Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"The transfer was unexpected and very stressful. I m taking the train because I need a rest," Mr. Gupta said. "Planes are a problem. You hurry and then you wait. Sometimes the plane is circling for half an hour. Ridiculous."

"You have a place to stay in Mumbai?"

"I will stay in a hotel for one month. Then I'll find a place and my wife and children will follow." He was making a call to his wife as he spoke, and when he hung up he said, "So how do you find India? Mostly friendly?"

"Oh, yes. No problems."

"This is Sawai Madhopur. There's a tiger sanctuary near here, at Ranthambore."

"Sanctuary" might have been stretching it, I found out later: only about twenty tigers, a dwindling number because of persistent poaching. The area had once been the private game reserve of the Jaipur royals, and many of the animals had ended up stuffed and peering from the ornate walls of the Rambagh Palace and the Amber Fort.

We plunged into a landscape of long lumpy hills, brown and dry and treeless, at the edge of farmed valleys. Women in beautiful yellow and orange saris hacked at gardens with heavy hoes and carried water jars on their heads, as in the old aquatints, walking with stately grace down narrow paths, past goats and chickens.

Later in the afternoon groups of people were gathered in wheat fields for harvesting, some bent double to slash at the stalks, others tying them into bundles—not a single sign of mechanized intervention. It all looked ancient. And that was only a matter of miles from Kota Junction, for though the surrounding villages were among the simplest I d seen in India, Kota itself was an industrial city, with an atomic plant not far away, and so modern as to be intensely polluted (guidebook: in 1992 "levels of radioactivity were way above 'safe' levels"). That was part of the panorama: a long hot afternoon in rural India that included ancient plowshares, wheat harvested by hand, water jars carried from the village well, and nearby an atomic energy plant leaking radioactivity.

We were soon among the plowshares and the harvesters, and in the twilight a group of laborers in puja

postures, an Indian version of Millet's The Angelus.

Mr. Gupta said, "People work very hard here."

We passed a man plowing. I said, "They're looking ahead. 'No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God."

"Who said that?"

"Jesus. It's in the Bible"

"Very nice."

Night fell in the wide valleys, and here and there I could see candle flames in the little huts. A food seller came to the compartment and offered me the vegetarian special for 45 rupees—a dollar. So Mr. Gupta and I each bought a tray. While we ate and talked, another traveler joined us and took a top berth. He was a shawl seller, on his way to Mumbai to take orders.

Mr. Gupta's phone kept ringing. "You will excuse me? Sorry for the disturbance, but my little girl, who is four, misses me greatly. I need to reassure her."

He spoke to his little girl three more times before he turned in. He was another young man from the provinces joining the twenty million in Mumbai.

By the small light over my berth, I read The Great Mutiny, then fell asleep and thrashed in mutiny-inspired dreams of bloody mayhem, religious fanaticism, revenge, and anarchy.

In the morning, Mr. Gupta and the shawl seller were up and packed. They were getting off at Santa Cruz, while I continued the whole way, into the heart of the city.

***

THE FRENZIED CAREERISTS of Mumbai seldom stopped talking about how the place was booming, as though having rid it of its old name, Bombay, they had founded a new city. Their obtuse pride was odd in a country infatuated with its past, obsessed with its own complexity, where nostalgia was a ruling passion. But the Indian craving to belong to the wider world is more than a billion strong—and not just to belong, but to have the world's good opinion of them, to impress with their history, their moralizing and disquisitional nature, their unembarrassed pleasure in speechifying, their love of the orotund and the sententious, and the enduring quaintness of their customs: how they avoided killing a flea, how they worshiped lingams ("It is penis, sar"), how they drank the river water from Mother Ganga, how they propitiated the goddess Lakshmi in order to acquire wealth, how they approved of the widow-burning practice of suttee and arranged marriages, while at the same time describing their progress in hedge funds, computer software, nuclear reactors, or astrophysics.

"This is my husband, Arun," an Indian woman said to me later in Mumbai, her eyes flashing with defiance. "It was not a love match. Our parents arranged it. We hardly knew each other. We have been very happy. We have three children. We will arrange their marriages, after—of course—we have consulted astrologers."