Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE LONGER I STAYED in Bangalore, the less I liked it. Many of the Indians I met there wanted me to be dazzled by the changes, but I was more horrified than awed. What went under the name of business in Bangalore was really a form of buccaneering, all the pirates wearing dark suits and carrying cell phones instead of cutlasses. The place had not evolved; it had been crudely transformed—less city planning than the urban equivalent of botched cosmetic surgery. The proud, tidy, tree-shaded town of the recent past was now a huge, unfinished, and deforested city sagging under its dubious improvements, where it was impossible to walk without falling into an open manhole or newly dug ditch. Most of the sidewalks had been torn up and the trees cut down in the interest of street-widening. The bypass roads and flyovers were all under construction, wearing a crumbled and abandoned look, and the skinny men working on them, poking the clods of earth with small shovels, suggested they'd never be completed.

In a few years you won't recognize it, the developers said, but was that a good thing? The whole place smoldered in the foul dusty air of a building site. I realized that what I had liked about Amritsar and Jaipur was that they hadn't changed much since my first visit. They were larger, of course, but they were finished and habitable. Mumbai and Bangalore were simultaneously being torn down and built up, works in progress, but Bangalore's distance from the sea, from any body of water, made it grittier and gave it a look of anguish. And there was something else: I attempted many times to walk in Bangalore, but the traffic was so bad I seldom succeeded in crossing the street.

So, one morning at five, while the city was still asleep, only the call center shuttle buses and the temple monkeys and the sacred cows stirring, I slipped out on the express to Chennai, sliding through rice fields and palm groves to the coast. The train was fast: it was an eight-hour journey, short by Indian standards, and I arrived in time for a late lunch of Tamil food—steamed buns called idlies, masala dosa

(a kind of crepe), soupy curry, and spiced potato, coconut, and curd, served on a freshly picked palm leaf. The city I had known long ago as Madras had quadrupled in size and yet looked the same: mildewed colonial buildings, tropical gardens, the streets thick with traffic, and just to the east a long sandy shore and the sea breeze from the Indian Ocean, which was a relief.

I had planned, in retracing my steps, to take a train from here to Rameswaram, at the tip of India's nose, and then the ferry to Sri Lanka.

"But there is a trouble in Sri Lanka," a travel agent told me.

"What kind of trouble?"

"A new offensive."

Tamils were well up on developments in Sri Lanka, since they had a stake in the guerrilla war. He meant the Tamil Tigers—they had attacked some Sri Lankan soldiers. The train to the south, the night ferry to Sri Lanka, had been fairly simple, even pleasurable, thirty-three years ago, but no information about this route was available in Chennai. It was another obstacle, like the Iranian visa I'd been unable to get, the war (and the kidnapping and murder of Western travelers) in Afghanistan, and the xenophobia in Pakistan. I was trying to follow in my own footsteps, but now and then I had to make detours.

The Chennai I had known as a city of around two million was now a sprawl of eleven million. Because Chennai had few tall buildings, it could grow only by spreading and overwhelming the surrounding villages, eating up the rice paddies and wheat fields, filling them with people and cars and hastily erected houses. Long ago, I had visited the outlying hamlet of Tambaram, beyond the southern outskirts of the city. Wooded, with tall trees and palm groves and gardens, a railway station, and a small college, Tambaram was now a crowded and urbanized precinct of Chennai, its rural atmosphere overwhelmed and altered. It was strange: as Indian cities underwent name changes—Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai—their character seemed to change too, as though they no longer had to live up to that old genteel image and could become nightmarish in new ways.

"Where going, sir?" said the doorman at my hotel.

"For a walk"

"Take car, sir," he said, and signaled for a taxi.

"Never mind."

"Walking not possible, sir!"

My hotel was near Mount Road. I intended to walk west, perhaps to St. Thomas Mount, a landscape feature mentioned by Marco Polo, where (so the story goes) the doubting apostle was martyred by a Brahmin wielding a lance. Both the lance in question and the remains of the saint were enshrined in San Thome Cathedral. I also wanted to stroll along Beach Road and look for evidence of the tsunami that had hit the year before.

"I'm walking," I said, and kept going.