Upon my return to America and having lived in India without driving a car (escaped a death wish), I realized that I had some select options by which to travel here, without the immediate purchase of a car. Given the way the economy is soaring (NOT), this is a wiser choice by far!
So the one mode of public transportation that I availed of quite frequently was AMTRAK. I used this often to make the 2 hour trip to see Aaron on the weekends from Sacramento to San Francisco. My experience on Amtrak can only be called Heaven on Wheels when compared to the memories of traveling by train in India.
Amtrak = Clean, usually with enough seats for everyone to be seated, comfortable seats, electric circuits to charge your phone or plug in your laptop, large tables to dine or to entertain little children with paper and crayons, overhead storage for luggage and also at the entrances to the train cars (that’s an odd name to call them since they are two different modes of transportation), pleasant, well-dressed, helpful Amtrak employees and train conductors, usually great scenery passing you by, a dining car, a place for you to store your bikes on the train, plenty of restrooms, mostly clean, ability to walk through to other cars with ease, and cheaper to take loads of luggage with you.
My mother along with millions, about 14M really, take the train everyday in India. She has taken the train to work her entire life and spends about 2 hours a day on it. It is an experience that can have a whole book dedicated to it, but then, everything in India can have its own book. Today I want to share with you The Train Tableau.
There are two types of train travel: Commuter trains and long-distance travel. The commuter trains usually look like long sardine tins with a live, throbbing, moving mosh pit of arms, legs, and saris. Some of the distinct characteristics of these train stations and trains are that the walls and pretty much many surfaces are abstractly painted with streaks of red made by spitting “paan”, a chewing tobacco and it smells like overripe fruit and flouride. Now mix this with the pungent smell of urine, sweat, flatulence and you will start to get an idea of what they smell like. You almost literally could smell them a mile away, except that a mile away, your nostrils might be assailed by a whole other set of smells that leave your insides waging war against you permanently!
Any time you travel in India, no matter where, it always feels like it is the last day of my life and cause of death would be stampede. There are compartments (individual cars on the train) that are allocated specifically to women and others are general and a couple are first class (indian first class, that is). Getting on a train in India, or doing anything in India, really is like Hotel California – you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!
Most of the time, lines to get train tickets are horizontal than vertical, and the men will ALWAYS get in front of women to get their ticket first. This applies to all Indians, including the highly educated ones who have just returned from the US or any other country abroad – when in India, or more rightly, you can take an Indian out of India but never India out of the Indian. Once you have traversed this dangerous course of ticket purchase, you manage to figure out where the ladies compartment are and wait around for the train to show up. It arrives with a grand honk and the race begins: you sometimes don’t feel your feet ever touch the floor and could be guided into the wrong compartment, if you don’t pay attention or don’t grab on to something. This is a full-out battle call and you assume combat position: elbows out and feet ready to kick anything in your way!
Since they are still on the brink of learning social etiquette, NO ONE waits for people to first get off the train, before others can get on. The highly-pitched cacaphony of Indian voices creates a permanent buzz in your ear. And you find yourself torn in one direction and your clothes literally being torn in another. You also find that you are alongside an overweight, sweaty, gold-laden, belly bulging out, loud -mouthed woman, screaming at you for stepping on her feet! How in the world she could know that of the 1 million people stuck in the doorway of the train, I would be the one that was stepping on her feet, is beyond me!!!! Even the flies would decide to wait and catch the next ride!
I hope you realize that I have not yet successfully made it into the train…keep reading…
