Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I obliged. I crept up the ladder to my berth and began reading Christopher Hibbert's fluent and well-documented account of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, The Great Mutiny. The uprising (bloodthirsty Indian troops) and its aftermath (bloodthirsty British troops) comprised one of the most violent racial convulsions in Indian history, yet the narrative was full of life and unexpected pleasures. An English notable and resident of Delhi named Thomas Metcalfe "could not bear to see women eat cheese," and sent them out of the room to satisfy themselves with their cheddar; and Lord Macaulay summed up his low opinion of Indian achievements by saying, "Medical doctrines that would disgrace an English farrier. Astronomy which would be ridiculed at an English girls' boarding school. History, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns 30,000 years long. And Geography, made up of seas of treacle and butter."

In the darkness, the train rattled fast through the cool desert night, clanging on the rails. I slept, seeming to rotate, like a person undergoing what a science-fiction writer would call "matter transfer." In the morning, seeing the foul-tempered woman again, yawning fangy and open-jawed like a jackal, I was reminded of another description in Hibbert's Great Mutiny, of a woman "with large, dark and unforgiving eyes."

But, this being Rajasthan, I was treated to a ravishing early morning sight. We were drawing into a station where a stunning young woman, a purple sari fluttering around her slender body—a woman of movie-star beauty, great glamour, and poise—walked lightly on pretty feet past me on the platform, carrying a basket of fresh tomatoes. I got out to get a better look. I watched her cross the platform to another train to sell tomatoes, and then a smiling old woman approached me with a pitcher of milky coffee, poured me a cup, and I stood there in the golden morning, uplifted by all this. The train whistle blew and we were off again, and, passing the sign Please Discourage Beggars, I returned to my compartment.

The shawl salesman was still asleep, but the grouchy woman was awake and sitting, facing out the window, her back to me. The rattle and clatter of the train crossing the desert contrasted with the scene: the lively sound, the vacant landscape. Skinny trees here and there like dead saplings stood in the rubble and dust of flat empty India.

I peered past the woman and said, "This is lovely. After Delhi, the great emptiness."

"It is not empty at all," the woman said.

"It sure looks empty to me."

"There are people everywhere, if you would look."

I was looking, but there were none.

She laughed, forcing contempt through her impressive nose. "You think it is empty. It is not empty!"

Believe me, it was the edge of the Marusthali Desert, in sun-baked Rajasthan, and it was empty.

But she said, "It is intensively farmed. It is all cultivated."

"Some of it is," I said, seeing some furrows raked into a gully and some stalks of withered grass, perhaps wheat.

"All of it is! Don't you see?"

This was a very irritating woman, a scold, who at seven-thirty in the morning was shrieking in contradiction.

"What's that, wheat?"

She snorted and said, "These people would not be so stupid as to plant wheat. They plant something that needs less water. They cultivate millet."

"I see."

"And those trees that you are ignoring. They hold the nitrogen in the soil. They are beneficial."

"I see."

Attempting a tone of haughty condescension, she merely sounded rude, and her rudeness was comically like self-parody. What she said could have been interesting, but her nagging tone made it abusive. I suspected the reason was that this Indian woman had assumed that she would be sharing the compartment with one other person, the shawl salesman, and what she found was a third person, a big tattooed foreigner from beyond the pale, glaring at her through sunglasses and scribbling in a notebook. Her intention was to make me feel unwelcome, and I mentioned this in my notes, adding that this was to be expected in the new robust and assertive India of peevish caste-obsessed bureaucrats.

"You're a lawyer?" I asked.

"I am a journalist. Environmentalist. I am going to a conference on water issues in Jodhpur." She turned back to the window. "Prince Charles is going to address our meeting about water conservation."

"Prince Charles is in Jodhpur?"

"At Umaid Bhawan. As I said, to address our conference."

That could hardly have been the reason. I had seen his name in the Delhi newspapers; he was on a private tour of India with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, formerly Parker Bowles, née Shand, and now Mrs. Charles Windsor—her first visit to the country.

"Maybe you'll get a chance to meet the prince."

She shrugged and made a face. "I don't care."

"It's a big deal, isn't it?"

Though she was grubby from a night on the train and was sitting in wrinkled pajamas, she attempted to be haughty, saying, "I've had enough of royalty."