Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  ‘Are you anyone’s girlfriend?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Do you belong to one of these men?’

  Looking from Jem to Marc and considering the idea of belonging to anyone, like a slave or a blow-up doll, I pointed to Jem. ‘He’s my fiancé.’

  Making smart-mouthed comments to border officials ranked low on my list of priorities, least of all on the Dostyk border between Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, the only feasible route home. After more than nine hours on board the weekly train, and another twenty to go, I was not about to risk being turned around and sent back in the name of feminism. Bringing a shock of cold air into the compartment, two male officials in long grey coats and furry hats looked in, snowflakes on their shoulders. Extending gloved hands for our passports, they looked at each one of us in turn before summoning an English-speaking female colleague who pushed and prodded our rucksacks before asking Marc to open his. He unpacked his cameras, rolls of film and balled-up socks, tipping the remaining contents onto the floor as one of the male officials nodded and moved on to the next compartment.

  ‘You didn’t have to do that, but thanks,’ said the woman, rummaging around the pile of pants and unwashed T-shirts. Pulling a brown package out of a trouser pocket, she handed it to Marc.

  ‘Open this up.’

  ‘It’s nothing, just a little clay thing from Tibet.’

  ‘Open it.’

  Reluctantly unwrapping the parcel, Marc pulled out a hand-carved Buddha that he’d bought from an elderly woman sitting at the side of the road.

  ‘May I see this?’

  Handing it over, Marc frowned as the woman turned it around, giving it to her colleague, who examined the piece.

  ‘This may not be authentic,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We do not want you to take fake goods out of the country. Sometimes the Tibetans sell fake items and it is illegal.’

  ‘Please don’t confiscate that. It’s just a little thing that I got for my gran as a souvenir. It’s real, it’s so small, please.’

  As I watched the scene unfold, my heart sank into my shoes. In the middle of the floor was a red cloth bag containing an exquisite hand-carved serving dish. Jhampa had taken us to a Tibetan-owned shop selling handicrafts, in particular wooden bowls and serving dishes that nomads used in their homes. Varnished and painted in curly, floral strokes, the wooden dish was so huge I’d been carrying it in both arms since we’d left Tibet, and it was now about to be confiscated, too. Avoiding Jem’s gaze, I smiled at the official who had finished going through Marc’s things, finally handing back the figurine. Patting the side of my rucksack, she slid her hand into a pocket and pulled out a tiny bottle with a gold lid. She held it to the light.

  ‘What is this?’

  I’d completely forgotten about the holy water from Lourdes that had stayed in my bag for almost seven months, unbroken and tightly sealed.

  ‘It’s a souvenir,’ I said, reaching for it and putting it in my pocket.

  Pulling open the main compartment of my bag, she peered inside for a moment before fanning it away, as a warm, musty smell emerged.

  ‘What’s the worst part of this job?’ Jem asked, as the woman pointed to his bag.

  ‘I’m not sure chatting her up is going to help us,’ Marc muttered.

  ‘I once put my hand into a used diaper with no gloves on,’ she laughed.

  ‘Or maybe it is …’ he said, raising his eyebrows at me.

  ‘Are you a couple?’ Jem asked, pulling out his clothes.

  ‘No, we’re not a couple,’ said the man, whose name was Qian. ‘We’re just boyfriend and girlfriend.’

  ‘I knew it!’ said Jem, looking smug and folding his arms, having made an entirely random guess.

  ‘You can say “couple” even if you’re not married,’ said Marc.

  ‘Oh, okay,’ said Qian, touching Ling on the arm. ‘And lover?’

  ‘Well, yes, assuming she is your lover, but you don’t generally introduce someone as your lover.’

  ‘Do you not get married yet?’ he asked Marc, leaning against the door.

  ‘Me? No, I’m not married. These two are going to get married.’

  ‘No? You don’t have one person close to your heart?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Marc hugging his bag.

  ‘But you’re very handsome,’ said Qian.

  ‘Now look who’s chatting up who,’ whispered Jem, delighted at the frisson of impending romance.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Ling, pulling out a foil-wrapped parcel.

  ‘Oh, that’s my … gas mask,’ said Jem, who had forgotten about the mask he’d stolen from the hotel in Moscow.

  ‘Please open it.’

  ‘Oh no! I’ve managed to keep that for more than five months and I wanted to take it back to London.’

  ‘Jem, it looks like a brick of heroin,’ said Marc, with a shout of laughter.

  The four of us leant in closely as Jem unzipped the pouch and unwrapped the mask. I was as curious as they were to see what it looked like. Unfolding the gas mask, Jem held it up over his face. Satisfied, Ling and Qian seemed to have forgotten about the rest of our bags and moved on to the next compartment as we sat back with relief, the Tibetan dish sitting in full view in the middle of the floor.

