Mark Twain was a man who knew how to advertise. Would that I had access to a TARDIS, I think this lecture would be my first stop.
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Travel Blog: Riding the Trains in India
India, Day 11 and beyond.
The trains in India are unmistakable. Distinctive blue paint schemes, mountains of discarded shoes beneath the benches, muffintops of people on the roofs--there's not much to compare to the sights, sounds and smells of a cross-country trip aboard an Indian train.
Something I was not aware of until I booked my extended trip to India was the layered romanticism India aficionados have applied to Indian railways. Most recently, I think Wes Anderson's superb film The Darjeeling Limited might be the ultimate glorification of them, and while the luxury rail accommodations depicted in that film are definitely atypical, a few elements of the cinematic treatment ring true to everyday experience.
I'm a very visual person (big surprise), the first cinematic element that hit home for me in person was an inexplicable thrill the first time I saw a blue Indian train snaking its way through the wild landscapes of the country. My compositional eye lingered hungrily over textual contrasts of smooth metal passing through rocky hills and lush jungles; as well as striking color contrasts of the blue trains crossing the earth-toned landscape like rivers. Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire captured the grandeur perfectly:
But I'm getting ahead of myself...
"First come tickets, then come passage..."
A cross-country trip aboard an Indian train begins with booking a ticket. Simple in theory, but surprisingly complex for the uninitiated.
I found out, a little too late, that the only smart way to book a train is six months in advance. of your travel date.
Why so early? Because this isn't measly old Manhattan where you are one of several million people using the Metro. This is India, and you are one of 1.2 billion people vying for a seat. Book early or face the consequences. What consequences? I'm glad you asked.
If you fail to book several calendar pages ahead of time, chances are that you will not get a reserved seat on any car. That said, if you miss out on one of those last twenty seats, you can still buy a ticket and board a train. If there are unoccupied seats when you get on the train (fat chance) you can buy them from the conductor at a discount, but only if you are the first to approach him (move fast) and if you possibly have an extra fold of rupees in your belt to incentivize good customer service.
If you are successful, by hook or crook, to get the seat, congratulations! You are a smooth operator.
If you are unsuccessful in obtaining some surface area on which to rest your tookus, you are cordially invited to join the doorway standing party, already in progress.
In what I personally feel is a cruel practice, twenty seats are held open on every train until the day they arrive. I can only assume this is for the entertainment of the ticket office. No matter the real reason, this means that most mornings you can expect to see the ticketing areas looking much like a campground as dozens of hopeful travelers bivouac in the stations to claim seats.
The Station
For purposes of this piece, I shall cancel out fractal possibilities, parallel universes and alternate endings and proceed with the simplest scenario: with a reserved seat on the train, what can you expect at the station?
My first visit to an Indian train station was preceded by fourteen hours of severe dehydration, complete with all the intestinal fisticuffs, marathon-level sweating, distance vomiting and projectile diarrhea that one might expect when sick overseas. I was barely coherent the first time when I staggered after my host into a station, so my early impressions of the places had very negative associations.
The exteriors of India's train stations are often impressive--the Howrah station in Kolkata is a positively monumental edifice--but it's not always a good idea to get comfortable on the platform. Very few litter laws and lackluster hygienic awareness in much of India add up to areas with active rat colonies and standing puddles of spit underfoot.
Needless to say, I started my relationship with Indian train stations on the wrong foot. But by the end of the trip, after logging more visits in the light of day and with a calm stomach, I grew to love them. I didn't care that ten kinds of foreign bacteria clung to my leg hair. I didn't mind the crowds or the beggars or the hungry cab drivers chasing the only white guy in the city. To this day, my time spent on Indian platforms has given me the best people watching and some of the most fun photo ops I have ever shot. As I write this post, I miss them.
On the Train
I love trains. As an American who grew up away from major cities, they're a fun novelty. I love them in Europe, I love them in the UK, and fell in love with them in India instantly. The convivial atmosphere of the trains would become one of the few constants in which I could take regular comfort while in the India that summer.
When I board a train, any train, a switch flips in my brain and I relax. While I know much better than to leave my bags lying about unattended (a policy applicable anywhere on the planet), there is a sense of communal friendliness to enjoy on the trains in India.
Like everywhere else in India, when you settle in, you kick off your shoes. As a visitor, I learned quickly to abide by the established etiquette. Trust me, it works in the country because everyone abides. If you resist going barefoot, you'll be the only one leaving shoe marks on the seats, which engenders dirty looks. It's much more comfortable to let your tootsies go au naturel in a country that warm anyway.
With your shoes off and the rest of you slouched comfortably in your favorite reclining position, the train abounds with wonderful people-watching opportunities.
Turbaned Punjabis They seem to be on the clock, twenty-four and seven, to look wise, ancient and heavy-browed.
Busking performers, many of them children. How that little girl made it through that hoop, I will never know.
Traveling families, their children more numerous than the stars in the sky, each of them with four days' worth of food stashed in Jenga towers of tiffins.
Laughing teenagers in reproductions of American pop culture apparel. Don't ask them why Colonel Sanders is blindfolded, they'll just grin and bob their heads.
Imposing aunties, feared for their size and severity by naughty children all over the subcontinent. In a hypothetical fight between an old mousi and a Bengal tiger, my money is on Mousi Lakshmi.
