up, without a break, nary without a pause for a breath it seems, interrupted only by the occasional cell-phone call (where the decibel level rises even more), until we pull into Haridwar, “the gate of God,” a good hour and a half later, the holy city where the sacred Ganga river (Ganges to Anglophones) bursts out of the Himalayas into the plains. Mercifully, they disembark, followed by the Italians, no doubt in search of all that the mysterious, exotic, spiritual East has to offer. I hope they don’t get fleeced by an unscrupulous swami.

I doze periodically as green fields, trees and villages pass by in the grey morning light. In the distance, the Siwaliks, the foothills of the mighty Himalayas, rise above the mists. The ride to Dehradun is painfully slow, and we stop for long stretches for no apparent reason, finally trundling in at 9:10a, an hour and ten minutes behind schedule, without so much as a by your leave. About 11 hours to cover 334 kilometers, which comes to, oh, about eighteen miles per hour. I should have walked.