Ticket to Ride Read online

  I am sitting next to a polite teenager who introduces herself as Visha and who is travelling with her mother to stay with grandparents in the cooler climate of the Himalayan foothills during the summer.

  Copies of The Sunday Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Hindustan Times are distributed to each passenger who wants one. I read an article in The Sunday Guardian about a big clearup under way at New Delhi station. Cleaning squads have been introduced in an attempt to ensure the removal of the 12 tonnes of garbage estimated to be produced each day in the station. Meanwhile, waiting rooms free of 'paan-spits' have been established; paan-spits are the buckets for the red-coloured spit produced by those who chew areca nuts. The station is one of the busiest in the country, handling more than 500,000 passengers on 350 trains each weekday, I learn; as this is a Sunday it is much quieter than usual. The cleaning blitz on the station is part of a nationwide campaign launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to create a 'Clean India' by 2 October 2019, to mark the 150th anniversary of Gandhi's birth.

  'Cleaner?' says my neighbour, who has noticed me reading the story. Visha makes no further comment, arches a doubtful eyebrow (she clearly does not consider New Delhi station to be in the slightest bit cleaner), and puts on some earphones to listen to tinny pop music with a Bollywood beat. Just about everyone is wired up some way or other.

  We head off, seats facing backwards, in the direction of Kalka. A welcome announcement is made in English, highlighting the rule that 'no smoking is permitted ever in the washrooms'. A pot-bellied ticket inspector with gold-striped epaulettes, an Indian Railways badge, a clipboard and a bushy moustache checks our tickets.

  My neighbour on the other side of the aisle places three mobile phones neatly on the table before him, looks at them to make sure they are just so, then picks up one and starts playing a computer game. He also has a moustache, and is wearing a tent-like limegreen polo shirt. He is so large that his neighbour in the seat beyond is hard to make out. All that is visible is part of a turban that dips forward now and then as a hand reaches for a teacup next to a flask. It is as though the bulbous lime-green belly has sprouted a tea-drinking claw.

  This is the set-up in FIRST AC CHAIR CAR, which is how the carriage is billed on the outside. We are on a Shatabdi Express, a class of fast train that runs during the day in India. 'Shatabdi' means 'century' in Hindi; the name was given to commemorate the centenary of the birth of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1989.

  Indian trains are complicated. I know this because even experts on Indian railways admit as much. 'The Indian rail system is one of the most complex in the world,' says the Indian Railway Secrets website. Other than Shatabdi Express trains, the website goes on to explain, there are also Rajdhani Express trains. These travel long distances and go overnight, with sleeper carriages; I am to return in one of these to New Delhi. Then there is the Duronto Express, the fastest of all train classes in India, with the most expensive tickets. This one has an average speed of 82 mph and takes 16 hours 20 minutes between Delhi and Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), 28 hours 20 minutes between Delhi and Chennai (formerly Madras), 29 hours between Kolkata and Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), or a whopping 44 hours from Delhi to Kerala.

  Add to this, Garib Rath trains (with air conditioning but cheaper than Shatabdi or Rajdhani), Jan Shatabdi trains (cheaper still than Shatabdi but without air conditioning), Sampark Kranti Express trains (a sleeper service with air conditioning that connects the regions to the capital), Superfast Express/Mail trains (which travel long distances at an average speed of 55 mph), regular Express trains (which make more stops than Superfast Express trains, so are slower), normal passenger trains, metros and monorails… and you can begin to appreciate just how complex Indian trains are. Mix in the various different classes of travel, always differentiated by whether air conditioning is offered or not, plus whether carriages are sleepers, and you begin to lose yourself in a world of Indian train nuances that can only, you imagine, be properly understood by the master controller of Indian Railways, tucked away in his no doubt air-conditioned office, somewhere in the depths of New Delhi.

  This is what Indian trains are all about though, as I am quickly discovering: the details.