Snoring imams, fearlessly wearing white raiments long after Labor Day.
Epic. Beards.Everywhere.
When I watch people for a while, I generally build up some thoughts that I want to put in my travel journal. However on that trip I found that I needed to ration my journaling sessions, because barely two weeks into my six-week journey I was already halfway through the journal I brought with me. Thus those first few rides I bounced back and forth between short periods of journaling and longer stints of creative people-watching.
At the risk of sounding like a voyeur, I found opportunities to take covert snapshots on the train. My street level walks India usually result in decent photographs, but always with a half-dozen sets of wide eyes staring back at my camera. In the words of Gregory David Roberts:
Somewhere in the five or more millennia of its history, the culture had decided to dispense with the casual, nonchalant glance….eye contact ranged from an ogling gaze to a gawping goggle-eyed glare.
Never were truer words written. By the time of my train experience, the stares didn't bother me any more--I had spent enough time as the only foreigner in a 100km radius to get used them--but I still felt the stares made many of my photographs appear clumsy or contrived. Amateurish.
With this in mind, I sought out the only place on the train where I could observe without being observed: the upper berths. If you travel in multi-tier classes or dedicated sleeper cars, there are several levels of benches (usually three) that fold out from the compartment walls as cots. The uppermost berths are high enough to stay unfolded all the time,and while everyone was seated below during daylight hours, I ascended to the top level.
From the privacy of those shadows, I was able to snap photographs with a much lower percentage of upturned faces. The "crow's nest position" became my new default whenever I traveled on the trains and took photos.
As interesting as the visuals are on the trains, one can't forget to pay attention to the sounds. You will most likely be surrounded by the aforementioned cell phone music, as well as conversation in several dialects of regional Hindi.
Sidenote: I had originally intended to try and pick up some Hindi on the trip, but eventually gave up. Almost every conversation, interpreted or not, is a pidgin hybrid of regional dialects and nationally standardized Hindi. The record I have on file for "most languages spoken at once" was when I heard Bengali, Nepali, Hindi, English, two dialects of Manipuri and one dialect from Sikkim spoken in a single conversation in northeast India. It's enough to make Tim Ferriss's brain explode.
That chai, tho.
Oh those vendors. Much like the little boy selling balloons in Slumdog, children and women slide up and down the train cars selling all manner of trinkets and floral pieces. Visiting family? Take them balloons and flowers. Making a religious or romantic trip? Flowers. Need to lock up your luggage? There's even a lone man going up and down to sell you a small padlock with a length of chain.
The custom in India is for a family to pack enough food for double their number on a train trip. And sharing with new acquaintances is common. But for those unprepared folks who didn't bring enough tiffins of food to live through the zombie apocalypse, there is no shortage of food available to buy from an entertaining cast of vendors.
First and foremost, from the moment you board the train to the moment you disembark, you are never far from a cup of that most wonderful of Indian customs: chai. Chai is a wonderful experience of spicy tea and sweetened milk, usually served piping hot in a barely-there paper cup.
If you are on a train and you have thirty rupees (fifty-five cents American), you can have a cup of chai.
If you are on a train and you have thirty rupees, you should have a cup of chai.
The thinness of the cup might result in your losing your fingerprints by the time you finish your beverage, but you will nonetheless be warmed and comforted by the wonderfully aromatic and soothing milk tea.
Meals are plentiful once the train has gotten underway. Unlike an American plane flight where passengers are fed like test subjects in an experiment whose title includes the words "hungry," "desperate" and "captive," Indians take pride in the food they serve their travelers. In fact, it's my personal opinion that India should be held up as an example of travel food done right. Boiled eggs aren't fancy, a samosa is nothing more than fried dough wrapped around a potato, chicken bryani isn't molecular gastronomy, but it is all fresh. Sure, it might be mixed and served by a man who hasn't washed his hands since the last time it rained. It might be wrapped up and handed to you in a sheet of newspaper of indeterminate age, but the hot dishes are always hot, the ingredients are always fresh and it is all delicious. If you walk past the kitchen car of a train, you won't see attendants microwaving shrink-wrapped packages; you will see a dedicated soul bent over massive pots on a gas stove, risking all of his recognizable features to fry up fresh snacks on board the moving train.
The vendors who patrol the trains to create their own strange music as they make the rounds and call out their products. Some of them speak in nasal tenors, some bark their products out loudly, some of them slur multiple words together into a single ongoing note, but everyone unconsciously works in congress to establish a rhythm with their voices.
Chai...Chai...Chai...
Samosa! Samosa! Samosa!
Misal!...Misal!...Misal!
Chicken bryani! Veg bryani! Egg bryani!
The Hermaphrodites
Unsurprising in a country where so many aspects of even heterosexual relationships are repressed beyond English Victorian standards, individuals born with the ability to both pitch and catch are marginalized and feared in Indian society. They are feared because some people ascribe their physical irregularities as being indicative of occult powers, and this fear leads to their curious reduction to highly stylized beggars.
Bearing the full weight of their reputation, colorfully-adorned groups of disenfranchised intersexuals hop on and off the trains at the satellite stations of major cities, begging more aggressively than anyone else I saw India.
I first met them near Kolkata. I was engrossed in some journaling (shoes off, of course) when the train made a quick stop at a small station outside the city. Deep in thought, I was vaguely aware of some heavy claps coming down the train car, but I had no idea just how close they were until a throaty voice above me said "hey!"
