Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Where else would they be going, draped and painted like that, dressed in yellow and red saris, russet shawls fringed with gold embroidery or ocherous borders, long saffron wraps, winking veils, heavy gold jewelry, ropes of knuckle-sized beads and heavy bangles, feet and hands painted with henna, the age-old plumage, brilliant and colorful? They were people of the vast desert state of Rajasthan, where the houses of Jodhpur are bright blue, the façades and palaces of Jaipur are pink, and men's turbans are crimson. As though to distance themselves from the dusty hues of their surroundings, Rajasthanis are emphatically adorned. But this is true of desert dwellers generally, for whom gold jewelry is wealth, and whose remarkable sense of color seems a guarantee against ever becoming indistinguishable or lost.

The Mandore Express was an overnight train to Jodhpur—where I'd never been before—on my route to Jaipur, which I had written about long ago. Jodhpur is a city of weaving and furniture making, traditional crafts, and these included copying antiques. Indians know Jodhpur as a producer of deceptive fakes that are sent to all the markets and bazaars and to credulous museums abroad—terracotta, porcelain, brassware, statues, idols, swords and daggers. Jodhpur also had a Vatican-sized maharajah's palace that had been turned into a hotel, and the maharajah still lived there—rode polo ponies and rejoiced in the nickname "Bapji."

Fish-glued to the side of the train was the manifest, a list of passengers and berths for second class AC. I found my name, but before the train drew out of the station I saw some vacancies in first. I appealed to the conductor to upgrade me. He took my money, made out an excess-fare receipt in triplicate, handed me a sheaf of chits, and showed me to a four-berth compartment. Two people had already seated themselves: a young man reading Debonair magazine and opposite him a young woman braying a mixture of Hindi and English into a cell phone. The fierce-sounding woman had the humorless beaky face and cold eyes of a shrew. She was an example of how physically ugly a person's face becomes in the middle of delivering a loud complaint; she was a gargoyle in horn-rimmed glasses.

While she howled, Rakesh, the man opposite, told me he was a salesman and exporter of shawls and scarves. He was going to Jodhpur, where his cloth was printed and dyed with the vivid Rajasthani colors.

"I come on this train every few weeks," Rakesh said. "It's the best way. I arrive early in Jodhpur, do a full day's work, and head straight back on the night train. This saves me from having to pay for an expensive flight and a hotel room."

He then offered me some of his food: spiced chickpeas, a bag of cashews, some obscure dumplings and deep-fried fritters.

"Must I repeat?" the young woman said, her eyes flashing. "I am on train. And I am furious. They are all against us! Three ministries, three secretaries. Finance Ministry is worst."

A scratchy reply from the phone had her scowling again.

"I don't give a fig! We must be strong!"

More babbling had her rolling her eyes and scratching her hairy arms.

"You did not see memo? It was audacious!"

I smiled, impressed, because I could not remember ever having heard the word "audacious" used in conversation by an English-speaker in all my eavesdropping life.

Then she began to sound like a field marshal: "But we can win! We must prevail! We will regroup. We will respond in kind. Never mind, I tell you!"

Clicking her tongue, she drowned out the reply.

"Enough, enough. You can find me in Jodhpur on my mobile," she said, and silenced the thing with a stabbing finger.

It was an amazing display of unselfconsciousness. I often think that people shout into cell phones in order to warn any casual listeners that they are to be reckoned with; that cell-phone screaming is more a show of aggression to eavesdroppers than for the person at the other end of the line.

As a wanderer in India, I was grateful for anyone or anything that came my way as I went about casting strangers for roles in my narrative. Here, purely by chance, I was in a compartment with a sympathetic salesman who offered me food and with a hairy troglodytic woman shrieking abuse into her cell phone.

"Do you mind?" she said sourly, twisting her beaky face at me. "I've had a long day."

She meant that the bench I was sitting on was her berth and that she wanted to turn in. I had been assigned the upper berth. This was one of the niceties observed on Indian Railways, especially in mixed compartments: I had to climb into my berth. It was early evening, and we had twelve hours of travel ahead of us, but she insisted on sleeping. Still, it was wonderful how by taking the train an idle traveler like me could penetrate to the sleeping quarters of a middle-aged native woman and (if I wished) could look down and observe her snoring and scowling in her dreams.