Indian Takeaway (11 page)

I had seven more cities to visit and seven more meals to cook. I felt like it may well end up being seven more lifetimes. Maybe that hippy in the pastry shop on Byres Road was right.

‘Y
our kind attention, please. Train number 6222 Mysore Express will leave platform three at 21.30 hours.’

‘Welcome to Chennai Station. Please do not sit on the floor.’

The faux-welcoming voice of the slightly snotty lady on the prerecorded tannoy is the first thing I hear over the dull roar of life that seems to be sucked into this building. And what a building! A massive marble structure with unfeasibly high ceilings, it seems that all of humanity have a train to catch from Chennai station tonight. The few seats that were available have long since been claimed, and old, sari-clad ladies lay sleeping peacefully on the floor of the concourse, flagrantly disregarding the tannoy’ed request, waiting for a train from nowhere to take them somewhere. There is a buzz about this place, the sense of constant movement, permanent transience, an indefatigable energy. Music blares from speakers, people blare at each other and TV screens blare heroines miming to the latest Bollywood hit. The station is open on three sides and from these three sides they come and they gather, expertly orientating themselves around and into the ever diminishing gaps between brown flesh.

This can’t be more different from my first train journey. Chennai Station is much more akin to my expectations than
Trivandrum was; in Chennai the only expectation is how many extra bodies can be crammed onto already full departing trains. This sense of chaos around me only makes me feel more smug about my prearranged ticket.

I saunter amongst the pandemonium. I am worry-free; what shall I do first? Shall I check on the status of my train? Why ever should I do that? I have aeons of time. Protocol suggests a small, sweet Indian coffee from one of the scores of coffee shacks on the periphery of the concourse. A sweeter, more delicious coffee I have yet to taste in India. Shall I check the status of my train now? Are you insane? But the last thing I want is a panic. Which is exactly why I had prebooked a slightly more expensive air-conditioned white ambassador car to bring me to the station. He had arrived quarter of an hour early and my wiry dark-skinned driver with his impossibly full moustache had spent the extra minutes buffing an extra sheen of whiteness on his already gleaming car, a whiteness sadly lost to the inexorable gloom of night. As I skipped out of Greenwoods, my trusty wheely bag by my side, I reminded myself that I had given myself a clear two hours to make the journey, recalling the words of Thom Yorke from Radiohead in the song ‘No Surprises’.

The cab journey had been generally smooth. Now I have a full hour before departure. I amble carefree to grab a couple of pyramidical samosas, noting a banana vendor on my way, making a mental note to purchase a bunch on my journey back to the as yet unmolested departures board. Having smugly dawdled the first thirty-five minutes away I should have sensed the initial stages of hubris gathering within me. The train to Mysore is at platform three. It is an enormous snake of carriages falling away to a train-like dot in the platform distance. I reckon it would take Sebastian Coe, at the peak
of his powers, at least two minutes to run its length, with a feisty Steve Ovett kicking hard behind him. I finally look at my ticket. I have never in all my life seen a single train ticket that conveys so much information. It declares the distance to travel; whether I am an adult or child; gender specifications; age details; ticket number which is different from a booking number which in turn varies from a reservation number; the class of journey; some other random but rather official-looking numbers; coach number; berth number; seat number; ticketing authority; concession status, rupee fee. It even has a note on the side suggesting a ‘Happy Journey’. It’s astonishing really. This single ticket has more information than some novellas I have read. And the information is truly inspired if you know what to do with it, if you know how to decode it and make the information work in your favour. Such decoding is lost on me.

I know I am at the right station at the right time; I have been reciting it in my sleep for the last two days. My gender is correct and I have to thank them for making me three years younger on the ticket than I really am. What is vexing me are the details of my carriage and berth number: carriage WL/17 and berth WL/05. There seem to be no such carriages; more worrying still, there seem to be no carriages even close to that description.

I have very limited experience of Indian travel as an adult, but one thing I can be sure of: whatever else one might say about the trains here, the seat numbering system is exemplary; never in all my train-travelling experience has there ever been confusion or fuss about where exactly on the train I should sit. Never. So you can understand my confusion and fuss at being asked to locate a carriage that simply doesn’t seem to exist.

Having perambulated the entire length of the train I am none the wiser and still unseated. Luckily for me, or so I think, each carriage has a printout plastered on the side listing names and seat allocations. The only carriages that don’t provide such information are the third-class compartments. These are already full of people, boxes, bags of rice and the odd chicken. They are euphemistically referred to as ‘free-seating areas’, a.k.a. first come, first served. I walk carriage lengths at a time, samosas and bananas in one hand, case and ticket in the other. My nervousness grows exponentially as each printout draws a blank. It seems that every conceivable anagram of the five letters K-O-H-L-I appears save for the correct spelling of my name. I scuttle past another third-class carriage, catching myself thinking the worst. Is this where I will have to sit? Having checked every carriage, every list twice I end up back at the head of the train, none the wiser and a great deal wearier. My name appears nowhere. Not in type, not in biro, not in chalk; not even in my own imagination. It is like I have ceased to exist. I have been air-brushed out of Indian railway history in some sort of Stalinist manoeuvre to revise my very being. (As you can see I wasn’t taking this experience too personally.)

I look at my ticket again in the vain hope that the 2km hike up and down the train might have imbued me with some new power of Indian Railway Ticket Understanding, or IRTU as I will now and for ever call it. Alas, my IRTU is still at novice level. My IRTU has got me to:

a) The right station

b) The right platform

c) On the right day

d) At the right time

Thereafter my IRTU has failed me. Spectacularly. As I hopelessly flounder, examining my ticket for the thousandth
time, the lone Indian Railways official policing this platform walks past. Seeing me obviously confused, he ups his pace in an attempt to avoid close questioning. I manage somehow to trap him as I spread myself and my case and my samosa and bananas as wide as I can. He barely looks at my ticket and instructs me to board any old carriage and let the omniscient conductor sort out the fine detail.

