When you get off the train in India, after 28 hours of feeling the tracks rolling away beneath you as you lie in your bunk, you feel justified when you find yourself very far from where you got on. When we flew from London to India, I walked out into Delhi’s smell and felt mystified that I could be so far from any place familiar. When I woke up on the Doon Express the other morning, and the train attendant told me that I was about to be back in Gaya, his words were a little sad to me, but perfectly believable.
It is very easy to sleep in the AC2 class of an Indian train. Sometimes there will even be cockroaches crawling over the fold-out bunk beds, but the lull of the train and the shaking of the perfectly flat bed is so soothing that you can forget about them. Occasionally, the train will stop so that a faster train can go by. If you are asleep, or half asleep, this is a disappointing occurrence, and you wait semi-consciously for the zinging of the passing train before you begin to move and drift away again.
The AC2 class is pretty nice — the beds are wide enough to fit your entire body and there is air-conditioning and you get blankets and sheets. We were asked to get AC2 tickets for all our longer train journeys because it is also safer. On the shorter trips from Gaya to Varanasi and back, we got tickets in the sleeper class. The sleeper class is more crowded and it has no air conditioning, so the windows are open. Women tie their dupattas around their heads and stick their heads out the windows. The wind blows straight through the car.
Once, on the way to Varanasi, we didn’t get our seats confirmed so we stood in the corridor between cars for the entire five hour ride. A whole family was laid out on the floor beside us and more people filled in every spare corner. We took turns standing against the wall and we held our bags in our arms and between our legs. We felt the wind on our faces — it was still hot then — and told each other stories so it wasn’t so bad. When my friend and I arrived at our host’s house, he told us to go wash our feet. That was when I saw that my soles were completely black.
On Indian trains, there is no announcement to tell you when your stop will be. It would be very easy to sleep past the right stop, but luckily I haven’t done that yet. On the train from Dehradun to Gaya, there was a man called Prakash in my compartment who said I reminded him of his daughter. When I asked to borrow his cellphone to call the Vihar and tell them that my train would be late, he wanted to know how I could call my father if I didn’t have a cellphone. We watched 1960s Bollywood clips that he downloaded from YouTube on his laptop, and he told me how he would sing these tunes with his daughter. When a young man came into the compartment and fixed me with an aggressive stare, the older man’s presence seemed to make Prakash back off. Prakash gave me newspaper to eat my food over, and he decided that he would be responsible for making sure that I woke up before my stop.
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