  A layer of caramel-coloured pollution hangs over the edge of New Delhi as we roll northwards; nothing like as thick as the fug in China. Kids rest on a crumbling wall next to breezeblock buildings, idly watching us pass. These structures are covered in creepers, as though nature is on the point of taking over the suburbs. In sections between the low-level houses, yards full of rubbish compete with the spread of vegetation. A shirtless man on a rooftop stops repairing an aerial to watch our Shatabdi Express. Cows munch on weeds by the edge of the track. Ramshackle rickshaw depots lead to dusty school playing grounds, then a shanty town of corrugated-roof houses and a wasteland piled high with rubbish heaps that look like sand dunes in a desert, if you squint your eyes.

  Everywhere there are people: hanging out washing, scolding children, striding towards corner shops, gossiping, leaning against trees, scooping food from bowls, lying flat out, fastening bags, washing clothes, placing towels on heads (for protection against the sun), squatting cross-legged in doorways, gesticulating, pontificating, arguing, smiling, waving, gazing, letting time slip by. The unimaginative and soulless, grand-scale town planning of China of my last journey has gone, replaced by a cornucopia of vibrant life. Folk are getting on with matters, down by the tracks.

  After the city, the countryside is parched. Termite mounds rise from patches of jungle, looking like ancient monuments to some secretive ant-God (perhaps). Buffalo drag ploughs across fields. Steam billows from the cooling tower of a power station.

  An attendant wearing a burgundy shirt and a pinstripe waistcoat brings tea and a breakfast tray. This is an event. Like the 'arm with the turban', I am given a red flask of hot water and a cup with a teabag. Visha declines hers and watches me as I pour the hot water and drink the tea black (I don't like 'creamer' sachets).

  'That is very unusual,' she comments. 'No sugar either. Unusual.'

  She returns her concentration to her music.

  Breakfast consists of two slices of bread, a jam 'blister pack', a 'butter chiplet' [sic] and a 'tomato souce sachet' [sic]. The quantities of each are written on a paper menu on the tray, so that you are able to query the allocation of one slice of bread, should such a travesty ever befall you, when in fact you know that you ought to be allotted two. Creative flair has been permitted on the packaging of the bread: Hearty brown bread! The original taste of brown bread! Egyptians were the first to add yeast to bread transforming flat bread to something lighter – around 10,000 BC man first started eating a crude form of flat bread, a baked combination of flour and bread. Meanwhile, the ketchup is marked enhance your taste ketchup, and the sugar is referred to as superfine sugar. Only the best in FIRST AC CHAIR CAR. I eat the butter chiplets. They taste like buttery lukewarm hot dogs (so I add a bit of tomato souce).

  I discover from the attendant, who comes to clear the trays, that the train has 15 carriages, 13 of which are second class (with 78 seats each) and two of which are first (with 50 seats). The train is 25 years old, he says. In a fit of rail enthusiasm, I ask him what type of locomotive powers the train.

  'Oh no,' he replies, looking at me askance. He doesn't know the answer.

  At this, the man with the lime-green polo shirt introduces himself as Rakesh Wason. He is a 'wholesaler of ladies' fashion' who has been visiting Delhi from his home town of Chandigarh 'for business purposes'. He tells me that the Indian economy is 'a bit up-down, up-down' and that he likes cricket. Then he shows me a picture on his phone. It's of Rakesh with a policeman in Manchester, where he visited relatives before going on to London to watch events at the 2012 Olympics. Another shot is of him standing next to a Network Rail sign, and another by a Virgin train. Without much difficulty, I seem to have unearthed an Indian rail enthusiast.

  'Virgin was very good,' he says. 'I prefer to
go business class. On a Saturday, if you want to upgrade it is just £15.' He says this as though he is letting me in on a secret. 'I paid £30 for the two of us and had the free coffee and snacks.'

  Mr Wason is a fan of Brighton, not so sure about Birmingham, and loves Madame Tussauds: 'The Queen, Margaret Thatcher, Obama, Benazir Bhutto, Indira Gandhi: very good!'

