tales from the railroad

(originally written tuesday 7.13)

For the last four hours, I've been sitting on a train speeding through the Indian countryside. The sun's starting to set, I'm finally getting used to the cramping in my legs, and the chai-wallah keeps passing our compartment expectantly - I'm entertaining the idea of buying some hot tea in lieu of the dinner I won't be having 'til we get to Varanasi.

Four hours down, seven to go.

We're traversing the north of the country in the quintessentially Indian way: by rail. 1.7 million people travel on Indian Railways each day; today, I'm one of them. I rather like it, to be honest. No near-death collisions, no potholes, no transvestite beggars tapping on your window. And believe it or not, the length of this trip (11 hours - jealous?) has a redeeming quality: my inevitable boredom. In the first two hours of the journey, I'd finished Fight Club and the rest of my summer reading books and extinguished my collection of episodes of The Office on my iPod. In other words, restlessness ensued.

So, I went exploring. I left the air-conditioned comfort of our compartment and made my way into the second class compartment, where men, women, and children sit four to a seat. Where mothers hold their babies to the barred windows to keep them from getting too hot. Where boys half my age sell balloons and cold drinks to the passengers with a few spare rupees, Slumdog Millionaire style. Where I'm almost positive I saw a goat.

Again, cue American consumerist capitalist guilt. I probably deserved the looks I got from those crammed into the coach. After all, it's not every day that a white boy with Ray-Ban aviators and a Nikon D60 stumbles into the steerage compartment of an Indian passenger train. But I ignored the looks, focused on the people, and made my way down the aisle, my boredom now replaced with the sense of curiosity of a seventeen-year-old boy on an adventure. Truth is, I loved it. I've sort of resented the "Westernness" of my last few days - the hotels, the satellite television, the french fries, and all the other homogenized trinkets of tourism. Actually, maybe not the french fries, but my point is pretty clear, I think. All I'm saying is it was nice to be back in a state of simplicity, if even for a few minutes.

I'm back in our compartment now, and night has fallen on the Indian countryside. Every ten minutes or so, we whizz by a blur of dim lights that indicates a village, but we still have hours to go before we arrive in Varanasi, the next big city on this train line (which, by the way, is called Kalka Mail - as the name suggests, it's a mail train that runs from the city of Kalka to West Bengal). Once in Varanasi, we'll probably grab some dinner before settling in for the night. I think we're renting a boat and taking it down the Ganges at sunrise tomorrow. Should be interesting - Varanasi, Hinduism's most sacred city, is famous for the hundreds of cremations on the shores of the river.

Oh, side note. Saw the Taj Mahal yesterday. Felt obliged to mention that. It was beautiful and it lived up to the hype, but monuments, tombs, and forts grow redundant after awhile. Imagine that.