It was a husky, androgynous voice. It sounded to me like a man imitating a woman, and for the briefest moment I thought Vera di Milo, is that you? Thinking of Jim Carrey's female bodybuilder sketch made me even more startled when I looked up and saw the genuine article looming over me, over six feet tall and colorfully arrayed.
"Hey," the tall figure said again. This seemed the extent of his/her English.
It is my policy to not respond to beggars who "attack" for money, especially because my white skin puts me on the list of high-priority marks for every impoverished individual in India. I tried to wave him/her off, he/she wasn't about to let me get off that easy. He/She lifted both huge hands.
CLAP, CLAP.
Good, close and loud, compressing a little air into my face. If I wasn't cooperating, he/she seemed to assume I didn't hear the first time. The clapping struck me as odd; almost ritualistic. I wondered at the time if there was a hex involved. At that moment, I wasn't thinking of a spiritual duke-out; to be quite honest all I could do was look at him/her and try to narrow down a list in my head of American celebrities to use when I described this person's features as being "a mashup of _____." To date, I could best describe this character as the ill-favored offspring of Snooki Palizzi and Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie.
My resolve to not turn out my pockets was met with one more offensive tactic from my inscrutable opponent. He/she reached out a bangled arm and snatched the water bottle that sat on the window ledge at my elbow. Throwing me a final look of utter contempt, he/she took a deep pull from the bottle and set it down back down next to me. The entire action conveyed an industrial-strength, non-verbal message of so there, jerk!
But the joke was on him/her. It wasn't my water bottle.
Summary
As a westerner, riding the trains in India is similar to doing anything else in the country. Everything is just different enough to make you question every action. I once joked with a friend, as we boarded a ferry to go down the Ganges, that everything in India was just "a little bit backwards" to what we were used to. As if to reinforce the point, a boat came down the river that literally looked like it had been built to travel stern-first. We laughed, because as Stephen Tobolowsky says, recognizing the truth in the situation made it funny.
The Indian trains are yet another scenario of the kind of cultural displacement that always makes life entertaining when traveling abroad. At the end of the day, though the culture is colorful and sometimes encroaches on our Western ideas of personal space, the best advice is almost the same as going anywhere else:
- Plan ahead.
- Get there early.
- Taste the local food.
- Keep an eye on your bags.
- Talk to and learn from as many people as possible.
- Remove your shoes and drink chai. (India specific tip.)
- Seriously, always drink chai.
Travel Blog: Why you should always stay hydrated in India, a story.
India, Day 11
Yesterday, I wrote about staying safe in India. I waxed knowledgable on the people and the culture. But that doesn't change the fact that sometimes I am just plain stupid and create problems for myself.
If there is one aspect of travel that is ubiquitous across the entire world, it is "stay hydrated." I mean, more than just when traveling, it's always a good idea to keep some water on hand. However, I have not been known to always do the smart thing...
I'm going to be changing the format of future posts in order to cover more events.
Day ten was surprisingly cool for monsoon season. The weather was still humid, but the clouds were thick in the sky and we were shielded from the brute force of the summer sun. As we motored all over the area in an open-air tempo, stopping along the way to eat a pungent meal of curry and drink a cup of chai, I never even broke a sweat. I was upbeat and feeling supremely happy that everything was going so swimmingly, as seen in the spontaneous self-portrait I took while driving home after our final village visit. Hanging out of a tempo, big grin...yeah, keep smiling dummy. Conditions were so clement that I completely forgot to inform my host that I needed to stop somewhere and refresh my depleted supply of bottled water. I had only been in the country for a week and a half, still not long enough for me to risk drinking more than an occasional sip of the native water. I had expended my last bottle of purified water that morning and the lack of palpable heat caused this not-so-insignificant fact continued to evade my full attention until we arrived back at the house that night, and by then I figured I would just wait until the next morning and pick up a few liters of water en route to the train station.
That evening, I went to bed around 9:30pm. Both the electricity and the generator were out of commission that night, so we didn't really have the option of functionally staying up later than that anyway. Not that we would want to; when you're up before the sun each morning and stay busy all day, there's rarely any need to stay up for long after dinner. This is one of the many common-sense aspects of life that come into sharp relief when you are separated from electricity and the internet for more than a day. [Food for thought.]
Returning to the story...as the house generator was incapacitated that night and we had no electricity whatsoever, the fans that usually run at night to move the air inside my hosts' cement home also took the night off. Because of this, the air indoors was just like the night air outdoors: hot, humid and deathly still. I might have attempted sleeping outside, but my previous evenings at this location had been spent under siege by the local mosquito population. Discretion being the better part of valor, I stayed under my mosquito net indoors. That was the only smart decision I made that day, one which I negated by deciding to sleep in my synthetic polo shirt instead of my white t-shirt, which was the only breathable, cotton article I had packed for the trip. The logic behind this decision was that it would minimize the growing number of wet clothes in my duffel bag. My host’s wife was kind enough to wash my clothes for me while I was there, but even when it was dry outside, the humidity was almost thick enough for fish to safely venture out of the streams and explore the overworld. In this environment, even my quick-dry fabrics were still damp after two days spent on the line. So, in another example of less-than-stellar decision making, I slept in the same polo I had worn but not sweated in all that day.
