Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

A new pool had been dug, and now there were two, one for men and boys, the newer one a zenana, strictly for women wearing saris, for modesty's sake, but they were drenched and clingy, so the effect was the opposite. They splashed among naked girls of six or seven. Both tanks brimmed with foul-looking water in which the pilgrims thrashed, dousing themselves and drinking—more like a hot evening at a public swimming pool than a day at a holy shrine, all the boys laughing and splashing, jumping, diving, some of them swimming and gargling under a spout of water issuing from the mouth of a carved marble cow.

Seeing me writing in my notebook, one of the small boys hauled himself out of the tank and said, "Please, sar. Give me pen."

"Why do you want it?"

"I am schoolboy, sar."

I gave him my cheap extra pen from the hotel and ascended the stairs, following Mohan.

"Monkeys," I said. "I hate monkeys."

"Sacred monkeys," Mohan said, as though this made a difference when they bared their teeth at me. Decades ago I had taken them to be baboons, but these were rhesus monkeys, big and small, with mangy fur and wicked eyes. Once, seeing monkeys like this, Paul Bowles had written that "their posteriors looked like sunset on a grocer's calendar."

The monkey god temple was a cave-like shelter at the top of the gorge. I climbed up, as I had all those years ago, and seeing a priest squatting nearby, I left my notebook and pen outside—it seemed sacrilegious to bring writing implements into the inner sanctum.

But no sooner had I gone inside than I heard, "Sahib! Sahib!"

The biggest monkey had stolen my small notebook and pen. I shouted and the creature dropped the notebook, but he skittered about ten feet away and began gnawing the rubber plunger off the top of my pen.

I threw some peanuts at him. He flung the pen aside and went for them.

"Good karma," Mohan said of my feeding the monkey. And he showed me a stain on the temple wall. "Image of Hanuman is miracle. You see it is natural in rock."

The lumpy rock wall, identified as a monkey's head and shoulders, had been outlined in orange.

"Six hundred years old," Mohan said. "Not less."

From this height I could see that Galta was much bigger than it had been before; what had seemed to me a dusty shrine in a ravine was now a large complex of temples. Far above it on the ridge was a sun temple, for the Surya devotees. The spitting and splashing—explicitly forbidden before on a comical sign—was now tolerated, as was the screeching and swimming in the tanks, and the sight of women with wet clinging saris, and small naked girls laughing at the edge of the pool and poised like water sprites.

As I passed them again, the women were floating small waterborne dishes, each one bearing a candle flame—in Hindu belief, a deepak, or holy flame—as a white and brown heron stalked along a low shelf, from time to time dipping its beak in the water.

"Hanuman is my god," Mohan said. "I do puja every day at my temple before I go on duty. Also my wife. Also my daughter."

Indians boasted of how much had changed in their country. It was modern, it was wealthier, "even rickshaw wallahs have mobile phones"—all that. But in Galta Gorge I realized that nothing had changed. The place was bigger but just as dirty; more people, more monkeys, the same pieties.

And then, after lunch one day in Jaipur, I decided to leave. Thanks to the train, it was easy to do. I went to the station, where the train was waiting. I got on. The train left. I simply evaporated.

NIGHT TRAIN TO MUMBAI

THE "SUPERFAST"EXPRESS

THE LOVELY HEART of Jaipur is what the tourist sees, a pink princely city of temples and palaces—painted elephants, the marvelous fort, all of it dusty but beautiful, like Rajasthani women in their gorgeous silks and gold-trimmed veils. But the train traveler sees a different Jaipur and begins to understand the city's true size. It sprawls to the horizon, a city of three million, mostly living in one- and two-story houses. Thirty minutes after leaving the station, and way past the airport, we were still passing the outer suburb of distant Sanganer—decrepit, but even so, a town full of temples that was entered through a triple gateway. A few hours later, the train moved through a yellow plain, flat and dry as far as I could see, with a scattering of trees. Some of it was plowed, awaiting planting, and flocks of goats browsed in the grass. But really it was a great expanse of wide-open country. In this nation of more than a billion people—utter emptiness.

"Superfast" might have been a misnomer for this train—eighteen hours of travel, a two o clock departure from Jaipur, arriving in Mumbai at eight the next morning—but the euphemism was consoling. I had to catch up on note taking, and I was becoming absorbed in The Great Mutiny. It was a trip of 720 miles.

Mr. Gupta, my compartment mate, was being transferred by his employer, a telecom company, to Mumbai.