Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Because of my last-minute ticket, I was able to get only second class AC: stalls in an ancient coach, berths with curtains instead of doors, like a troop train in an old movie, or the one in Some Like It Hot, with flapping drapes. Passengers peered out of them like nomads peeping out of tents. On the outside of the next coach, running its entire length, was a piece of denunciatory graffiti in tall and graceful white letters:

The most corrupt person on the railway is Shyam Prakash. An aside in Hibbert's book on the 1857 mutiny was the line "One of those arcane statements, beloved by the wall defacer, whose meaning is usually known only to the cognoscenti."

I was going to Bangalore because everyone talked about it as the site of the high-tech economic engine that was driving India's economy. And Bangalore was a stop on the way to Madras, where I had been before and wished to go again.

I was sleepy from the early start, and drowsed in my berth. When I woke up an hour or so later, we were in a landscape of blunt brown hills and deep ravines, tiny villages in the empty India of struggling farmers. Away from the sea of people, this bulked like the mainland. The news about this agricultural part of Maharashtra was that deeply indebted and drought-stricken farmers were drinking rat poison, committing suicide in record numbers (almost two thousand in the previous six years, and eight hundred of those in the year I passed through, the deaths accelerating in the first three months of 2006 to "a suicide every eight hours").

We were headed southeast in a region of rock temples and deep, elaborate caves, dating from the first and second centuries B.C., near the station at Lonavale and Malavli—a little under a hundred miles from Mumbai but a world apart, with a narrow muddy river farther on, trailing through the small villages and offering a chance for women to do laundry in its opaque water. Fifty to eighty women at a time were thrashing clothes against rocks while their husbands labored in the wheat fields, and their kneeling children formed cow shit into Frisbee-sized disks and dried them for fuel. This was not the Indian miracle. Less than three hours from Mumbai and its plutocrats and boasters, this was the India of the hut, the cow-dung fire, the bean field, the buffalo, the ox cart, and the bicycle—of debt and drought and death.

Past Pune, in the early afternoon we came to Daund Junction, where a gathering of aged but highly ornamented women—"tribals"—were waiting for a later train. Mirrors the size of silver dollars were sewn or woven onto their embroidered bodices, and each woman had a small filigreed ornament in the shape of a chandelier depending from her left nostril. They wore russet or yellow shawls, and veils and bangles, and the huddle of them, all in finery, about twenty altogether, could have been Gypsies. India is full of them; indeed, India is the origin of the Gypsy nation. It is a thrill to see people wearing traditional clothes, especially in a place where so many had become assertively Western in their dress. I always have a sense that where people wear traditional clothes they are keeping their folklore and the subtleties of their language alive as well.

So, the slow way to Bangalore ("like Silicon Valley!") revealed the eternal and stubborn and in some places desperate India. Crushed-looking villages where women squatted in fields of onions and stunted corn, planting or weeding. Nothing had changed for these people. I wrote in my notebook: Flying over this I would have missed the splendor and the misery. When someone says "India" I don't see one thing or even a hundred, but rather ten thousand images, and many stay in the mind. I keep noticing small children working at hard jobs, loading donkeys with sacks of gravel, or cleaning and mopping; or here at Daund boys hardly more than 9, scurrying around with big sacks, emptying trash bins.

Indians in cities often wail, "Too many people!" But these people in rural Maharashtra were growing their own food and drawing their own water and building their own houses and making their own fuel.

Their land had the flat and parched appearance of the African bush: low trees too thin to give any shade, dead grass, dusty paths. Even something African in the villages of stucco huts with verandas and tin roofs, the farm buildings with thatch roofs and walls of woven branches.