Fast forward.
I half-awoke sometime between 1am and 2am and passed a bizarre hour in that strange Neverland between awake and asleep. You know the feeling you get when you're really tired and are aware that you should be asleep, but you stubbornly try to finish watching a film or reading a chapter in a book anyway? This is the same feeling that accompanies staying up too late at night, manifesting itself in nod-offs during a class or a church service. It has been my experience that these situations climax with a sensation of falling just before you wake up feeling startled; a feeling appropriately jargoned as "the kick" in the movie Inception. That morning, I was stuck between being awake and being asleep, but the kick never came. In that fugue-like state, I honestly wasn't sure if I was lying on a bed in India or camping in the woods outside Buford, Georgia. Yes, Buford, Georgia, just northeast of Atlanta. Don't ask me why my mind went there--I have friends there but I've never actually been to the town itself--I can only say that the mind does strange things when you can't wake up.
After a long time spent down the rabbit hole, I came to full consciousness just in time to check the assault of some mosquitoes who had found their way inside my netting; either a group of advance scouts or kamikaze-style assassins. After reducing the brave warriors to smears on the palm of my hand and wiping the remains on the net as a warning to their brethren, I took stock of my situation.
In India.
Lying on a bed.
Sweating profusely.
I don't know who originated the phrase "sweating like a stuck pig" or what the exact criteria is for that state of being, but I was there. And I knew something else was wrong. I wasn't just hot and sweaty, I felt constrictions on my neck and arms where there was no reason to feel them. I gingerly peeled off my shirt to get fresh air on more surface area on my body, but I was past the point of no return, the feeling wouldn't abate. There was no fresh air anyway; I was inside a cement house and there was no breeze coming in through the windows. I became aware of a creeping dizzy feeling, even while lying still, and I had a feeling that bad things would happen if I stood up. So I remained still for two more hours.
Around 4am (I was logging the hours on my watch), my need for fresh air trumped my dread of nausea. I heard voices in the next room and knew that if anything did go wrong, at least I would have some help available from people who were already functionally awake. Slowly, carefully, I eased myself upright and ventured out of my cavern of mosquito netting to the wooden door leading outside. I swung the door open and leaned on the frame. The air outside was just as still as the air inside, but marginally cooler, which was some relief.
But my relief was momentary. Something else wasn't right; in fact, many things immediately started being very wrong. I wasn't wearing my glasses, so the world as I saw it was already an indistinct conglomeration of shapes that looked more like mold spores than trees and buildings, but after I stood upright for just a few seconds, they were worse than blurry. As I looked at the purple horizon, the blurry shapes melted together into a dark, formless mass. Then the mass dissolved into a blue-black nothing. As a consequence of my standing up, all the blood had drained away from my head, and I was blind.
Now, I was legitimately worried, to put it mildly.
Then I felt a new sensation. I hadn't felt it in a long time but I recognized it instantly, and even in my overheated state it formed ice crystals in my bloodstream. It was a peristaltic spasm; a tell-tale cramp in my stomach accompanied by a seismic rumble at the southernmost end of my lower intestine. The warning signs had arrived; the prologue to a horrible story of which I was about to be the main character. I was dizzy, blind, and now the clock was counting down, 24-style, to a nuclear holocaust in my keister. To quote Harlan Ellison, "I have no mouth, and I must scream."
I called for my host. He rushed in from the next room, as much or more alarmed as I was, closely followed by a few of the orphans. I told him only half-coherently that I needed to get to the bathroom and tried to feel my way there on my own. On his part, he assumed I was out of my head, because he tried to guide me back to the bed. I resisted the motion and remember the moment now as a wash of hallucinatory lights and colors as I spun around in place, resisting the gentle tugs back to the bed. I finally managed to grab hold of something solid and collected my scattered mind enough to say, calmly and severely, "I need to get to the toilet. Now." In the land where people season food with the primary goal of smugly asking their western guests if it is too spicy for them, this statement always carries weight. The words were hardly out of my mouth before I was towed to the latrine by several eager sets of hands.
Crouching over the outdoor keyhole toilet, all self-consciousnessness nullified by the necessities of the situation, I spent a long period doing those unpleasant things that one does at latrines during times of gastric distress. My sight mercifully came back while I was crouched, which brought as much mental relief as the toilet trip in general brought physically, and over the next hour I figured out the correlation between my blood pressure and the act of standing up.
About an hour later, after my angry digestive system had completely emptied itself and I had sat on the outdoor stairs sucking in lungfuls of a tardy morning breeze, my host went out to get some water. After a few minutes, I felt good enough to stand up, albeit very slowly and with great care not to life my head too high, and I staggered back to bed, where I wracked my brain to deduce why my usually healthy body had collapsed into such a malfunctioning instrument.
Was it the chai I had from the roadside stand yesterday?
The chicken curry at lunch?
The turtle curry we had for dinner?
That turtle was really ugly before they cooked it...why did I eat it?
Before I could fall asleep again, I pulled out my phone and texted my mother and a nurse friend and told them what had happened. My nurse friend, a longtime servant in India, texted back first and told me exactly what was wrong with me. All other variables aside, I had classic dehydration. She gave me detailed instructions, both for standard treatment and what to do if it didn't respond to the regular protocol. I noted the advice, also taking a moment to log and timestamp my symptoms in my journal before I dozed off. I was exhausted from the inside out, and in my fuzzy mind, there would be plenty of time for treatment after I slept some more...
