Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

We were watching the Punjab go past from the breezy passageway of the express train. With its fields of wheat, the women in shawls and the men in turbans, bicycles on the dusty roads, the countryside was unchanged from what I had seen all those years before. But Mohinder Singh's confident mood and the good humor of Kuldeep and Kumar were something new. My memory of India was of people looking to the past. What struck me now was meeting Indians who looked to the future.

I said, "What do you think is India's problem?"

Mohinder Singh said, "Crux of India's problem is overpopulation. As soon as we build any kind of infrastructure it becomes inadequate because of," he shrugged, "we have too many people."

***

BUT AFTER ALL THE TALK in the Shan-e-Punjab (Glory of the Punjab) Express of the success of India, the wealth of Punjab, the national renewal, all the optimists got off the train in the darkness at New Delhi Station to find the old India stubbornly clinging to life. A thousand passengers disembarked, burdened by bags, suitcases, sacks, children, old grannies, and jerry cans of ghee, to find thousands more waiting for onward trains under the glaring lights—brighter in India than anywhere else I've been, the dazzling light that prevents you from seeing things.

The permanent residents of the station lay stretched out under sheets and blankets. Mark Twain, who saw such crowds of travelers and squatters, includes a satirical two-page description of a big-city railway station in India in Following the Equator (1897). And then he loses his jollity; he is baffled and disturbed by the squatters: "These silent crowds sat there with their humble bundles and baskets and small household gear about them, and patiently waited—for what?" The squatters were still there, still waiting, the scene unchanged, Twain's words as true now as they had been a century ago. The people were sleeping, hundreds of them, completely covered, big and small, some like corpses in body bags, some like campers, some like mummies; lying in family groups under the lights at the Ajmeri Gate side of the station.

All the optimists from Punjab who got off the train with me walked past these hordes of homeless sleepers, beggars, squatters. The distressing scene, another fact of Indian life, was so obvious no one mentioned it, or even glanced at it.

In this dry season the Delhi air was a settled cloud of dust, of smoke, of car fumes, a fog of eye-stinging grit, and most of all a sweetish stink of too many people, the emanation of their outdoor habits that clots your nostrils. It is not a city smell but a suggestion of deforestation and desert and pulverized brick and wood-fueled cooking fires, the odor of humanity, which is also an odor of death. Even in the pitch-darkness of one of the frequent Delhi power cuts, you would know you were in an overpopulated place that existed in a crisis of old-fangledness.

I stayed in the Delhi hotel where I'd stayed before. It was now luxurious. In a mood of self-pitying nostalgia I remembered how, long ago, I had tried to phone my wife in London from here and had met only frustration—her faint and evasive voice, not much warmth, and then a rising tide of static. "Speak louder," the hotel operator said over a sound like crashing surf on the line. Phoning was no problem these days. As the man had said, "Even rickshaw wallahs have mobile phones." From my window I could see that the dust cloud of the night had resolved itself into a grainy fog that hovered over the great horizontal city—no skyscrapers but many tombs, domes, monuments, mosques, temples, riverside forts, ancient walls, and obelisks, wreathed in the vapor that had a human smell.

I got a box and filled it with my coat and gloves, my fleece vest, the icons I'd bought, and my maps of Georgia and Turkmenistan. I sent the stuff home, unburdening myself. Changing trains, I had found summertime; no more cold weather until Japan. With a lighter bag, just a change of clothes in it, and my small briefcase of papers, I was eager to move on.

Looking for onward train tickets, I went back to New Delhi Station and found the international booking hall. In the past, as in Amritsar, I had paid an Indian to stand in line for me. But this was well organized— not much of a line, and I could pay in dollars. A proportion of railway seats were now set aside for foreigners, as a way of stimulating tourism, which in India is relatively small. The state of Hawaii has more than twice as many visitors (seven million) as the whole of India.

Seeing my application, Mr. Sharma said, "You're the writer."

"That's me. Back again after many years."

Leaping to his feet, he said, "How can I offer you service?"

"Just looking for trains."