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Aboard the Mangalore-Goa train, with my seatmate, Young
Master Wiggles
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I was in India in 1998 as a Fulbright Scholar. During that time,
I had many opportunities to see The Real India up close and personal,
since I was not on the "tourist" circuit. I was in Mangalore,
a small port city on the western coast of southern India. "Small"
is a relative term: Mangalore is "small" by Indian standards,
being 63rd in size rank...but it has 700,000 residents,
which makes it about the size of San Antonio, TX, and in the USA
it would be in the top ten! This in an area smaller than my home
town of Blacksburg, VA. Needless to say, the population density
is pretty high, and at times it feels as if everyone is standing
in everyone else's pockets.
The Fulbright Office in India has an annual Mid-Year Conference,
at which all the scholars in-country meet to talk about their
work and experiences. Although I'd only arrived a week before
the conference, I was invited to attend. It was held at the Fort
Aguada Beach Resort, a very plush place in the small state of
Goa. The resort is a five-star operation, and definitely not The
Real India, in any way, shape, or form. There was a threat of
an air traffic controller's strike, so at the advice of my department
head I opted to take the train, rather than flying up, as I'd
originally planned. The distance was about 400 km (240 miles).
Riding along with me were Mike Kuetemeier, a Fulbrighter from
Temple University; and his wife, Anula Shetty, who is Indian by
birth. Even though I was a bit unsure about how to ride the train,
I figured Anula would be a valuable resource, so I agreed that
this was probably a better option than flying.
The train left Mangalore at 7:10 AM. Even after only a couple
of weeks in India, I had already learned that getting someplace
early is always wise. India is a place where you never can predict
what might happen; and although the usual situation is
that an airplane or train or other scheduled conveyance will be
late in departure and arrival, on occasion a flight or train may
be "pre-poned" (this word is used in "English as she is spoken"
in India): i.e. it will leave early.
I was taking no chances. I got up at 4:30 and caught a cab to
the train station in Mangalore. This turned out to be (as was
every other train station I encountered) grimier and even more
Third-World downscale than I'd expected, and by a substantial
margin. As in the USA, rail travel is used most by the less-affluent
strata of society (though to a much greater extent than is the
case in America, middle-class Indians use it too). The Indian
National Railways are not up to the standards of British Rail,
SNCF, or the Swiss system (or even AMTRAK), but it's a functional
transportation system that carries something like nine million
passengers per day, and I didn't expect it to be like the Milan-Lucerne
express. It wasn't.
I tried to buy a first-class ticket; and was told no dice, it's
a one-class train. And....that one class was "Indian Class." This
meant that if I could get a seat, and manage to keep it,
I could have one, but otherwise, I'd stand up with everyone else.
But there was no turning back, because it was already too late
to get to the airport in order to catch the flight.
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Mike Kuetemeier and his wife, Anula Shetty
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Luckily we had arrived there early enough to get a seat. Mike
and Anula met me at the station, where I had already bought 3
tickets--all of 47 rupees each, about a dollar and half per person!
In essence the railroad network in India is free, so it isn't
surprising that for the average person it's the method of choice
for travel. On a per-mile basis the Indian Railways are a great
bargain, but it's true: you get what you pay for.
The coaches to Goa were lined up along a "stationplatform" that
was simply the dirt strip alongside the track. Although there
were two real platforms for other trains, this was a new run on
the just-built Konkan Railway, and they hadn't bothered to build
a new platform for it, so we climbed up into the cars from the
ground, about 3 feet below.
Now, if I hadn't been told that it was in fact the Goa
train, I'd have thought it was a collection of condemned cars
awaiting breakup for scrap. Apparently the "new" train
had been made up of old, former 3rd-class carriages. These had
been administratively upgraded to the status of 2nd-class by the
clever expedient of simply eliminating the distinction and no
longer selling 3rd-class tickets. These cars must surely have
been painted when they first left the coachworks, but obviously
nobody had bothered with repainting since, and it was anyone's
guess how long ago they'd been new. Given the Indian climate and
the all-pervasive dust, it probably wasn't all that long, not
more than ten years. But they were so weather-beaten and had such
a timeless look about them, if I'd been told they dated back to
the British Raj I wouldn't have been surprised at all.
Inside they were worse than outside. They were every bit as dirty
and as littered and as smelly as any movie image of an Indian
train, and could have been used as a movie set for a remake of
Gunga Din. Half an inch of solid grime covered everything,
and I suspected that by the end of the day, that would include
all the passengers, too (I was right). There was no air conditioning,
of course; but there were at least sixty ceiling fans in each
car, some of which did work, though not the ones near me. The
cars were day coaches, with board seats covered in torn vinyl
but lacking any sort of padding. Trash was everywhere on the floor.
Nor was there any glass in the windows, presumably to facilitate
ventilation. The windows themselves were barred, so that you couldn't
even jump out, no matter how desperate you might get.
Before boarding, Mike asked where the rest room was. Anula pointed
to the weeds at the edge of the "platform" and said, "Just go
there. Everyone does." So it proved. There were toilets on the
train, the usual hole-in-the-floor Indian type; but I don't think
we could have got to them, or that I'd have dared use them in
any event. Thinking ahead, I resolved to limit my water intake
and to pray for dehydration on the trip.
We did manage to find seats, and I think we were lucky. Although
we were early, there were others who'd got there earlier still:
fair numbers of people had come in the night before and were sleeping
in the train to assure they had seats. After we'd settled in,
I resolved not to leave my seat till I reached Goa, which turned
out to be easier than I thought, since once we filled up there
was no chance of my even getting out of the seat at all. The train
left 30 minutes late (but made up the time on the run). While
we waited to pull out I fanned away hundreds of mosquitoes rising
from the swamp next to the tracks and the shanty town in it.