An hour later, I awoke to the hairiest Indian man I had ever seen looming over me. If had told me that his name was Esau, I wouldn't have even blinked. He held out a furry hand. In my frame of mind at that time, after five days of every Indian man in the state tripping over himself to shake hands with the gora, I assumed he was simply being friendly, and, groggily and automatically, I grasped his hand and shook it, weakly. He smiled and adjusted his grip--he was a doctor, and he was taking my pulse. My host had already walked into town and purchased a few bottles of water, and it only took the doctor the work of a moment to appraise the situation. He gave me rehydration salts for the water and some pills for my stomach; and spent a few minutes in conference with my host before leaving.
Upon the doc's advice, I tried to eat some soft-boiled rice to get some carbs back into my system, but to the introduction of solid food my body stolidly said "no." My colon had been empty for several hours, and after a few bites of rice, I vaulted out of bed with willpower borne of need, and sprinted outside to lean over the wall at the side of the house. In a few heaves, I expelled all of the undigested ephemera that was still in my stomach. Despite the violent reaction I had to even the blandest of foods, my hosts' nonetheless continued urging me to eat for the rest of the morning, but it would be a long time before I would want any food that day. I simultaneously avoided disagreement and gave my body time to sort itself out by sleeping as much as could.
I slept off and on until the noon hour, breaking up my naps with trips to the toilet. You see the little fellow giving a cheerful thumbs-up? That's Ajay. He was the best unlicensed medical care provider I have ever met. It was the weekend, and the kids weren't in school. Every time I went to the bathroom, Ajay stayed close. He was not about to let me pump my own water to wash my hands or rinse the toilet. Whenever I emerged from the latrine and went to the hand pump to draw a bucket of water, he cut in front of me and insisted on manning the pump himself. I don't know if Ajay will ever see this, but I want it known to the world at large that this kid is the bomb.
After a long morning of long naps and long calls, my host roused me out of my most recent nap a silver lining to brighten my bad day. Our train tickets were confirmed, and it was time to go. Happy that something had gone right that day, I shambled up out of bed and pulled on my pants and the loosest shirt I had in my bag. Still weak and mineral-deprived, I emerged from the front door to see Driver waiting for us. For all the craziness that was involved in my trip to India, when I was in that region in particular, it was always comforting to know that we had a reliable constant in our Driver.
Together, the three of us made our way up the path one final time and stepped into the Bolero. With the benefit of rest and rehydration salts in my water, I had rallied a bit back at the house, but my body lapsed back into an unshakable malaise after hiking the scant 150 meters to the Bolero. I let my head hang and tried to fall back to sleep as Driver did his thing, carrying us through the ever-changing skein of traffic with his trademarked brand of pragmatic recklessness. On his part, he was also concerned for my wellbeing. The best English he could speak was "no problem," but we had worked out a system of thumbs up and nods to communicate as needed, and like my host, it pained him to see what had happened to the visitor.
On the way into town, we made two stops. On the first stop, my host and Driver got out of the Bolero and returned with a glass of what my host called "curd." Told simply that it was "good for loose motion," I chose not to imagine the last person who might have drunk out of the glass and downed the yogurt-like concoction. With a name like "curd," I expected something like buttermilk, or perhaps something strained from milk or paneer. This drink, however, was thick and sweet, and after my morning of rice and retching, it tasted like nectar from heaven's own fruit. I suppose that they were unable to procure a true "curd" and gave me the next best thing they could find, which in hindsight I guess was a variation on a mango lassi, complete with cashews and dried fruit on top. While it might not have been as efficacious for soothing the stomach as actual buttermilk, I was nonetheless grateful for its cool sweetness.
Our second stop was in the market, where I asked for a young coconut with a lot of water. It slipped my mind at the time that coconut is replete with magnesium, and therefore more of a laxative than what was ideal for me at the time, but all I could think about at that moment was the bounty of naturally-occurying electrolytes contained in coconut water. I still didn't have an appetite, but I nonetheless craved the friendly taste of tropical fruit, making the curd/lass and coconut combination very soothing.
Another hour passed before we arrived at the train station. It was about 4pm when I bid a final goodbye to Driver, vowing at some point to send him a t-shirt that said "King of the Road." Driver left, and I followed my host into the station. I was greeted with what was, for a westerner, a completely disconcerting scene. I definitely wasn't in Kansas any more, a fact substantiated by a teeming crowd of individuals, couples, families, beggars and Ghandi look-a-like Hindu holy men filling every spare centimeter of space in the station. Some were walking about and others filled benches from edge to edge, but most of them were rested on blankets on the station floor. Surrounded by towering stacks of food-filled tiffins, families of all shapes and sizes talked and played card games while waiting for their train. The whole scene might have seemed quaint and cheerful, except that it had rained earlier in the day, and the floors of both the station and the platforms were slathered in a thick layer of conglomerate filth. Thousands of bare footprints, mounds of food wrappers, rats in the corners and frequent jettisons of paan juice erupting from almost every male mouth in sight offered some clues to the possibilities underfoot, and I made the conscious choice to not think about it further as I followed my host through the crowd.