  Adopting his conspiratorial style once more, he advises me to go to Madame Tussauds to see the waxworks for myself. As he is doing so, the turban beyond his belly pokes outwards, like a hermit crab emerging from its shell. It is attached to the head of a thin, bearded man with a broad smile. He gives me his card. His name is Professor J. P. S. Sawhney, a cardiologist from Delhi. He too is a rail enthusiast – they seem to be everywhere.

  'Trains!' he says, leaning forwards so he can see me. 'Switzerland has the best trains. Stockholm to Oslo: this was also a very good experience. Picturesque, beautiful place. US: trains are not very good. The quality is poor. In India there is the Palace on Wheels, you know.'

  The Palace on Wheels makes up yet another category of Indian trains: using plush old-fashioned carriages of the sort once popular with the maharajas of Indian royalty. I've decided to give the service a miss as it seems too touristy.

  Professor Sawhney and Mr Wason say that they always try to travel first class on Shatabdi trains.

  'I was going to fly this time, but there were no seats,' says Professor Sawhney. 'There were no seats on this train either. So I called a patient at the Ministry of Railways. I was then confirmed a ticket. My client prepared this.'

  Mr Wason had been in a similar situation; however, he found a seat via a different method: 'I had to pay double. Today is my wife's birthday, so I had to go urgently.'

  Professor Sawhney surprises me: 'The Dalai Lama is my patient.' Shimla is close to Dharamshala, where the Dalai Lama lives in exile from Tibet, and I'm planning to see the mountain-top town. 'I was with him for six days as he had a problem: one of the arteries was blocked,' the professor says. 'It was a wonderful experience. He gave me a book with his autograph.'

  The professor had provided the Dalai Lama with advice on his diet, including a recommendation to eat more bananas, to which the spiritual leader had particularly taken. 'We had many talks about his teachings: truthfulness, simplicity, honesty, all those things.'

  Professor Sawhney returns to health matters: 'Heart disease is the biggest killer of mankind. For the Indian population the big problem is the lack of exercise. And we are overeating, like the Americans.'

  Mr Wason keeps quiet during this.

  'You can live off about one quarter of what you eat. We can eat milk, meat and eggs but also take lots of fruit, vegetables and nuts: almonds, walnuts, cashew, pistachio. Soya milk: it is good. And don't use too much oil when cooking food.'

  Professor Sawhney gives me the telephone number of the Dalai Lama's main doctor, Doctor Dorji, whom he believes will be able to arrange an audience with the spiritual leader; I'm intending to travel by vehicle from Shimla to Dharamshala (there are no direct trains). Then Professor Sawhney takes my pulse using a device attached to his mobile phone. I am running at 71 beats a minute. Satisfied that I am not about to drop dead, the professor retreats, crab-like, behind his neighbour's belly. I appear to have been given the all-clear by the Dalai Lama's cardiologist.

  The subject of diet exhausted, Mr Wason takes over once again.

  'You know, I used to be a wedding photographer,' he says, apropos of nothing. 'For seventeen years I was in that line, but it is going way down. Everyone knows how to take pictures like this. Digital cameras: who needs wedding photographers?'

  He doesn't sound especially disappointed by his career change.

  We are on the outskirts of Chandigarh and kids are playing cricket on a dusty pitch next to an electricity plant.

  'Le Corbusier: French,' says Mr Wason. 'He created this city. One and a half million people. Very beautiful city. I went to take a look and I am still there.'

  Le Corbusier was responsible for overseeing the new city in the 1950s, designing a grid pattern of streets that makes Chandigarh quite different from the chaotic labyrinthine set-up of most Indian conurbations. It is divided into 91 sectors, each assigned to four zones – A, B, C and D – which are separated by broad boulevards. In sector 17B, there's a science museum and the National Portrait Gallery, with many pictures of the country's freedom fighters against the British. Meanwhile the Nek Chand Rock Garden, a space filled with eye-catching, world-famous sculptures by the artist Nek Chand, is in sector 1 in the city centre.

