Indian Railways

It's okay Buddy, I'm sure your friend on the other end of the phone can hear you. In fact, he could probably hear you even without the phone. Most cellphones here are older with the tiny lcd screen and keyboard and Indians yell at them like their wives burned the chapatis. Trying to sleep on an Indian sleeper train is a futile thing anyway. There are the tea sellers walking the aisles yelling "Chai! Chai!" and the water sellers with "Bailley! Bailley!" plus all the food hawkers. I swear one guy was yelling "Sandpaper soap!" This guy though. I'm tired and have the trots and I'm tempted to stick my leg over the edge and wedge my toe in his mouth, ear, nose, anywhere that horrifies him.

You can see interesting things on the trains. So far this week I've seen cockroaches, men sleeping with rifles, a guy with a machine gun and sniffer dog and a mighty big rat. And people ask what I love about India.

Sleeper trains are brilliant in a big country like India. You go to sleep in Delhi and wake up in Varanasi or Udaipur. There are three classes of sleeper. First class gives you little compartments with your own closets, a table and two or four bunks. There's headroom to sit up on either the bottom or top bunk if you're short. Second class are curtained off cells of two facing sets of bunks with another curtained set lengthways along the corridor. Third class are open cells with three up bunks facing each other and two more bunks along the corridor. If you fold up the middle bunks you can sit up on the bottom one, otherwise there is not enough room to sit up straight on any of them. Since Indian Railways limits the number of tickets you can buy to 6 at a time you are pretty much guaranteed to be mixed in with people with whom you are not travelling. Mainly it's a nice way to meet people, but you can get inconsiderate dickheads sometimes. Hello Mr. Cellphone.

Indians without the means to buy an AC sleeper are crammed in cars with open but barred windows and benches in them. They bring huge bags of bedding and food for themselves and their families because very little is provided for them, not even a guaranteed seat. It looks like a miserable way to travel and extra ugly on trips like today when we are arriving 5 hours late.

These folks are the first things you see when arriving at the railway station. There will be blankets or sheets of plastic on the ground or the floor of the station with whole families sound asleep on them. It can be tricky to navigate to your platform around all the prone sleepers and it's somewhat amazing that they can sleep when you hear how loud the stations are.

Then there are the railways beggars. Some stations are worse than others for scabby children and scrawny elderly ladies getting in your face and poking you, then pointing to their mouths. It's awkward to experience. I like to think of myself as someone who has empathy for the poor and who helps. Here, though, if I opened my wallet or snack bag for someone it would turn into feeding time in the shark tank. They and I would be swarmed and no one would benefit. There just isn't any way to explain that to them and they are frustratingly persistent.

One of the big contradictions are in the tipping for food service. On our compartment door in big blue letters it says "Please no tips." On the paper placemat on the food tray you are requested not to tip the food servers. Yet, if you don't, they will harass you and not go away. This morning I was asleep and the guy shook me awake to demand a tip. He didn't get a big one but he did get one so I could return to sleep.The next guy was SOL.

A couple of weeks ago on the train from Delhi to Jaipur a woman gave birth on the train. She thought she had to go potty but then gave birth. Indian train toilets are foot pedestals with holes that open right out to the tracks, so out shot the baby. The new mom passed out in the can and when her parents came looking for her you can imagine the panic. It was pure luck that someone was able to find the baby on the tracks and it was healthy.

It's a testament to my yoga practice that I am now able to maintain a completely stable squat over an Indian toilet on a moving train. That's one place you absolutely do not want to fall over. It may be one of my most satisfying achievements to date.