It was just a little bit after 4pm now, and I asked when our train was due to depart.
The answer came casually: 6:30pm.
Cue an unveiled reaction of shock and horror on the American's face. Apparently, as I would learn that night and from future experiences, trains are an exception to the usual rules and customs of Indian culture. In a land where "five minutes" can mean as much as forty-five minutes, and being "on time" often requires being no more than thirty minutes late, no one ever arrives less than two hours early to board a train. I suppose it's one of the few usable excuses to knock off work early.
The timing of this latest learning experience could not have come at a worse time. Sitting on the three inches of bench where my buttocks had found purchase, I bit my lip hard to avoid making even harsher remarks at or about everything that happened around me. Exhausted and already traveling without enthusiasm, the knowledge that I was sitting in a petri dish, surrounded by a seething mass of people who were all hacking, hawking or fingering their navels, I was having trouble finding my calm center. My state of mind deteriorated further as the train's arrival was repeatedly pushed back, imprisoning us on the platform for what became an extra hour. For the first time on the trip, I gave up trying to put every inconvenience down to a cultural difference or a defect in my own impatient, western character. I scratched "this day has been hell" into my journal, among other unfriendly descriptions and turns of phrase.
After a purgatorial three and half hour wait, the train arrived, and the jubilation I felt cannot be described in mere words. If I had been able to dance without fear of restarting gastric irregularities, I would have frolicked onto the train like Dick van Dyke in his prime. Circumstances being what they were, I settled for a quiet shuffle up the steps and down the aisle. The Indian train lines have a cruel practice by which they hold twenty reserved seats open on each train until the day of departure, and I had heard of people regularly going to great pains to get a confirmed seat on their trains, including camping out at ticket offices overnight; something westerners only seem inclined to do when bargain electronics are involved. However, this train was mercifully not overbooked for this leg of the journey, and we were able to enjoy plenty of room to sprawl out and sleep overnight. After stowing my clothing bag under my feet and wedging my Gearslinger full of valuables (passport, camera, phone) between myself and the wall of the train car, I ate my first solid food since the ill-fated soft rice of the morning. Fruit was still the food that appealed to me, so I forewent the train's offerings of bryani and samsosas and ate a few baby bananas. And, praise be, they stayed down.
Feeling somewhat at ease for the first time all day, I leaned back against my bag. My head was clearing up a little bit, and I was cognizant of and regretful that I had allowed myself to be such a poor sport for the several hours we spent on the platform. It was reminder of the luxuries I enjoy every day back home, and how much I had hitherto treated my journey like a camping trip instead of real life. What I encountered at the train station--the filth, the crowds, the ever-present risk of tuberculosis--that was and is everyday life in India. As is illness. As is waiting overnight in competition with 1.2 billion other people for just the possibility of a confirmed seat on a train. I had the full experience of life in India in the concentrated space of one day, and I couldn't handle it. Since arriving at the train station, I had been determined to milk my misery for all it was worth, regardless of the great pains my host had gone to to make me as comfortable as possible.
I shook my head at my own childishness and drifted off to sleep, thanking God that the day was finally over, and curious to find out what the Indian train system would be like in the light of day.
India, Day 2 - The lonely way to travel.
I have a love/hate relationship with transatlantic air travel. I like having nine hours to relax, but I dislike doing it in a metal tube filled with recycled air.
I like movies, but I dislike four-inch screens.
I enjoy conversations with new people, but planes always carry the threat of a seatmate whose bulk occupies both his own seat and part of mine. Worse yet, I've previously been caught next to talkative sad sacks, and with nowhere to run or hide, they depressed me with their life stories for hours at a time.
All that said, I generally enjoy the experience of air travel, even flying coach. Even at its worst, flying gives me dedicated time to catch up on some reading. Post-college, reading has taken on a new significance, because I finally have the luxury of choosing my own books. Based on the recommendation of a friend, I chose to bring a book on the trip that was very, very special: Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. Set in India during the 1980s, there was little difference between what was on the pages and what I saw firsthand in India every time I put the book down. If you have not read it, I highly recommend that you do so, sooner rather than later.
Aside from a reading and some intermittent movie-watching, my flight from Miami to London was uneventful. I managed to sleep a little bit as well, which always helps kill time. Someday I'll learn to take some Tylenol PM every time I fly, so I can just go right to sleep and be blissfully unaware of the passing time. After nine hours, I touched down in London early in the morning and was met by a familiar sign.
As I entered the terminal, following the familiar path through the "B Gates" in the international terminal, I grinned for a couple of reasons. The first reason was the knowledge that I would be returning to Britain at the end of my trip, and for the first time, I would actually get out of the airport and see England itself. As many times as I had connected through Heathrow, I had never actually set foot on English soil.
My second reason for grinning was the sight of several information screens held hostage by my old arch-nemesis, the Blue Screen of Death. I had no idea the old blue screen still afflicted modern computer systems, much less in airport terminal displays, but there it was, big as life.
As I said, it was early. Early enough to eat breakfast, although my body clock was so confuzzled by the time change that I might have actually been craving lunch or dinner. This is one point of my travel recaps that will remain problematic. On a good day, I am hopeless at processing numbers. Dramatic time changes and long flights exacerbate this weakness and make it even harder for me to remember details that aren't logged in my journal or with photographs. Details like exact times.