It is 9:24. I have six minutes to make a decision. Time being of the essence I jump into the final carriage, a first-class carriage I have intimately examined four times thus far this evening. I find the first available seat and sit down. And I wait. Time is best killed in the pursuit of eating. I eat my samosas, knowing full well I am an interloper sitting in the wrong seat, trying to use the eating of a pyramidical Indian snack as some confident cover for my crime of seat theft.

Conscience gets the better of me. I decide to move to a different seat moments before a family of three crowd around my samosa-crumbed seat and seek refuge. The train has pulled off, a detail that has passed me by. I search in vain for a seat called WL5. I settle on another seat, a seat that very roughly approximates to some of the numbers on my ticket. It isn’t seat WL5, but it is a seat 5 and it resides amongst some jolly young student types. I brush samosa crumbs from my mouth. I hold my case, my bananas and my breath. I close my eyes and hope that sleep will offer some solace and shelter from my seat-less existence.

No sooner have my eyes shut than images revisit me of the mayhem in the third-class carriage; my imagination runs riot. I dream of tooth-free, wrinkled grandmothers in skimpy cotton saris tempting me with newspaper-wrapped food, the provenance of which could not be guaranteed; their long, bony brown fingers ushering me forward, nothing but darkness
behind their cold, uncaring eyes. My sleeping mind transfixes on an insolent, big-eyed child, a girl who has, so early in her life, developed anti-Sikh tendencies, eating a rotten mango and offering me nothing but hate. And that chicken, now the size of a small man clucking straight at me, questions my very existence with every juddering movement of its overly large head. And I feel myself being inexorably pulled towards this unreserved, third-class dystopia, this free-for-all of humanity, mangoes and poultry; and there is nothing I can do to stop it happening …

I am snapped out of my stupor by one of the jolly students who gently rocks my shoulder, sparing me from the bony-fingered granny. He politely and eloquently informs me that my big fat hairy Glaswegian arse is parked on the wrong seat, a seat that does in fact belong to his friend, another jolly young student type. I am all out of ideas, so I simply submit to fate and show him my ticket. He takes one look and to him, everything became clear. WL, he told me stands for Wait Listed. Wait Listed? All I can see now in my mind’s eye is a granny chicken with big insolent eyes, eating a mango. I exclaim. Audibly. I ask him what that means, Wait Listed. He shrugs his shoulders non-commitally. I ask him if I would have to sit with the granny and the chicken and the mango girl. He looks worried. He kindly agrees to sort it out for me. He takes my ticket and digs out his mobile phone from deep within his pocket. Now, remember when I listed all that information they print on the ticket? Well, just above the space where they print your grandmother’s maiden name, the colour of your first pet and your inside leg measurement, there is an official-looking number. He texts this official-looking number to some train conductor somewhere in cyberspace. Within seconds the phone beeps back the information that I
have seat 22 in carriage A1. A1: the very first carriage on the train. And here I am in the very last carriage. I thank him, I pick up my case, my bananas and myself and head towards the front of the train.

Now here’s a little detail you may want to carry with you if you ever find yourself at the furthest available point on a train from your designated seat. Unlike the trains in the UK, Indian train carriages are not interconnected: at least not always. (Needless to say they are interconnected on all those journeys where you find yourself in the right seat, in the right carriage, at the right time.) But as I should have remembered from my early endeavours to try and find my seat, this train is made up of three distinct sets of carriages with no connection between each group of three. I have not fully taken the time to appreciate this little quirk of carriage non-connectivity until I have banged and battered myself down the three lengths of narrow gangway, apologising to the myriad of legs and elbows I collide with as I try to move elegantly through the moving train. After the third carriage I reach an impasse, an impasse of sky-blue painted Indian metal. How am I going to get to my seat? Quite simply: I have to wait until the train makes its next stop and then dash as far as I can along the platform before the train sets off again. An inexact science, I trust you’ll agree.

I wait impatiently for the first stop. I decide, in the interests of pragmatism, to ditch the bananas: they will only slow me down. I reckon I could cover the length of three carriages in about five minutes (five minutes would seem to be the minimum stopping time of Indian trains at stations). If I manage to achieve three carriages per stop, then it shouldn’t take more than ten or eleven stops to reach the final carriage. Piece of cake. I limber up as the train seems to be slowing down into a station stop.

I alight the train and run like some Madras Moses, parting the sea of brown humanity before me. It seems I am the only one heading to the front of the train. The clock is ticking, my heart is pounding. I manage to pass six carriages and find myself running alongside third class again. I’m sure I see the dead-eyed granny and the mango-eating girl as they are egged on by the mutant chicken. I avert my gaze and keep sprinting. Miraculously the train stays stationary for just enough time to enable me to make my way out of the balmy, sweaty evening into the cool, calm and air-conditioned ambience of first class and the expectant emptiness of seat 22, carriage A1. I feel like I have arrived home. And not a stray chicken in sight.

I buy a hot sweet coffee for 5 rupees from the boy who walks up and down the carriage shouting ‘coffee’ (actually he shouts ‘coppee’, but I know what he means). In seat 22, carriage A1 I find myself ensconced with a fat, prehistoric man in a white linen shirt, white linen trousers and a white linen jacket. I fully expect his wife to be constructed from white linen. She merely looks long-suffering and tired as he continues the marathon phone call he has been engaged in since I joined the carriage, by now more than an hour or so ago. He continues grunting down the phone.