Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

AMRITSAR CENTRAL STATION had been built in 1931; the date was carved on its red brick façade. The antique weirdness was another pleas ure of India. Entering the station, I felt I could have been walking backwards into the past, passing the big gloomy station restaurant and its overhead fans, the urchins chasing each other on the platform, the Sikh in a brown suit and blue turban, the man in dusty pajamas sleeping against a pile of burlap bags. And there were the station's hustlers, children mostly, selling bottles of soda they carried in a big bucket, or ice cream bars they hawked out of a wooden box, or with shoeshine kits slung over one skinny shoulder, all of them completely fluent in English but illiterate.

"What does that sign say?"

The boy was about thirteen, and I was pointing to one of the more dramatic-looking examples of railway strike graffiti.

"I don't know. I don't go to school."

Half-naked sadhus, holy men with metal tridents and all their possessions in one small cloth bag; groups of women looking tidy and serene amid the squalor; a man hoicking just under a No Spitting sign; fierce mustached matrons and small girls, nearly all the women in saris or Punjabi dress, all the men in turbans. It could have been the 1930s; it could have been 1973, when I had been on the Railway Bazaar trip. Superficially, nothing had changed, and it was uplifting, as though time had stood still, as though I were young again.

"What is your bogie?" the conductor asked.

I told him and he showed me my seat. It was a day train, the seven-hour trip to Delhi, not as fancy or as fast as the Shatabdi Express, but comfortable, on time, with a meal service, and soon rolling and bouncing through the wheat fields of the Punjab—Pakistan just a few miles to the west.

I had thought of taking the train to Lahore, but the news from Pakistan discouraged me. Riots had recently taken place in many Pakistani cities, Lahore included, after this week's court case in which a man in neighboring Kabul, one Abdul Rahman, was put on trial for converting to Christianity. The charge was "apostasy." One of the Hadiths specified death as the punishment for a Muslim who abandons the faith. But when the man's life was spared, riots broke out, huge mobs crying "Death to Christians!"

"Death to America!" was another shout, and "Abdul Rahman must be executed!" Meanwhile, court officials pondering the man's baptism said, "Rahman's mental health will be evaluated."

These Koranic laws were enacted in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which theoretically were our allies. But I knew it wasn't safe. The journalist Daniel Pearl had been recently abducted and beheaded in Pakistan, and Westerners were routinely harassed in the bazaars. This was the result of billions of dollars spent and many lives lost in the futile attempt by the U.S. government to prop up the governments of these countries.

"This is a young democracy," the American secretary of state remarked when Abdul Rahman's life was on the line for his crime of apostasy, and Afghanistan needed apologists.

So I didn't revisit Pakistan. Instead, I headed south and intended to keep going until I got to the southernmost tip of India.

Many people boarded the train at Ludhiana, among them Kuldeep and Kumar in the seats next to me. Neither wore a turban, yet I guessed they might be Sikhs—Westernized from their residence in England, where they said they lived, both in Ilford, Essex. Kuldeep had gone to England as a ten-year-old; Kumar had been born there. Both were visiting relatives in Ludhiana. Kuldeep was the more talkative of the two.

"Could you live here?" I asked him.

"I'm a Punjabi, I could live here easily," he said. "But my wife was born in England. She'd find it hard to adjust in a village."

"What would it be like for her?"

"Maybe too quiet. But I tell you, village life is good. Plenty of food, cost of living is low, no stress. I don't need nightclubs. I'd like it." He seemed a bit rueful that he was heading back to England. "This India is different from the India I left. Some people are coming back."

"Building houses?"

"Plenty. Big villas. Not many in Amritsar, because it's a border town. No one wants to risk living so close to Pakistan. But Ludhiana is quiet and safe. Jullundur, too. There, you see?"

We were passing a cluster of houses in a walled compound.

Kumar said, "We have two growing seasons. You see all this wheat?" I did, it was unmissable, green and gorgeous, silky in the sunshine. "This will be harvested in a few weeks. Then the rice will be planted, and the rains will come and fill the paddy fields."

"This whole place is connected, too," Kuldeep said. "Those farmers look like rustics and hicks, but they all have cell phones. Hardly anyone uses a land line."

"What do they worry about?" I asked.

"They worry about democracy, as I do," he said. "The scheduled classes, for example."