Where was I? Oh yes, breakfast. Or, "brekkie," as they say in the UK. I love that term. "Brekkie." Fun to say.
One of my favorite things about England is, honestly, the food. I don't know why England's traditional fare has been the black sheep of world cuisine for so long, because I find it delicious. Traditional British food is certainly simpler and less magazine-ready than, say, French or Italian cuisine, but that is actually what I love most about it. There's been a renaissance in British cooking in recent years, and top-tier gastronomy is dramatically changing the modern opinions regarding British cuisine, but I will always be a fan of the classics. From the delicacies and to the pub grub, it is simple, hearty fare, always savory and always satisfying. Especially the traditional English breakfast. Eggs, sausage, bacon, beans, tomato and potatoes. I can't think of a more comforting eating experience.
Breakfast moved to the top of my action list, I entered Giraffe, had my brekkie (I love that word) and a cup of good coffee. The repast over, I sat in the atrium of the terminal with my journal and wrote. As I got still and focused on the blank page, I became aware of an odd feeling. The last two times I had flown--including the last time I had gone through Heathrow--I had been with friends. I was retracing the same path to India, but I was doing it alone.
Alone. That's a naughty word when you're traveling. I've traveled alone plenty of times, and had fun doing it, but after several trips in a row with other people, I missed the company. I missed them badly, in fact. I have to confess that my trips to India aren't just mission trips. Selfishly, I look forward to the chance to spend ten days at close quarters with good friends from another state who I don't see at any other time during the year. And now I was doing the India thing again, but they weren't there with me. In the film The Third Man, Orson Welles' character, a sociopathic gangster, says from atop a ferris wheel: "Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?" In that moment, tired and listless and with no one to talk to, I felt like a dot.
This was the first of several such moments that I had during the course of my journey. When I was actually in India, I returned to several places where I had served on earlier trips. Coming back was strange, because the paradigms were so drastically different. Whereas the first time I went to this or that place, I was with friends, and often arrived there after a bus ride filled with conversation, laugher and even the occasional song. On this trip, however, I visited these places as the "silent partner" of various hosts, with almost every word out of my mouth requiring translation into Hindi or a local language before they could be understood. Having such strong memories so far from home, and even in a place like Heathrow, was a new and surreal experience, made slightly depressing by the removal of all the familiar and positive emotional associations. It almost felt like I had lost something, or someone.
In this incredibly positive state of mind (irony alert!), I sat in Heathrow and journaled my thoughts onto paper. My plane left in the late afternoon, and before departure, I also translated my mild sadness into a bit of emotional eating by buying a cappuccino and a bar of dark chocolate for an early dinner--my last Western indulgence before committing myself to India for six weeks. That decision has not gone down in the annals of "Steven's Personal Best;" to the contrary, the assault of milk and sugar on my stomach, unaccompanied by any other solid food, made the flight uncomfortable and set me up for a very tired landing in India.
My re-entry into Incredible India will be covered later this week. I am slowly realizing that my writing consecutive entries as long-form narratives is a little too time-consuming, so you may look forward to shorter but more frequent entries in coming weeks. Stay tuned!
India, Day 1 - Goodbye is always the hardest part.
This is part one of my recap of my forty-day journey through India. Some entries will be short photo essays, others will be more prosaic, long-form narratives. This first one is more along the lines of the latter. Enjoy.
"So, when do you leave for India again?"
"In about four hours."
Every trip is bookended by goodbyes, first to the people you leave at home, and later to the people you meet while traveling. I hate goodbyes, and this day was to be full of them. I love traveling, but only in the middle.
The night before I left for India, I didn't sleep well. Even though my day's schedule began early, I got up several hours earlier than was necessary, because I simply wasn't resting well, and laying in bed rolling back and forth seemed a greater waste of time than getting up and pacing back and forth on my feet. As there was a marginal possibility that my family would finish construction on our new home in my absence, I rose up and got dressed amidst a landscape of stacked boxes containing all of my worldly goods, which I had packed in anticipation of the possible move. The environment drove home every aspect of the idea of "leaving home," and for a brief moment I felt like I wasn't coming back. Once I had my clothes on, I had nothing left to do. My bag and check box were both packed, double-checked and by the door. Yes, I packed six weeks' worth of clothing in one backpack, my Monsoon Gearslinger. I pack light and travel light. I anticipated the inevitability of my buying gifts or a some new shirts along the way, and a packable duffel bag, reduced to a six-inch disc of fabric when collapsed, dangled from the clip of my backpack. Sadly, my own efficiency had left me with too much time on my hands; the morning dragged on forever. I was also experimenting with intermittent fasting at that time, and as such I didn't even have breakfast to kill a half hour.
I did a lot of pacing until I called my dad to say goodbye. He was out on a business trip to Washington D.C., and I wouldn't see him again until I arrived home. Afterward, I left at 7:00 to meet my friend, Jeff, for coffee and a book swap. He had lent me Lucifer's Hammer, and I wanted to return it and loan him my copy of The Four Hour Body before I left town. We only had about forty-five minutes to chat, a restrictive time for two people with a tendency toward motored-mouthing, but we did the best we could with the time we had. But upon saying goodbye and exiting the Drowsy Poet, my next stop wasn't the airport; far from it, in fact. An associate pastor at my church had passed away that week, and I wasn't about to miss his memorial; international flight be damned.
