Choo-Choo Special : Romancing the Rails : Moving the masses: a steamy India odyssey

Red-turbaned porters balancing huge bundles trot barefoot past me into the vast iron carcass of Howrah Station. The throaty shriek of a steam whistle pierces the heavy air.

It’s night. In the cavernous main terminal, a tiny Bengali girl smiles as her mother tucks her in on a grimy patch of floor. Around them, hundreds more rag-wrapped Indians settle in cheek by jowl.

Thousands more flow past. I’m swept into the current of chattering passengers and piping vendors surging toward my platform. In the throng, I catch quick glimpses: Two naked tots play on a pile of half-burnt garbage; an itinerant holy man, forehead white with smeared ashes, leans on a wooden staff; a sudden skinny hand thrusts in my face, palm up. Before I can respond, I’m pushed forward, thenlook back--the hand is gone.

Before me is the rail car and a reservation sheet posted by the doorway. Even after three hours crammed in line on this morning, filling out a half-dozen triplicate forms, I’m surprised to find I actually do have a berth. I clamber up, plop on a bench under a ceiling fan, feel my sticky shirt start to lift from my back and peer back out the window.

Howrah Station is the quintessence of Calcutta, and so, of India: a whirlwind of vigor, despair, beauty, anarchy and bureaucracy--the perfect place to begin an Indian railway journey.

I was beginning a 10,000-mile loop that would cover the four corners of India, encompassing four months--January through April of last year--and more than 40 trains.

From Howrah, the rails would carry us south along the Bay of Bengal to Madras and on to the ancient Pandya capital of Madurai in Tamil Nedu. Then we would rumble through the rugged Western Ghats to the lush Malabar Coast. On one of the most spectacular train rides in the world, we would climb north from the southernmost tip of India to Udagamandalam, the city once known as Ootacamund or “Ooty.” Then we would ascend the vast Deccan Plateau to Bombay, through the Thar Desert and north to Agra, New Delhi and beyond, under the shadows of the icy Himalayas into Himachal and Uttar Pradesh, down the Ganges River to Varanasi and back to Calcutta.

It is the train that unlocks this land to the traveler. India’s steel arteries carry 11 million people a day to the nearest village market or the farthest foothills of the Himalayas. Railway stations serve as community centers for many villages. Larger stations inevitably support their own populations--from the people who work, eat and sleep there to such animal life as sacred cows in the waiting rooms, monkeys begging for food or helping themselves at water fountains.

The age of steam lingers on in India. More than 4,000 steam locomotives, some dating from the 19th Century, still thunder across the land. A sugar mill near Gorakhpur, in Uttar Pradesh, boasts what is said to be the oldest steam engine still in use in the world, dating to 1873.

Our first morning on board brings a rolling, lambent sunrise. In and out of view along the Bay of Bengal glide villages of thatched huts, lithe girls in colorful saris balancing brass water jugs on their heads, slow bullock carts loaded with hay, women pounding their wash on flat rocks at the edge of a muddy river, men contemplatively squatting in emerald-green fields, watching us clatter past.

A few days out of Howrah, the Spartan compartments come to seem almost homey. We fall into the rhythm of the rails, hopping out at whistle-stops to snag brittle clay cups of hot, milky brew deftly poured by tea-wallahs.

We accustom ourselves to sleeping through the rattle and roll of the cars as the train devours its invisible path. In the second-class cars, at every stop, no matter the hour, the raucous cries of vendors who’d huddled asleep on the platform moments before ring through the compartment. Across the country, the shouted names of the snacks varies with the language: Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi and a dozen others. Only the tea-wallah’s nasal, piercing cry of “Chai! Chaaaaii!” (tea) never changes.

Near the Son River in Bihar, far from any town, the Mughal Sarai Express grinds mysteriously to a halt (as Indian trains are wont to do). Women villagers soon materialize from empty fields, build a fire and turn a brisk business in steaming hot chapatis until the train just as mysteriously gets rolling again a few hours later.

Two days later, rattling towards New Delhi on the Dehradun Express, three young Brahmins returning from a pilgrimage proudly show us their bottles of greenish Ganges River water.