  Wandering up the corridor, I looked into each compartment, amused by the women applying eyeliner, removing rollers and rubbing in Nivea cream. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d applied make-up, carrying nothing more than a pot of concealer the size of a ten-pence piece, and a tub of Vaseline, which I knew the boys had dug into, after catching them sitting around with glossy lips. A rotation of five different T-shirts had seen me through seven months, each one barely held together by its threads. But until now I hadn’t considered how little it bothered me. Before leaving Vancouver, we had stocked up on thermals knowing that temperatures in Kazakhstan had highs of minus seven, and as I looked out of the window at the guards’ breath, I shivered in anticipation. Touching the cold glass, I watched as China rolled away from the window, and we were shunted across the border into Kazakhstan, and a little bit closer to home.

  13

  Azamat and Marzhan

  Snow billowed around the train. Soft as cotton, it swooped at the window in panicked flurries, a Christmas-card frame building along the edge of the glass. Through the blizzard, the Tian Shan mountains were just visible, their wizened old heads greyed with ice and veiled by rolling cloud. Curving away from the mountains, the train swept across the dry grassland towards a fresh army of thunderclouds gathering force on the horizon. After crossing the border, we’d stopped at a small station cafe for a breakfast of lamb and tomato noodles, and mugs of builder’s tea – a gift from three off-duty Kazakh officials who were drunk on Russian vodka. No longer the green-leaf kind, the first cup of regular tea I’d had in a long time marked the beginning of our shift from East to West. Presenting me with a carton of grapefruit juice, the officials showed us photos of Gennady Golovkin, the Kazakh middleweight boxer. One of the men took out a ballpoint pen and wrote ‘Triple G’ on the back of my hand, before offering us a photograph with them to post on our ‘English Facebook’. Our first Kazakh encounter was a positive indicator of things to come. Like all good drunks, the group apologised on a loop for their drunkenness, before doling out hugs and leading us back out to the forecourt where the train had returned with its new engine. ‘Forecourt’ was generous; the station was more like someone’s old house with a railway shed in the back garden.

  Now, as we strained across the extremes of terrain to Almaty, I watched as the expanse seemed to double every hour. The snow had melted away, spotlights of sunshine lighting up the ground like a stage. Lagoons shone between bright yellow banks of sand as though we’d arrived on the coast. Until darkness streaked the skies, eclipsing the sun, which swirled like a beady eye, I sat in the warmest corner of the compartment, feeling a distinct sense of place. My mental clock had finally adjusted to the mar
athon stretches of time spent on these trains, and I now understood how far we would travel in twenty hours, thirty hours – or even five days. I could gauge the distance we were moving, and know how my body would respond to the rhythm beating beneath my feet. It had taken just under seven months, but after much fine-tuning I’d finally located the precise wavelength where I could sit in peace, my thoughts at rest, and time ceased to exist.

  In the harsh pre-dawn cold, Almaty station woke briefly with the thump of boxes and cases being dragged and rolled along the ground. Boots crunched through sludgy ice, and coarse voices blew steam into the air. Following the Kazakhs as they ignored the footbridge and traipsed across the tracks, children sleeping on their shoulders, we passed beneath the grandeur of the station, then found ourselves alone as they got into taxis, kissed friends and family, or walked on with purpose through the unlit streets. It was just after four o’clock, and guessing that we wouldn’t want to wait for first light in the emptiness of the station, I’d booked a hotel a few streets away. Trudging down the middle of the road, none of us said a word, unnerved by the stillness of our new surroundings. Each clearing of a throat or rustle of a bag was deafening, and I wished I could silence our footsteps and blend into the dark. A broken strip light flickered above the hotel door as we wandered in to find more darkness, wincing as we pressed a silver bell, shrill in its announcement of our arrival. Scuffling up from the floor behind the desk, a member of staff yawned and rubbed his eyes, handing over our card and sending us straight up to the room without checking passports or checking us in. Fumbling up the corridors, we found the door by torchlight, dumped our bags and crawled straight into three hard beds.

  *

  ‘What did you think? That Almaty was like small village?’ Azamat burst out laughing, wiping away a foam moustache. ‘You thought it was like Borat’s TV show, with one goat and a cart?’

  I was sitting in a Costa Coffee drinking a latte with an ecology student named Marzhan. I’d found her on Instagram, after trawling a forum for English-speaking students wanting to practise their language. Marzhan and I had been struggling along, Katy Perry playing in the background, when Azamat had stuck his head over a wall of plant pots and called out to me in perfect English. Announcing that he’d studied linguistics at Southampton University, he asked if he could join us. Relieved, I waved him over, having learnt nothing from Marzhan other than she was an ecology student who wanted to practise English, at which point we’d both smiled in silence as though on a bad date. Azamat was in the middle of having coffee with a young woman with green eyes and a sleek black ponytail; abandoning her without a moment’s hesitation, he grabbed his leather jacket from the back of the seat and came over. Thirty seconds was all it took for me to see that it was less my English prowess and more Marzhan’s rose-pink pout and soft eyes that had lured him across. Azamat was a trainee secondary school teacher who had spent a number of years in Hampshire and London, but had returned to Almaty to finish his training and start work. With thick eyebrows, perfect teeth and eyes that turned up at the corners, Azamat had one of those faces where you instantly knew what he’d looked like as a child, causing trouble and smiling his way out of it.