The loss of Pastor Mike Dekle was a blow to our church and the community at large. Mike wasn't just a gifted administrator, he was a devoted husband and father and a great friend to many people. He and I weren't very close, but I saw all four of my grandparents succumb to terminal illness, and I was very sensitive to Mike's own battle with cancer, and I wanted to support his wife and son during the service. In addition to supporting the family, the service allowed me the unforeseen opportunity to see the members of my church one final time before I left town, as well as a number of other old friends from other churches in the area. The service was a celebration of a well-lived life, and the reception gave me a chance to say a few final goodbyes and pray with friends.
After the service, my mother, sister and I went to one of our favorite restaurants, Siam Thai. It might sound funny, eating Thai food before going to India, but I honestly love Asian cuisine, whichever region it hails from. Siam Thai is also a family favorite, and I wanted one last opportunity to splurge on something familiar and well-loved before leaving home. Several plates of chicken and bamboo shoots later, my mother and I had coffee at a The Bad Ass Coffee Co. while my sister attended her voice lesson. When the lesson was over, we regrouped and the three of us went to the airport together.
In the airport restroom, like a scene out of Burn Notice, I changed out of my jacket, trousers and tie and put on a lightweight khaki shirt and a pair of Magellan cargo pants, emerging from the lavatory looking, well, like someone bound for India. India was (and at the time of this writing, is) in the throes of monsoon season, and I had purchased several new athletic shirts and a few pairs of fast-drying pants for trip, all in accordance with a self-imposed rule of "pack no cotton." I would love to travel the world attired like Indiana Jones or Josh Bernstein (I even have the hat), but practicality often dictates otherwise.
Clothes changed, there was still time to kill before I needed to go through security, and I re-entered the limbo of the early morning. I sat with my mother and sister in the terminal, and we passed a few minutes in uneasy silence. There really wasn't much to say. We're an emotional bunch, and I didn't want to cause any unnecessary strain by speaking too much. In the context of a year, seven weeks isn't a terribly long time, but it's still a respectable period of time to be apart from loved ones, especially when I would be making so much of the trip alone. We talked a little bit, here and there, but I was honestly relieved when the time finally came for me to put dignity on hold and pass through security.
The actual goodbye was still hard. I hate leaving people at the airport; it reinforces the separation before it even begins.
After the last hugs and kisses were exchanged, I shouldered my Gearslinger and went forward. The exact protocols of TSA screenings change a little bit each year, but I stay one step ahead by keeping all of my change, toiletry carry-ons and phone in plastic bags in my pockets until I'm through the screening area. It's a practice that saves me the trouble of rummaging around in my backpack while ill-tempered fellow travelers urge me to hurry up. As much as possible, I like to design my circumstances to stay relaxed. It works pretty well, so much so in this case that a female flight attendant, seeing my buzzed hair and single, compact bag, asked me if I was military, because she was unused to seeing any other group of young males be so polite while going through security. Plus one for Southern manners.
Once through security, I boarded the plane.
The plane flew.
The plane landed.
I found myself in Miami International Airport, with a long layover and, again, very little to do. I wandered through the terminal, marveling at the sameness of every shop. I made a few phone calls home, speaking once more to my dad before I crossed the threshold into the realm of international phone charges. My father runs his own business, and with the added pressure of handling a lot of his own contracting in the construction of our new home, he had been unable to see me off at the airport himself, and it was important to me to speak to him one more time.
When dad and I were finished speaking, I hunted down a coffee shop and bought a cup of green tea to chill out with while waiting for my flight. It was a long trek--the international terminal in Miami rambles on interminably. On the way back, I passed a heavyset black man on the concourse, and he hailed me in a thick Caribbean accent. It turned out that he was from Haiti, and was passing through Miami on the way to visit family. He was having trouble finding his gate in the massive terminal. It so happened that I had seen where his gate was located on my way up from my first flight, so I walked with him for a while and took him to where he needed to go. He summed up the airport with a single sentence: "Miami's just too big, man."
Couldn't have said it better myself.
My Haitian friend at his gate, I made the hike back to my own gate (tea still in hand!) and gave Jeff a ring to tie up the loose ends from our abridged conversation of the morning. Jeff has also served in India; that was actually where we first met and became friends, and that left us with plenty to talk about before I left to go back for an extended period. Anyone who has been to India will testify that it is a hard country to adjust to, between the cultural differences and the sheer frenzy resulting from a population of 1.2 billion people, and Jeff and I enjoyed a few good jokes as to the challenges facing me upon my return. As we spoke, the call came over the loudspeaker: it was time for my section to board the plane.
I finished with Jeff, shouldered my bag once again and boarded the plane. It was late.
Next stop: London.
The trouble to begin at 8 o'clock...
MARK TWAIN
(Honolulu Correspondent of the Sacremento Union)
Will deliver a lecture on
THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 2
In which passing mention will be made of Harris, Bishop Staley, the American missionaries, etc., and the absurd customs and characteristics of the natives duly discussed and described. The great volcano of Kilauea will also receive proper attention.
A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA is in town, but has not been engaged.
Also
A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS will be on exhibition in the next block.
MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned.
A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever they please.
Dress Circle, $1.00 | Family Circle, 50c.
Doors open at 7 o'clock. The Trouble to begin at 8 o'clock.
