So I'm in India. In Calicut,
Kerala, to be precise, and the getting here was anything but
straightforward. Before I hopped over the ocean from Bangkok to
Chennai, fellow traveler folk kept saying the same things about
India to me over and over again, focusing on the relative difficulty
of travelling in such an outrageously big, unregulated and poorly
infrastructured 'country'. It is staggering that a landmass this huge
and varied can get by with just one central government and that
everybody takes its authority seriously! How can they possibly
govern? Small is beautiful, they say, and something this massive is
just plain daft, any notions of government fundamentally unfit for
purpose.
Anyway, comments from friends
and fellow teachers in Bhutan, along with the general banter that you
hear 'on the road', made me question whether or not I really wanted
to do this - travel in India, a place of caste systems and dowries,
of commonplace and 'acceptable' destitution, where the ratio of men
to women is 10:1 (I have been told this twice but haven't checked it
out), and where the hottest news stories all seem to focus around the
rapes that are purportedly commonplace. I'd seen evidence of most of
this on forays over the border from Bhutan, but I'd also seen the
colour, the vibrancy and felt the buzzy energy that people get hooked
on. It was time to have a go, I decided, and besides, one of the
Canadian teachers from Bhutan is currently studying Ayervedic massage
in Kannur and needs 'models' to practice on. Off I verily went...
Chennai was big and dusty and
looked exactly the same as Jaigon, the border town with Bhutan, only
bigger. The same mounds of festering rubbish filled the streets, the
air was a cloying fug of exhaust fumes and food, everybody seemed to
be busy buying or selling something with furrowed brows. But nobody
hassled me at all. I took a 3 hour walk around the city and not one
person approached me. The next day, it took only 20 minutes of the 45
autorickshaw drive to the bus station for my eyes to start stinging
from the pollution. Happy to leave Chennai behind, I boarded an
Aircon sleeper bus at 8pm for Kodaikanal, a mountain retreat town
where the temperature would be lower and the pollution less!
I had hoped to sleep. I didn't.
Every time the bus lurched around a corner I nearly fell out of the
narrow bunk, and with my backpack wedged in at the foot of the bed, I
couldn't properly stretch out. I ended up watching Amelie on my
laptop and then catching a few hours kip before arriving at 5am in
the refreshingly cold air of Kodai.
Three days later, I left Kodai
for Calicut, but this is where the idiot in me found ascendency. To
be fair, regular injections of lies and misinformation by Indians
didn't help. Trains are hard to book in India. For one thing, they're
always full because there's simply too many people here. For another,
you can't book them online if you don't have contact details in
India. Thirdly, you have to know where your train came from and where
its final destination is in order to book a segment of its route. I
decided to put my fate on this first occasion in the hands of a
booking agency. They told me the trains were all full, but noted that
the third class air con sleeper carriage only had one person on the
waiting list.
'What happens if the waiting
list doesn't clear?'
'You will be accommodated –
101% sure.'
He told me that a waiting list
of 1 would usually clear, and I saw that in other classes, there were
waiting lists of up to 50, so it seemed reasonable. He told me that
if it didn't clear, then seats are always held back in different
classes for emergencies, and that even more seats were held back for
idiots abroad. I had 3 chances, hence his 101% surety.
The first stage of the travel
was a 3 hour public bus to Pakapal (or similar) at 12pm, followed by
a 2 hour bus to Coimbature, where the train to Calicut would be
waiting. At 11:30am I was still in the post office waiting (reasons
of delay: unknown) to send a parcel of wooden toys for my nephew.
Priorities David!!! It was in this post office with the clock ticking
that I realised I didn't have the pen drive with my friend's contact
details on. I walked briskly back to the internet cafe where the
agency was and, lo and behold, it was still there. Phewee – an
early reprieve for the idiot. I took a motorbike taxi back, hurled
the parcel into the international parcel-shifting leviathon and then
jumped onto my bus for a 3 hour bounce down to the plains.
Pakapal. As I disembarked, the
bus driver called me back. I'd left my Nalgene water bottle and fancy
karabiner on the bus. Thanks!!! Idiot reprieve number 2. I found the
connect and had 50mins to wait, so I wedged my big pack in behind
some seats on the bus and indulged in a chai in a nearby stall that
gave me a good view of the bus and my bag that was sequestered
therein. Then the bus started moving. People started piling in. The
bus was leaving. I leapt from my chair and bolted out across the
tarmac, leaving behind a half-drunk chai... and my Nalgene bottle...
AGAIN. Only this time I had no way of getting it back. Idiot abroad;
Nalgene bottle lost forever. Irritating misinformation: that was not
50mins at all! It was less than 10.
Coimbature. I had to get across
town to the train station and a couple of policemen kindly told me
the way. I made my way through the backstreets in the darkening
twilight, cursing the bottle of wine and the chocolates I'd brought
from Bangkok as a gift to my friend in Calicut. I hate travelling
with a big bag, the immobility, the sweatiness and the spectacle of
it. It was dark when I reached the train station. I made my way to
the information kiosk:
'I have this ticket. Is it
okay?'
She checked a computer,
smiling. Then she scribbled something on the paper I'd given her and
the smile vanished.
