The Howdah Express

Amazing as it may sound, my plan on being on the train the following night didn’t work out. The express only ran once a week and only because I was a foreigner and assumed to be an ignoramus was I allowed to buy a ticket on such short notice. The lady, who sold the ticket to me, was covered and like all railroad employees, was about a blink of the eye from being rude. She gave me the price of the ticket and must have heard me gasp. It would be a giggle in American money but I’m thinking in rupees. Then I remembered that I was probably a year or two older than she.
“You have senior citizen discounts, don’t you? Do they work for foreigners?”
She said that they did and I told her that I was old, very old. Then she smiled. I sat back in my chair (emergency cases wait in an office, not in line with normal people) and was happy to hear I’d just saved 30%.
In traveling by train in India unless you are playing the game of “I can go farther on a nickel than you can,” which I played in ’67 and rode third class, consider a second class sleeper, AC, two tiered. That means that you have a cushioned seat and backrest, air conditioning, and no more than three traveling companions and if you get the other side of the car, you are with one other person and have something of a private little curtained-off compartment. Another thing which seems to be considered is your age. Seventy-one years got me a lower bunk. But a main reason for my asking for a second-class car was that since it costs a bit more, the people, who can afford a little luxury, purchase that ticket. And those folks, being a little better off, have better educations, which include skill in English - doctors, accountants, engineers, and railway officials.
Along with the 30% discount for being older than the lady, she told me that the train would not leave tonight but tomorrow night. I liked the Pearls Hotel, knew where I could buy passable food, and remembered that there was a Gandhi museum here. Also there was a blog to write. I saved the museum for that afternoon and after a long auto-rickshaw ride out, which just happened to go by a bank, which shall remain unnamed. I heard the ATM machine’s stomach growl but I ignored it.
The museum was a nice looking building with a statue out front of Gandhi striding along with walking stick in hand. I made the long ride back as it was a government holiday. People work in India. It’s just that they do it when I’m not looking.
There was no Kodai Road rush and sqush on boarding…well a little. Finding that I couldn’t find the proper number on the proper car, I got aboard and found a top bunk. You are supposed to climb up and down by the rungs at the end of the bunk. I figured out an original way of climbing up and used it when the conductor called me down from my perch. The trouble began when I felt that I was going past a point of no return and went into a fall. I alighted on the conductor’s foot. I apologized for the damage and he limped off to lead me to my car.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I discovered that my double paned window was totally fogged. There were lines of cocoanut palms and small tracks of land outside the ruined window. Actually it wasn’t ruined. It just needed a vent hole to let the water vapor out but in India that translates “ruined.” Occasionally I could make out a silhouette of a temple but the east side of India looked to be a smear.
As I said, I traveled with people with educations and some skill in English. One was an American citizen who had been 13 years in the States. We talked about Partition and while that history has long ago flowed on to the sea, many people question the virtue in their leaders at the time. He said in effect that Nehru and Jenna both wanted to be prime minister and while Gandhi wanted to preserve greater India, the country was divided to suit the two politicians. Another view has it that if there were no Pakistan, there would be no India. Since they go to war with each other, each serves as a unifier for the other. Kashmir would like to reclaim the land they believe is theirs and then become independent and the Sikhs want a country of their own just to give two examples of a possible unraveling.
Another traveler in his late thirties with a muscle beach build and wearing a little too much gold, lived on his cell phone and took vacations to his laptop. He was as aggressive as a wild elephant but docile enough if ignored. He was a tech specialist and had been sent to Atlanta recently by his company. He had a photo collection on his computer which he proudly showed us. As with my thinking in rupees while buying my ticket, looking at his pics made me realize that India had rubbed off on me in other ways. He had taken pictures of empty streets that looked clean enough to eat off. I never thought I’d admire an empty street but I was as surprised to see them as were the others in the compartment.

The second night going north, I fell asleep thinking, why would a train ever arrive at its terminus at 3:40 A.M. but then I heard the car go silent and rubbed my face, grabbed my pack and briefcase, and walked out into the great Howdah Station. I was right across the river from Kolkata. With luck, tomorrow I would find the stand of cactus where 41 years a bright young man looked over his options and combined selling peanuts with the novelty of hand feeding the peanuts to the dwellers of the stand of cactus….a good sized populations of rats.

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