Deccan Express

The Indian railway system gave the impression of being chaotic, but it was dependable and the best way to see the landscape, that is if you weren't an enochlophobic.  As for the other phobias - it was best that you didn’t have any of them either. 

I stopped and drank chai and ate a dosai at the Bangalore Station before boarding the Deccan Express to Bombay. I shouldered my way through the wave of travelers that flowed like an incoming tide across the platform, dropped a few bronze coins into the outstretched hand of a beggar who blocked my path and tightened my grip on my small bag, when a fleet-footed bearer ran up and tried to take it from me.

I passed a line of cars that were packed tight and spilling over with ordinary passengers, a colorful array of transient students, farmers, and peddlers who were probably just hitching a free ride to a nearby station. 

When I bought my ticket, I decided with a little twang of guilt that this trip wouldn't be in the crush of a rudimentary third-class coach, sitting for hours on a hard bench or standing, waiting for someone to leave so I could squeeze into the empty space. Instead, I'd be traveling in the relative comfort and privacy of a first class sleeper with an upholstered seat that folded down into a cot. The process had taken a while, but I had come to the realization that it wasn't necessary for me to rough it all the time in order to prove that I was a seasoned Peace Corps volunteer.

The din of the crowd was momentarily drowned out by the sharp mechanical clank of iron scraping against iron and the engine letting off steam, while it backed and coupled the worn carriages that would take me and a thousand other passengers on the long journey to Bombay. The other seat in my compartment was still unoccupied when a blast of the whistle split the air and signaled that we'd soon be on our way.

The hopes that I had of spending my trip in relative solitude with a book and the scenery disappeared when the door opened and a man in a flowing, white kurtha burst in. Bowing his head slightly while trying to catch his breath, he pressed his palms together and greeted me with a hearty "Namaskara”, his easy smile showing a row of uneven teeth in a face that seemed younger than his thinning dollop of slicked back hair and thickening middle suggested. 

"My name is Krishnaswami and your name is? "

"Francis," I said, returning his salutation with a lack of enthusiasm, and being reminded that in this densely populated country, that opportunities for privacy and personal space were rare.

A thin, dark-skinned bearer whose muscles and tendons looked as though they were covered with stretched, polished, leather, wrestled with a trunk almost as large as he was. Without being asked, I helped my new travelling companion lift it onto the rack above my head. As he leaned over me, I saw that rivulets of sweat had begun to gather in the creases on his forehead and in the folds of his neck and run down into the fringe of coarse hair on his chest, and thought that when his perspiration blended with the sooty smoke from the locomotive and the dust from the open tenders, his kurtha wouldn't be white for long.

The lilting, clipped, cadence of Krishna's English was sprinkled with random phrases in Kannada and punctuated with the lateral head movements and graceful hand gestures that were as much a part of the Indian languages as their syntax. 

"Bala chenagade”, he said, and took out a pressed and folded handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed his forehead with it and then dusted off the seat opposite me before sitting down. 

"Francis, how are you liking our India," he asked. 

I answered his question, also using the present participle that was common in the Indian English dialect and that I thought sounded charming. 

“I’m liking it very much, thanks”, and then answered his other questions in a series of brief sentences about my work and family and life in America.

"I feel that our meeting is very auspicious," he said cheerfully. "When I performed puja with my father this morning, we prayed that I might have a safe trip and that I would have the good luck to share my travels with an agreeable companion. My esteemed Appa, who has many friends says, "Friendship does not depend on the length of the acquaintance, but is nourished by mutual respect and understanding."

I registered a change in the pulse of the engine and the laboring drive wheels as we left the dusty villages and patchwork fields of Karnataka, and climbed the hills of the Western Ghats. We were chugging along at, I guess, thirty or forty kilometers an hour, not exactly the express speed that the train´s name implied. Two years earlier the Apollo 8 space mission had put the first men on the moon and the disparity of traveling in a train powered by a coal-fired locomotive, a relic from the 1920s, was a comparison that didn't escape me.

We stopped at stations along the way to pick up mail, discharge passengers and to take on water for the steam engine. At one, a barefoot attendant came on board and brought the rice, sambar and roti that we had ordered for dinner before we left Bangalore.

At other stops, we drank sweet tea with buffalo milk in hand thrown clay mugs that were passed through our open window and that we discarded along the tracks when we were finished.

Traveling together with a stranger in close quarters can turn you into a story-teller or a listener, and I remembered a reprimand, or was it perhaps a piece of valuable advice, from one of my high school teachers, a gaunt, Jesuit with an affinity for platitudes. 

"Mr. Mola, you have two ears and one tongue, listen twice as much as you speak and there is a remote chance that you might learn something.” 

Listening wasn't going to be a problem in the shoe-box confines of our compartment. Krishna's stories were like a flock of migrating birds looking for a place to roost and I was a captive audience of one and could only get in a few generic comments to break up his monolog.