'WL3'
Which meant – Waiting List:
3. There had only been 1 there when I bought it! But no, she told me,
there had been 5. It was there clearly enough on the ticket if you
knew where to look and could understand the code: WL5. In the time it
had taken the booking agent in Kodai to march across town and book
the ticket, 4 more people had jumped the queue ahead of me, a fact
that the booking agent had made no reference to whatsoever. I wonder
how this would have affected his 101% surety? It didn't escape my
notice that 5 going down to 3 was the same as 2 going down to zero –
that I would have been on the train had the waiting list information
I'd booked with been correct. The information woman directed me to
the booking kiosks. Off I trundled.
When I finally reached the
front of the line, sweaty and heavy, I handed my ticket over and
asked the same question:
'I have this ticket. Is it
okay?'
He asked for 60 Rupee. I gave
it to him. Best not to quibble.
'This ticket... It's okay?'
'Yes.'
'It is valid?'
'Yes.'
Irritating misinformation.
Outright lie.
On
the platform I asked around and two security guards told me to stick
with them, that they'd help me. When the train came they ushered me
onto the 3rd
class AC and told me to wait until the ticket man came – he would
accommodate me. But the ticket man was a busy individual, and, to my
chagrin, the grumpiest man I've thus far met abroad. After waiting
for nearly 15 mins I pushed gently through a small crowd of refuge
seeking kow-towers and proffered my ticket.
After a summary glance:
'No chance.'
'What?'
'No chance. No vacancy.'
'Well, what do I do?'
'No vacancy. Go away.'
So I did. With no where else to
go, I sat by a bin/sink combo at the end of the carriage and read
some of Rupert Sheldrake's book about the failings of science to see
through its own axiomatic dogma and take itself seriously. It's a
credit to Rupert that I was so easily distracted from stink of the
bin and the dollop of curry 3 inches from my feet that seemed to move
when you didn't look at it, freeze when you did.
All of a sudden the security
guards were looming over me with expressions of confusion. At the
precise moment I looked up, the ticket man came through the other
door, and there we all were, players in a dumb farce all staring at
each other.
'I have no idea where to go or
what to do.' I said. Honesty seemed the best policy.
'You can't stay here. You must
go.' The grumpy ticket man replied.
The chief security guard laid
his hand on the ticket man's arm, but there was no shifting him.
'You must go to general class.'
'Where is it?'
'All the way down. Just keep
going.'
General
class. It sounded ominous. I picked up my stupidly big bag and
started walking the length of the train. For anyone who has never
seen the trains of India, they stretch from one end of the galaxy to
the other at least, if not further. Some scientists, unable to
measure them using the tools available at the time, mistakenly
ascribed to them the quality of being infinite. And like everywhere
else in India, they are rammed with people, with corridors narrow
enough to permit the movement of one person at a time. I donned my
finest and most polite Englishman-abroad voice and I
do beg your pardoned myself all the way
down the train. Everybody was very nice to me.
Pushing through a throng of
people I came to a dead end. Where is general class? I was told that
it was sectioned off, that you can only get there by getting off the
train and walking down the platform. My fears about general class
were compounded; it was isolated from the rest of the train.
In the little crannie where the
door would have been to the next compartment, I spied a space, the
only one I'd seen that was big enough to accommodate me and my bags.
I pushed my way through and put my big bag up against one wall.
Against the other, I put my small bag, and then, with ass on big bag
and feet on small, I wedged myself in and closed my eyes. The air was
full of filth. I was sitting next to two toilets. Every time a door
opened, a cloud of human waste gas came spilling out to surround me.
Why? I thought to myself. Why do people do this?
At the next station I jumped
off and walked down the platform, but where General Class was
supposed to be, I found what could well be described as a Final
Solution transport carriage, except it had windows. People were
crammed in standing, as packed as a tube in King's Cross at rush
hour, spilling out. There was no way I'd be able to get myself and my
bags on. My only other option was the toilet-jam, or finding
somewhere else illegal to be on the train, with the likelihood of
being shifted again or booted off. Just then a chap I recognised from
the throng by the toilet doors approached me and told me he was
taking a bus, that he hadn't got a ticket at all and was thus being
booted ashore. His destination was the same as mine.
'How long will it take?'
'3 hours.'
Irritating misinformation. It
would take 6 hours. I didn't know this. I decided to trust him and
off we went on an autorickshaw across town to a bus stand. I still do
not even know the name of the place. Thus began an unexpected 6 hour
ordeal through the night. It was 11pm. I'd left at 12 noon. I
wouldn't arrive at Calicut until 4am, but there my worries would not
end. As soon as I boarded this bus I dug out the pen drive to get my
friend's phone number, and it was then that I realised the biggest
mistake had been kept from me until the end... she wasn't even in
Calicut. She lived in a town called Kannur, another hour's bus
journey from Calicut. The scale of my idiocy was immense. I finally
knocked on her door at 5:30 am, exhausted and desperate for good
sleep.
My first two journeys in India
were both, in their own ways, pretty rubbish. I made enough mistakes
along the way to be held responsible but I was also continually led
astray by this strange culture of giving advice when the giver has
none to give, or of giving wrong information for reasons I can't
quite fathom.
Kannur is a good reward and a
great place to recover for such a strange journey. The people here are laid back and the massages are
free and plentiful. I get unctions shoved up my nostrils that burn
down to my neck and make me cough up 'kapha'. I swim beneath a full
moon in the Arabian Sea. There's still rubbish strewn everywhere,
along the beach, piled up beneath cliffs, as if living in paradise
is just too much for people to bear and they feel compelled to spoil it by soiling it. Oh, and the beach is longer than an Indian train.