By the time we left we had standees in the aisles, and in the
vestibules at each end of all the cars. A few guys were hanging
out the doors, though I don't think there was anyone on the roof
on that particular train. To this ex-New Yorker, it was very much
like riding the IRT subway at rush hour on a hot day. However,
the passenger load at the start was only the beginning. After
the first stop we had many, many more standees. At every subsequent
stop more people got on, but no one ever got off. By the time
we had made three stops the car was so packed it was more or less
impossible to move, and I was thanking my foresight in getting
that seat. Indians accept this as the normal condition: there's
always room for one more, and if not, well, there's the roof,
isn't there?
At Udupi, the first town outside Mangalore, a huge pack of school
kids got on. This was apparently a grade-school class on a group
outing, and like everyone else, they were going all the way to
Goa. The smaller spaces between the adult passengers were filled
by stuffing them with Indian urchins and their keepers, until
the whole car was jammed with humanity to the point of near-bursting.
I was lucky enough to receive my very own urchin, whom I'll always
think of as Young Master Wiggles. He was a lethally cute kid about
8 or 9 years old, plunked into the 6" space between me and the
old man on my right by his harassed schoolteacher. This lovely
young woman smiled at me as she wedged him in, saying, "This is
the most mischievous boy in my class," as she dropped him off,
and that was the last I ever saw of her.
To give him his due Young Master Wiggles was quiet; he didn't
shout or yell. But on the other hand, he never stopped moving.
He stayed wedged up against my right hip for the entire trip,
squirming and kicking me in the foot. As he grew tired, he discovered
that a well-padded foreigner is a convenient object to lean against
when you want to nap, and my right thigh turned out to be a comfortable
place for his pointy little elbow when he wanted to watch the
scenery. After the first hour or so, my ass was getting more and
more achy from the board seat; but there was no way to stretch
out and get even remotely close to comfortable, especially with
Master Wiggles doing his damnedest to get into my lap (something
which he eventually succeeded in doing). If I shifted my weight
to relieve the stress on one part, I drew resentful looks from
my young seatmate, whose contemplative mood had been disturbed
by my movements. If I leaned forward, when I leaned back, his
head was behind me.
At every station, hawkers would come through the car, fighting
their way through and literally climbing over the crowds and along
the backs of the seats. Master Wiggles bought something to eat
from every single one. He'd brought money along for the big class
outing, and wasn't about to miss any nuance of the travel experience.
Usually it was rice or some other slop wrapped in banana leaves,
with the whole thing then wrapped in newspaper. Sometimes it was
potato chips, or cola, or candy. In addition to what he bought
at the stops, he'd brought along his own bag of fruit, I suppose
to make sure he didn't starve to death between stations. He found
my leg to be the most convenient place to rest his orange and
banana peels as he methodically stripped them off. In short, for
the entire trip he grazed more or less constantly. When he wasn't
eating he was wiggling and twitching and pushing. He would lean
over to see out the window and practically sit on me to do it
(this was the dodge he used to get up on my leg) and whenever
he (or anyone else) ate anything, the disposal of the trash (newspapers,
leaves, wrappers, whatever) was via the window on my left.
At least when the train was moving the mosquitoes weren't a problem,
because they were left behind; any that might have been trapped
in the car probably were killed by the locomotive exhaust that
blew in through the open windows. I daresay a coal-burning locomotive
would have been worse, but breathing concentrated diesel fumes
is no fun, either.
Periodically we would go through tunnels, and the other passeners
would do weird things. Every time we entered one, they would start
to whistle out the windows. I don't know what this was for. Perhaps
they just liked to hear the echoes off the rock walls, but it
was an invariable routine. The tunnels had something to be said
for them: they were cooler by a considerable margin than the open,
so much so that I was willing to accept the increased concentration
of diesel fumes that accumulated in the car while passing through
them, in exchange for some relief from the heat. If a tunnel was
of any length the car would fill up with fumes until it smelled
like a bus garage; God knows what the carbon monoxide content
in the air was, but had some of those tunnels been longer someone
might have died of asphyxiation.
This trip took seven hours, arriving at Goa exactly on time.
As we tried to disembark, a thunderous herd of people waiting
on the platform were also trying to get on. Some of them managed
it, and promptly engaged in screaming matches with people on the
train. I asked what was going on, and Anula explained that the
people getting on at Goa had bought reserved seats; and they boarded
only to find those seats already occupied by people who had no
intention of leaving them.
Since Goa was the last stop, this didn't make any sense to me
until she added that it's common practice to board a train at
the next-to-last stop, and to grab a seat as soon as someone gets
off, so as to have a seat for the run in the opposite direction!
The level of yelling and complaining seemed likely to develop
into a fair-sized riot. The three of us struggled off somehow,
battering our way through the arguers and the bystanders who'd
come to watch the fun. We then found out that the train station
is 50 km from the resort. One thing India does sensibly is cabs:
they have fixed rates per kilometer, and the driver is required
to show you the "government chart" dictating his maximum fare.
It's a good system that cuts down on the many abuses that are
common in other places. But cabs are out of the reach of ordinary
Indians for long hauls: the 50-km ride, one-ninth of the distance
from Mangalore, cost Rs 525! On arrival at the Fort Aguada Resort
I took a shower, and quite literally washed off an oil film that
had accumulated on my skin, along with the grit and dust that
had found its way into my pores. The washcloth the hotel provided
turned a dingy gray color during the process.
Travel is broadening; it teaches a lot about other people and
other cultures, and anyone who has a genuine desire to see The
Real India will certainly encounter it on the Mangalore-to-Goa
run. But someone with a low tolerance for heat, dust, diesel smoke,
body odor, and close physical contact with total strangers would
be well advised to avoid second-class carriages on Indian railroads.
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