I took the train from Jodhpur up to Jaipur, riding in the best of the 8 classes available on Indian trains. I had an upper berth in a musty room with four bunks. There were two of us; in one of the lower berths was a Unilever sales manager, who said hello, told me he was a Unilever sales manager, and then alternately snored and talked on a cellphone for 7 hours. I could pick out English words like 'sales target', 'minimum', and 'maximum'. There were no windows by the upper berths, and the lower one was streaked with dirt and grease, so I saw nothing of Rajasthan.
I explored the train a bit. I looked for the pantry car; I knew one existed, but, though there are really only two possibilities on a train, failed to find it. This makes me think that it may not be the fault of Indian cities that I am always lost. I passed the washrooms available to different classes. For AC1, there was a western-style toilet imperfectly joined to a plastic tube that ran directly down to the tracks. The next was dirtier and had a squat toilet. The one after that was where the romance of Indian train travel went to die. In fact, I think its body may still be in there.
Somewhere called Phulera Junction, the train stopped for half an hour. The Unilever sales manager was snoring, so I stepped down onto the platform and stood around yawning, which was what everyone else was doing. As we started up again, I leaned out an open doorway for a while, which is one of those exhilarating things you don't get to do in the developed world, knocking it off when I noticed I was going to be scraped off the train by an approaching signal station.
The hotel in Jaipur had sent a car to the station to get me, and turned out to be clean, quiet, slightly posh, and completely insulated from the rest of the city. In my haveli in Jodhpur, there was a very thin wall between you and the loud, disorderly weirdness outside. You could sit on the roof drinking milky coffee and watch the cows the milk came from eating garbage in the streets. The noise and fumes would float up, and the manager would come and nag you to write a favourable TripAdvisor review. The place in Jaipur is a cosy tourist enclave of spotless bathrooms and expensive buffet dinners. It's easy to forget you're in India here.
As I stood outside the Hawa Mahal the day after I got to Jaipur, a young Belgian came up and started talking to me. We walked around the Hawa Mahal together, then took a cycle rickshaw to a restaurant recommended by his French guidebook. The trip turned out to be a long one, and the driver stopped twice to rest. For the last couple of blocks, which were slightly uphill, we got out and walked. Still needing the driver as a guide, we took turns pushing the rickshaw along a bit. It was a cruelly heavy, steel thing, and the driver was a tiny man of about 50.
The Belgian was one week into a 2-year trip around the world. He already had harrowing backpacker stories: He'd shared a tiny apartment in Delhi with six other people and then ridden a cheap intercity bus to Jaipur. He said he counted the number of times the driver honked the horn in a minute, and it was 43. By comparison, I've been carried through India on velvet cushions with a white hanky pressed to my nose. He'd saved probably $5 by not taking a more comfortable bus, and was amazed that I'd squandered a thousand rupees ($20) on a first-class train ticket.
At the restaurant, we sat with a couple of teachers from Réunion. One of them was a Bollywood fan, and we all went off together to the (she said) famous Raj Mandir theatre to see if we could catch a film.
The queue for tickets was like a panic on a trading floor. But there were four of us, and we were doing well, until a small, angry woman appeared and started pushing everyone. She represented theatre management, and was trying to move the line so it ran along the wall. It disintegrated, and a few seconds later had re-formed where she wanted it. But we were caught standing apart, and all the people in the queue were pressed together so tightly you couldn't have stuck a sheet of paper between any two of them. Luckily, one of the teachers had had an arm pinned in it near the front, and was able to buy us tickets (in the 'emerald' section -- the middle class of tickets, above 'ruby' and below 'diamond').
When the curtain went up, the crowd whistled and cheered. They cheered when the producer's credit appeared, when there was a joke, when two actors almost kissed, when their kiss was interrupted by a distraught supporting character in a bloodstained shirt, and whenever a pretty girl was shown. When the actors broke into song, a tiny girl of about three came out into the aisle beside me and danced. The movie, called 'Crook: It's Good to be Bad' , was in Hindi, except for a few words of English here and there, but wasn't hard to follow. It was actually pretty damn entertaining.