“Perfectly pure!” one says with a broad grin. Hindus hold the Ganges too sacred to be defiled by pollution--or even by the occasional bloated dead body drifting downstream.

Half the train stations in Uttar Pradesh could be nature reserves. In sacred Varanasi, India’s holiest, dirtiest city, cows graze garbage on the tracks and wander the platforms. In Agra, bold langurs command the crossover bridges, and cocky mynas scold from the rafters. At Hardwar, monkeys drink from the water fountains and share waiting-room benches with humans while placid cows rest beside them.

Sailing across Rajasthan’s Thar Desert toward the fortress-city of Jaisalmer, it’s all steam locomotives and open carriages. We sleep, breathe and dream dust and coal flinders, racing past camel drivers plodding with their beasts along the arid track.

On Indian trains there’s a direct trade-off between comfort and local color. Air-conditioned sleepers are cool cocoons, when the air conditioning is working. But their tinted, double-paned windows obscure the distinctive sounds and scents of each stop: the sweet tang of copra and salt air, the cool smell of rice paddies, the plaintive quaver of a beggar’s flute.

Indian passengers in first class or A/C are more likely to speak English. But on short trips it’s worth the discomfort of the crowded, noisy, dirty second-class, or even more rock-bottom, unreserved coaches, to experience India as most Indians do.

As British journalist Trevor Fishlock put it, “The true Indian motif is not the Taj Mahal, the elephant or the patient peasant behind the ox-drawn plow. It is the crowd, the ocean of faces in the land of multitudes, endlessly stirring, pushing, moving, as teeming and vigorous and urgent as spermatozoa.”

And it’s the crowd you get, in second-class coaches, for no unreserved rail car is ever really full. Indians can always take a deep communal breath and admit just one more.

These are the unreserved passengers: a boy and his turbaned father, carting milk a few miles to market; three farmers on holiday, heading to the Siva temple in the next town--short rides that still take hours, for the “express” designation of most trains is more hopeful than accurate.

Finally, we approach the great Nilgiri Hills and Udagamandalam. If you watched Dr. Aziz clamber across the rail cars in the movie “A Passage to India,” you’ve seen the train that daily makes the 7,000-foot climb to this old British hill station in the Nilgiris, up a rail line that’s still considered an astonishing feat of engineering.

The Udagamandalam or Ooty train leaves from Mettupalaiyam Junction, in Tamil Nadu. As we near that station on the Nilgiri Express, the great ruddy rim of the sun washes the horizon crimson from behind a screen of stately palms. But all faces around us eye only for the next platform, and they wear the tense expressions of football players a second before the snap.

Even as our carriages roll to a stop, we leap into the crowd, stampeding toward the tiny blue-and-yellow cars of the train. Quickly, we squeeze with a dozen others into a cozy compartment meant for six. Young Tamil men perch on the window ledges. Schoolchildren avalanche into the next compartment. We’ve arrived with the Friday throng of weekending families.

The train seems about to burst when the steam whistle issues two startled hoots, and with a great series of chuffs , the ancient engine--Swiss-designed in 1914--starts easing us up the line. The pulsing shoves of acceleration smooth out as we wind slowly through fields of bananas and sugar cane, then thick rain forest, stands of towering eucalyptus and masses of flowering lavender and primroses.

The narrow-gauge railway climbs along a dizzying series of loops and tunnels, doubling back and again on itself, twisting along sheer cliffs that plunge thousands of feet to the jungle below. On the steepest grades, the locomotive lowers a gear that engages a toothed third rail--the rack.

Belching clouds of steam and coal dust, the engine pushes up the steep, terraced upper reaches of the Nilgiri Hills, carpeted with emerald tea shrubs. Leaning out, I can see--directly below--the track where we’d been 20 minutes earlier. Just beyond stretch the plains of what seems to be half of southern India, hazy in the yellow heat.

At noon, we steam into Udagamandalam. Founded by the British more than 150 years ago as a hot-season retreat, it gives the impression of an old pocket watch winding down: stone cottages, narrow lanes and leafy stairways, sleepy horse-drawn tongas. The hive-like Indian bazaar bubbling at the center of town seems strangely out of place.