  It all sounds a bit Truman Show. The original architect for the city was a less rigid, more relaxed Pole named Matthew Nowicki. Sadly, he died in a plane crash before his plans could be put into motion. This was when Corbusier stepped in, creating his science-fiction-like, futuristic vision.

  Mr Wason is full of praise for the city: 'So clean, so well ordered, so easy to get around.'

  We pull into Chandigarh station. Mr Wason and Professor Sawhney disembark. Mr Wason insists on taking my picture with my camera, so he can show off his photography skills. I join him on the platform. He drops down on one knee and fiddles expertly with the zoom lens, while telling me where to stand. We all shake hands, and then I return to my seat in the carriage and the train moves on, passing an enigmatic, guru-like man in a blue robe, matching turban and long white beard. He smiles at the train, looking as though he's stepped out of the pages of a J. R. R. Tolkien book.

  Then we travel through jungle and the train starts to climb. The foothills of the Himalayas begin here.

  I go for a wander. There are two toilet choices: 'TOILET WESTERN STYLE' or 'TOILET INDIAN STYLE' (a hole in the floor). Neither is exactly wonderful. The second-class carriages seem to differ mainly in that they have three seats on one side of the aisle and two on the other, thus making them more cramped than first class, which has two seats on either side.

  I return to FIRST AC CHAIR CAR and glance through the papers. They're packed with mischief. The Sunday Guardian shows a picture of Prime Minister Modi and China's President Xi Jinping taking a selfie in Beijing. Modi, who is on an official visit, has used his phone and appears to have taken President Xi Jinping by surprise. The Indian prime minister is said to be a fan of selfies, and this is the first time anyone has dared to try the stunt on the Chinese president. Another article describes a fatherand-son team from Patiala who have just built a termite-proof wooden 'wonder car'. The Chennai Super Kings cricket team has 'demolished' Kings XI Punjab in a 'clinical performance'. This report is next to a 'WAG of the Week' picture of a bikini-wearing girlfriend of one of the players. The front page of The Sunday Times runs a story headlined: ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION IN INDIA UP 55% IN 20 YEARS. During this period, only the Russians and Estonians have increased their drinking more, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

  That's one of the things about being on trains: you have the time to read bits and bobs, to patch together an understanding of a place through its incidentals (and India's English-language newspapers are overflowing with those).

  I close my eyes and feel the train rising further still. I doze for a while, and when I wake we are entering a city. We are about to arrive in Kalka.

  Footplate ride in the Himalayas

  Kalka to Shimla

  So what type of train brought me to Kalka? What type of loco? I take a snap of the front of the train at Kalka station, in true rail-enthusiast style. By now, I have no shame. It is a WAP-7 30248. The body is a mishmash of green and blue colours with rusty streaks and a heavy grille on the front window. I have no idea what the numbers mean and I cannot find the driver, though I later check on the internet and discover that someone has posted a film of this very train on YouTube.

  Unbelievable.

  It is, if Mr Akshay Gupta is to be trusted, a Duronto Express locomotive. So, although we were on a Shatabdi Express train, we were being pulled by a Duronto Express loco. Simple. At the time I take a
look, Mr Gupta's 31-second YouTube film has attracted almost 1,000 views.

  There are clearly a fair few Indian trainspotters out there.

  I cross a platform and come to a train that is internationally renowned. New Delhi–Kalka was the warm-up for the main act: Kalka–Shimla. This is a narrow-gauge train with a twotone red-and-pale-yellow livery, and a bustle of passengers attempting to board. I go to the front to take another picture – I might as well try to have one of each ride, and this one is especially photogenic. It is, after all, nicknamed 'the Toy Train'.

  As I do so, I meet Peter Jones, a lanky, local-government licensing manager from Bromham in Bedfordshire. Like me, he has come to India to ride this train. Like me, he is also capturing a few images on camera.

  'Oh, I used to be one,' Peter says when I ask if he's a trainspotter. 'When I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Now I just like trains. We still regularly go on steam and diesel outings. Annually.'