Slivers of light shone through the clouds as the day faded. Farmers were coming in from their labor, hoes and picks slung over their shoulders, walking on bare, calloused feet alongside erect women balancing bundles of firewood and bales of freshly cut grass on their heads.

I fell asleep to the clacking of the rails and Krishna's extrapolations on the better taste and agronomic suitability of the local strains of rice and wheat, both of which were being replaced by Green Revolution hybrids, and where U.S. Aid and the Peace Corps were active participants.

His theory of how these new grains would feed the people but redefine the demographics of rural India seemed to me, with my scant knowledge of the problem, to be reactionary and unfounded.

Had I been able to see into the future, I would have understood that his presentiments were correct. These new crops were the precursor of the industrial agriculture that would make the use of bullocks and small, but self-sufficient, land holdings redundant, and that the migration from tightly knit rural societies to sprawling urban slums, would become a reality.

When I awoke my cabin mate was sitting Buddha-like on his bunk, bare-chested facing the window and the rising sun. His hands were outstretched, with his index fingers and his thumbs touching, and in contrast to his animated conversation of the evening before, his gaze was serene and focused inward. I climbed down from my berth trying not to disturb the rhythm of his breathing or his silent calm and went to the privy at the end of the car. I sat on my haunches over a hole in the floor, rocking back and forth in time to the train's movement and watched the ties glide past under me. I washed as best I could in the thin stream of water that ran into a stained, metal basin and trickled out into the same hole that I squatted over a few minutes earlier.

I waited in the narrow corridor while he finished his morning prayers. When I sat down again, he asked:

"To whom do you pray Francis?”

And even if he wasn’t combative, his question didn’t leave me much room in the restricted confines of our compartment to wiggle out of a discussion. 

“I’m not much of a believer in inexplicable mysteries”, I mumbled and buried my head deeper into the book I had been trying to read.

"And to whom do you pray Francis”, he asked again in a voice that said he wasn’t going to let me off so easily. 

I looked down at my hands as though I was counting my fingers and muttered that I didn't pray and consequently didn't practice any faith. 

"God can have many vestiges," he replied, as if I was the only non-believer in this spiritual revival meeting in a tent that was India.

After a little more prodding, I conceded that I was raised and educated in the Roman Catholic Church, with its blessings and benedictions, and a myriad of saints who protected devotees and granted wishes, and with angels who flew through the cosmos on oversized feathery wings. I told him that I lived in a home where a crucifix hung in every room. There was also a holy water font by the front door. My mother insisted that we dip our fingers in it and make the sign of the cross before we went out.

With a self-righteousness that is a prerogative of youth and one of its faults, I told him that because of all that, I had become an agnostic. I neither believed nor disbelieved, and that I felt that how you treated others and the way you lived your life was more important than which God you worshipped. I added irreverently that I thought that organized religions were a chimera propped up by far-fetched stories of mythical Gods. 

I have to mention, that about that time, I was influenced by the cult books that were being passed around and traded by backpackers on the India route, “Chariots of the Gods”, and “The Morning of the Magicians” and said that I could just as well believe those metaphysical explanations of aliens with super-human intelligence who civilized the earth, as the mysteries and legends of the different religions.

“Yake", why, he asked in Kannada, shaking his right hand in front of him with his thumb raised and fingers pressed inward against his palm, a gesture that accentuated his question. 

"Why don't you believe?" he repeated in the same manner I used when I instructed the young apprentices in our workshop about the mysteries of engines and compressors. 

"How could there not be a God when there is the divine in all of us”, again like a teacher coaxing an answer from a slow pupil. 

"Look around you, and you can see that there is a plan for everything in the universe, even for the most insignificant of God's creatures. Once, I visited a twenty story building and at the top, there was a colony of ants, and I thought that it must have been God that saw to it that they had nourishment up there“. 

I could have said, "I'm sure that those ants thought that it was manna, but it was just some careless people who left scraps of food there.” But I wanted to end the discussion and kept quiet.

Maharashtra’s villages and fields were gradually replaced by the oily haze and the congested streets of India's largest city. This time the sharp blast of the steam whistle wasn't to warn off cattle or pedestrians from the web of tracks and trestles leading to the station but to signal that our twenty hour trip was over.

We stepped out into the quivering Bombay heat. The sun stood straight up and the shadows that fell divided the day like a plumb line. Another porter, a twin to the one we left behind in Bangalore, repeated the struggle with Krishna's trunk. 

I gave my new friend my address at the Rex Hotel, an inexpensive guest house in one of the narrow alleys near the Gateway to India. We promised to meet the next day. As I was climbing into the auto-rickshaw that had appeared in front of me without having signaled for it, he turned and in the last round of our verbal sparring asked,

"Francis, do you know what Our Gandhi said when he visited England and was asked what he thought about Western civilization?"

"Nope”, I answered, waiting for the knock-out punch. 

Without hiding his satisfaction and amusement, he replied:

“Civilization? It would be a good idea!"