Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Scenes from an Indian Train Ride

The scraggly rolling hills, tinged yellow from grasses. The roaming bulls with sagging necks and ironic rolls of fat in contrast to their visible ribs, with horns painted ruby and turquoise and marigold. Children wearing only short shirts running barefoot across a dirt road, relieving themselves atop a mound of assorted garbage, sitting in the shade. Mounds and mounds of burning, smoky, rancid garbage. Fields of cotton and corns vaguely evocative of the Carolinas, but followed by fields of mangoes and bananas. Men wrapped in white fabric tied around the waist and hanging to the knees and scarves tied around their heads for protection from the sun, and women wearing magenta saris carrying baskets of whatever grains are grown or fresh cotton or clothes to be washed. Colorful towns with full clotheslines hanging like colorful Christmas lights from atop the buildings, between the trees, in the yards while saris and t-shirts sway in the breeze. And men, walking through the train's corridors carrying rolls of plastic cups and a swinging cannister of freshly brewed and spiced chai while screaming, screeching in a high-pitched urgent tone "CHAI!" Followed by women carrying baskets of guava and potato chips and pretzles and boys with multilingual newspapers and samosas and bottled water. At each stop, a new batch of salesmen and women boards and the present departs. And passengers walking past the berths stare, unabashadly, at the bizarre white travelers, pausing for a good view. And the lull of the constant tic-tic of the train atop the tracks, bending with every curve and rolling over hills and through valleys and gently easing into each station.

Train rides are considered a quintessential element of Southern India, which now seems obvious to me. Due to the vast network that criss-crosses the country, like a spider web of tracks, I'm expecting several other equally memorable rides.