I left the movie early (one of the teachers had warned that it was likely to run for 3 hours or so) and caught a tuktuk back to my hotel. It was dark, and the driver spoke no English and didn't know where the hotel was. His tuktuk had been lovingly customized to look like a giant bumblebee decorated for Christmas, with strands of tinsel attached to it that looked like they might get caught in a passing motorbike. After 10 days in India, none of this seemed alarming or unusual. When the driver stopped to ask a passerby for directions, it was reassuring. It meant the system was working. And also that he was genuinely trying to find the hotel and wasn't planning to just take me to an alley and knife me, which made it the perfect end to a good day.
I explored the train a bit. I looked for the pantry car; I knew one existed, but, though there are really only two possibilities on a train, failed to find it. This makes me think that it may not be the fault of Indian cities that I am always lost. I passed the washrooms available to different classes. For AC1, there was a western-style toilet imperfectly joined to a plastic tube that ran directly down to the tracks. The next was dirtier and had a squat toilet. The one after that was where the romance of Indian train travel went to die. In fact, I think its body may still be in there.
Somewhere called Phulera Junction, the train stopped for half an hour. The Unilever sales manager was snoring, so I stepped down onto the platform and stood around yawning, which was what everyone else was doing. As we started up again, I leaned out an open doorway for a while, which is one of those exhilarating things you don't get to do in the developed world, knocking it off when I noticed I was going to be scraped off the train by an approaching signal station.
The hotel in Jaipur had sent a car to the station to get me, and turned out to be clean, quiet, slightly posh, and completely insulated from the rest of the city. In my haveli in Jodhpur, there was a very thin wall between you and the loud, disorderly weirdness outside. You could sit on the roof drinking milky coffee and watch the cows the milk came from eating garbage in the streets. The noise and fumes would float up, and the manager would come and nag you to write a favourable TripAdvisor review. The place in Jaipur is a cosy tourist enclave of spotless bathrooms and expensive buffet dinners. It's easy to forget you're in India here.
As I stood outside the Hawa Mahal the day after I got to Jaipur, a young Belgian came up and started talking to me. We walked around the Hawa Mahal together, then took a cycle rickshaw to a restaurant recommended by his French guidebook. The trip turned out to be a long one, and the driver stopped twice to rest. For the last couple of blocks, which were slightly uphill, we got out and walked. Still needing the driver as a guide, we took turns pushing the rickshaw along a bit. It was a cruelly heavy, steel thing, and the driver was a tiny man of about 50.
The Belgian was one week into a 2-year trip around the world. He already had harrowing backpacker stories: He'd shared a tiny apartment in Delhi with six other people and then ridden a cheap intercity bus to Jaipur. He said he counted the number of times the driver honked the horn in a minute, and it was 43. By comparison, I've been carried through India on velvet cushions with a white hanky pressed to my nose. He'd saved probably $5 by not taking a more comfortable bus, and was amazed that I'd squandered a thousand rupees ($20) on a first-class train ticket.
At the restaurant, we sat with a couple of teachers from Réunion. One of them was a Bollywood fan, and we all went off together to the (she said) famous Raj Mandir theatre to see if we could catch a film.
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| The Raj Mandir Cinema |
When the curtain went up, the crowd whistled and cheered. They cheered when the producer's credit appeared, when there was a joke, when two actors almost kissed, when their kiss was interrupted by a distraught supporting character in a bloodstained shirt, and whenever a pretty girl was shown. When the actors broke into song, a tiny girl of about three came out into the aisle beside me and danced. The movie, called 'Crook: It's Good to be Bad' , was in Hindi, except for a few words of English here and there, but wasn't hard to follow. It was actually pretty damn entertaining.
I left the movie early (one of the teachers had warned that it was likely to run for 3 hours or so) and caught a tuktuk back to my hotel. It was dark, and the driver spoke no English and didn't know where the hotel was. His tuktuk had been lovingly customized to look like a giant bumblebee decorated for Christmas, with strands of tinsel attached to it that looked like they might get caught in a passing motorbike. After 10 days in India, none of this seemed alarming or unusual. When the driver stopped to ask a passerby for directions, it was reassuring. It meant the system was working. And also that he was genuinely trying to find the hotel and wasn't planning to just take me to an alley and knife me, which made it the perfect end to a good day.
