Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I could see she was simply trying to put me down, and that fascinated me. I didn't mind that she took me for a backpacker, a scrounging vagabond, an idle traveler—that much was true. What she didn't know was that, as she was faced away from me, I had just finished writing in my notebook, Sourpuss—wrinkled pajamas—sunken eyes—I've had enough of royalty. And since I was also planning to stay at the Umaid Bhawan Palace, perhaps we could all meet for tea—grouchy woman, Prince of Wales, and me.

"What a coincidence. I'm going there too," I said. This did not get a rise out of her. I asked, "Who do you write for?"

She glanced over her shoulder, mentioned the name of her magazine, then turned back to the window, so that all I saw were her skinny shoulders and her rumpled clothes. Perhaps she suspected that I had leaned out of my berth during the night and peered down at her twisted form, as she emitted flutterblasts of halitotic snores.

When the shawl seller woke up, he looked out the window and, seemingly on the basis of the telling contours of a few dusty hills, said, "Half an hour to Jodhpur."

We chatted while the woman sulked and muttered into her cell phone. He too had been at the cricket match in Delhi. I said, "Cricketers used to clap and look bored or phlegmatic. When did they start hugging each other and rolling on the ground?"

"About ten or fifteen years back," he said. "The Australians started it. They made it more American style. Changed the colors, made it commercial—changed the whole sport."

"If you don't mind?" the woman said, pushing past us. We were entering Jodhpur Station, but she was in such a hurry to get out of the train that she was already thrusting her way—sharp elbows out—to the end of the coach and to her water conference, though, looking at her, you would have thought she was headed to a witches' sabbath.

There is always a mob scene when a train arrives at a large station in India: the onrush of porters, coolies, men with wheelbarrows and luggage carts, water carriers, food sellers, taxi drivers, rickshaw wallahs, hotel and guesthouse touts. They pile onto the platform and block the doors so as to be first.

I allowed them to entrap the grouchy woman, and I slipped past, moving quickly to the taxi rank with my small unimpressive bag.

Near the middle of Jodhpur my car was surrounded by big serious men carrying brass plates. The plates were glittering and heavy, and the men lifted them, seemed to shake them at me, gesturing for me to roll the window down.

"Who are these men?" I asked the driver. "What do they want?"

"It is Navratri, sar. They are celebrants."

I opened the window, assuming they wanted some rupees for their brass plates, but no: one person stepped forward and, putting his thumb into red powder, applied a dot to my forehead.

On the way to the Umaid Bhawan, the driver told me that Navratri was just beginning—nine nights of fasting and praying, devoted to the goddess Durga. This mother goddess is one of the fiercest in the Indian pantheon, easily recognizable from the weapons in her many arms and her necklace of skulls—she is much fiercer than the male gods, and is a power of both creation and destruction. Durga means "the Inaccessible." I was put in mind of the petulant woman on the train, a Durga incarnation howling into her cell phone, who throughout the trip was making herself inaccessible to me.

"Also Navratri, very important to Surya," the driver said.

I had been to Surya temples. Surya, the sun god in Hindu cosmology, is worshiped more devoutly in Rajasthan than in other places because, as I later found out, the royal Rajput family—the Rathore clan, rulers of Rajasthan—are regarded as suryavanshis, descendants of the sun god.

An unlucky aspect of this year's Navratri and this sun imagery was that a solar eclipse had occurred the previous day in this part of India, and the darkening of the sun was clearly visible in Jaipur.

"It was not an auspicious day," a woman told me at the Umaid Bhawan Palace, and this was bigger news in Jodhpur than the arrival of Prince Charles and his duchess. A solar eclipse during this religious holiday was a bad omen.