Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Hours passed, but the landscape of plains and plowed fields did not change. A familiar melancholy descended on me, the effect of a long hot afternoon on a train rolling through a landscape of sparse trees and stricken fields. Near a halt in the middle of nowhere, a man was squatting on his haunches at a level crossing on a country road, and two men on bikes and an old red bus waited for the train to pass by. As the train continued across the great abdomen of India, I thought that if you didn't see this—the immensity, the destitution, the emptiness, the ageless solitude—you would know nothing of India.

The huts could not have been simpler: made of piled-up boulders, the roofs formed of bundles of straw. The crude plow was pulled by a bullock, a man guiding the animal and whipping it with a switch. To say "Mumbai is in Maharashtra" is meaningless, because nothing could be less like Mumbai than this vast plain and its fields of lentils, a herdsman watching from an embankment as his twenty or so buffaloes bathed in a river. They rolled and wallowed, dipping their heads. Their horns were painted red.

The day was very hot, over 100 degrees, but the heat did not slow down the hawkers at Sholapur.

"Jews—fruity-fruity jews!"

"Mag-zeens, mag-zeens!"

"Pani, pani, pani, pani—vohta!"

"Biscuits, cheeps! Biscuits, cheeps!"

Seeing me, a man said, "Luntz?"

"What have you got?"

He was dispensing dahl in cups. I bought some, and a bag of pistachios and a bottle of water, and ate and watched India pass. After eleven hours the landscape had hardly changed, flat to the horizon, fields plowed by oxen, a gathering of women with brass jars at a well among grazing sheep, like a lithograph plate from the Old Testament—and even now, in the state of Karnataka, the villages seemed as remote and ruinous as any I had ever seen on earth, and many of them clearly visible to anyone traveling to the much-hyped city of Bangalore.

Towards the end of the afternoon, two young men joined me in my compartment. They were information technology employees, working in Bangalore. They spoke in what I took to be their own language—anyway, incomprehensible to me—for about fifteen minutes before I realized they were speaking English.

Rahul, the older of the two, complained that some IT workers in Bangalore were making the almost unheard-of sum of $30,000 a year, raising real estate prices.

The other young man, Suresh, talked about his travels, training IT people in places such as Singapore and Bangkok. He claimed that Indians were tormented by the police in both of those cities.

Just at dusk, at a stop in Dudhan, in the last light of day, a man with a withered foot and foreshortened leg limped with a stick, poling himself down the platform. Then the sun buried itself in the dust beyond the shacks. A woman approached the train, pleading for money, holding a skinny naked child, obviously ill, flies on its face and flies crawling between its lips.

The sight of these desperate wraiths stayed with me in the darkness. I slept. I woke to sunlight, the train gliding through palm groves, all the windows open, the fragrance of the countryside filling the coach.

***

SMALL, SLEEPY, TREE-SHADED, and bungaloidal Bangalore was so inconsequential at the time I crossed India on the Railway Bazaar that I didn't stop on my way to Madras. It was a town of retired people, many of them British, Indian army officers, fading God-botherers, with all that implied: gardening, bowling, cricket-watching, churchgoing, running Women's Institute jumble sales, among the clubbable and the soon-to-be-decrepit in the limbo of Staying On, the Indian equivalent of Cheltenham or Bognor Regis or Palm Beach. They could sit on the veranda, sipping cups of tea or chota pegs of locally distilled brain damage and moan how India was going to hell.

"It was pensioners' paradise, you can say," an Indian told me soon after I arrived. His name was Vishad Gupta, and he laughed as he said it.

He was laughing because, about four or five years ago, a dramatic thing happened: Bangalore exploded, becoming the center of India's high-tech industry. The placid city of fewer than a million inhabitants became a boomtown of seven million.

"It happened for three reasons," Vishad said, putting up one finger to indicate the first reason. Vishad's title was Director of Strategies and Business Initiatives for one of Tata's subsidiaries, in a new Bangalore business-only suburb called Electronics City Phase 2. Phase 1 was full. It was a short distance from the center of Bangalore, but a long car ride because of the nightmarish traffic, which included bikes, scooter rickshaws, ox carts, sacred cows, and hurrying pedestrians, all of them in the road—the broken, dusty road under construction.