Udagamandalam is a haven, remote from the turmoil that can flare in India. Early this year, India’s central government took over Tamil Nedu to restrict a guerrilla group launching attacks from that state on Sri Lanka. But no commotion reached Udagamandalam or Mettupalaiyam, in the far northwest corner of the state.

Separatist groups sporadically wage fights in several areas of the country. Travel to Kashmir, Assam and a few other states is often restricted. Sikh terrorists bombed the train station at Pathankot, in the Punjab, one day after we stopped there.

In Dharamsala, in Himachal Pradesh, we were delayed by travel curfews imposed after separatists bombed a train line and two bus stations between there and Delhi. Every train and station in and around the Punjab was filled with soldiers.

Separatist violence is not aimed at foreigners. In the north, with its large Muslim population, demonstrations against the Persian Gulf War caused the U.S. State Department to advise caution for travelers to India. Since the cease-fire, those concerns seem to be waning.

There have been no reports of demonstrations or hostility in southern India. You can usually avoid trouble spots simply by checking with the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi or reading the widely available English-language newspapers there.

You’re far likelier to be aggravated by the sometimes incomprehensible ways of doing everyday things in this country: spending two hours in four different lines to mail a letter, slipping baksheesh to another conductor so he’ll find your missing reservation, discovering that the shoes you left at the temple entrance have vanished.

India can be vast, hot, profoundly alien, overwhelming. But aboard the trains there is time and breathing space for faces to emerge from the teeming masses.

Riding the rails, Indians tend to be extremely friendly and hospitable. Every other person we met on board, from railroad workers to farmers to the former Bangladeshi ambassador to the United Nations, invited us--often insistently--to visit with them, to share their homes.

There’s no better way to immerse yourself in India than to answer the seductive, throaty call of the steam engine’s whistle.

GUIDEBOOK

A Passage to India by Rail

Classes of trains: At the bottom, there’s second-class unreserved--the cattle cars. Anyone who can crowd in does. A true masochist can ride a thousand miles this way for about $4, but this and the slightly less crowded second-class reserved are best saved for day-trips.

First class is cleaner and less crowded, though still basic and very cheap by Western standards.

Sleepers: All sleepers should be reserved in advance, sometimes weeks ahead on popular lines. Second class has wooden benches, usually but not always padded. First class usually consists of lockable compartments with four padded bunks that fold out from the wall.

Air-conditioned two-tier sleepers also have four bunks to a compartment, but only a curtain instead of a door. A/C first-class compartments with private toilets and locking doors are available only on a few express trains.

Types: Normally, you won’t want “passenger” or janata (people’s) trains. These strictly second-class trains call at every whistle-stop, and are the most prone to halt in the middle of nowhere. “Mail” and “express” trains are considerably faster. On some lines, newer “superfast” trains make few stops and are faster still.

Reservations: You can book tickets up to six months in advance from the United States. But allow “breather” days in your schedule, so one missed train doesn’t foul it up. Reservations in India can take a long time to make, but many large stations have tourist offices and tourist quotas, allowing you to secure a sleeper on an otherwise full train.

Indrail passes: These allow unlimited travel for one week to 90 days. Get the First Class/AC two-tier pass.

Women: Women traveling alone, or with other women, are likely to encounter sexual harassment. It may help to dress conservatively and not return male stares (it’s considered provocative).

Food: Railway refreshment rooms, in almost all stations, offer basic but generally safe food at low prices. Bottled water is widely available; otherwise stick to boiled drinks such as tea.

When to go: Best travel: from October through January, when it’s coolest. Temperatures begin to rise again in February; by late April, the heat can be brutal.

Visas: Allow six weeks to secure your visa by mail from the Indian embassy or consulate nearest you. Visas are valid for four months, and may be renewed for another two months in India.

For more information: Contact the Government of India Tourist Office, 3550 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 204, Los Angeles 90010, (213) 380-8855.

“India--A Travel Survival Kit” (Lonely Planet Publications) is probably the best single travel guide to India.