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘I didn’t think it would be like that, but I wasn’t expecting a Costa Coffee next to a KFC and a Hardee’s.’

  ‘Usually Kazakhs drink tea, proper black tea with cream or milk and sugar like in England, but recently coffee shops have become trendy. You know, in our tradition if you are bright, you should know how to make proper tea. When you get married for the first time, the other family will taste your tea to see how well you make it, and they give you money afterwards.’

  Kazakhs sounded like English Northerners.

  ‘Seeing as you brought him up, how do you feel about Sacha Baron Cohen,’ I asked carefully, worried about offending them.

  ‘He’s a super comedian,’ Azamat said, edging closer to Marzhan. ‘Most people here didn’t understand that metaphorically he’s actually making fun of Americans, not us. I like him, he’s so funny, and actually I’m sure he made people like you want to visit the country, no?’

  Azamat was prodding me in the shoulder and laughing, while Marzhan looked on in confusion at the exchange. Feeling guilty that she had no idea what we were talking about, I asked Azamat to translate for her, which he was only too pleased to do as her knight in shining leather, while I waved over Marc and Jem, who had just arrived from trawling the bazaar next door.

  ‘What language are you speaking?’ I asked.

  ‘We speak in Kazakh, but we also use some Russian words. We are, how do you say, switch-coding.’

  ‘Do children still learn Russian at school?’

  ‘Yes. They teach both languages at school. We only got our independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and things have been slow to change, but we are getting our identity back. Some Russian people think we are trying to discriminate against their language, but we are not, we are just trying to get our own language back. For example, we don’t have many media channels in Kazakh – maybe 30 per cent – and that will change. Some families speak only Russian, but most Kazakh people are bilingual, I’d say around 90 per cent. And from the first grade they now teach English here. Our government is changing the formation at school, we have a multilingual education system. Most people aren’t ready for that, they think it’s overloading children, but our president, Nazarbayev, suggested changing to English language in tenth and eleventh grade, and he thinks that in university everything should be taught in English.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘After studying in the UK, I think we should if we want to catch up with the rest of the world, and catch up with research – which is always in English.’

  ‘And does everyone get on? I’ve seen such a mix of Kazakhs and Russians.’

  ‘Yes, we are friendly, they are our neighbours, but we don’t want to be under their system. Of course, there were many advantages of being a part of the Soviet Union, but the Russian people claim that when we were a part of the Soviet Union they helped us build a lot of the infrastructure. I don’t agree, because they used our resources, 90 per cent of our resources went to Moscow. Oil is the first thing, but we have gold, silver, coal, we are a really rich country.’

  Almaty was no small village. Not that I had ever thought it was, but it was hard to visualise a country that I knew little about other than from a London comedian with a penchant for bad moustaches and swimwear. Moving out of our far-flung hotel and into the centre of town, we had walked for more than an hour down the four-lane avenues, as though drifting through a brutalist nightmare. Passing expressionless Russians in stonewash jeans and stilettos, and Kazakhs wrapped in fur, it was hard to tell what they thought of us. They were neither friendly nor unfriendly, with the exception of a drunkard who had tried to throw a punch at Marc, then chased me up the road until I’d hidden in an ammunition shop behind a counter of handguns. Veering away from the bare woods and speeding cars, we’d taken a detour through the university and its gardens, one of the few regal-looking buildings in a city that was architecturally stuck in the 1970s.

  Over the next week, I discovered that the post-Soviet dourness belied an energetic youth culture of techno clubs, Superdry T-shirts and Converse, which Azamat and Marzhan were quick to introduce us to. Taking us to a student party one night, they followed up the next day with cheeseburgers and ice-skating at the Medeu speed-skating rink. On the bus journey there, we’d discovered the other side of the city, driving up Almaty’s answer to Beverly Hills, where boulevards were lined with designer fashion outlets, gated mansions, and shopping malls shining like Mecca. On the way back into town, we stopped to thaw out at the Bellagio, a restaurant and bar that resembled a grotto with fairy lights – the sight alone had warmed my gangrenous fingertips. Azamat and Marzhan hovered nervously at the gate as an attendant in a beanie and black jacket stepped out of his cabin and trudged across the snow.

  ‘Where are you going? What do you want?
’ he barked.

  ‘I want a drink,’ said Marc.

  ‘You cannot come in here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You do not have the money.’

  ‘Maybe we go,’ said Azamat.

  ‘No, no way,’ said Marc, getting riled up into a frenzy. ‘Who are you to tell me I’ve got no money? I’ve got loads of money,’ he said, probably wishing at that moment that he wasn’t wearing hiking gear.

  ‘I think it’s because he just saw us get off the bus,’ Jem interjected.

  For all our bravado, I had a sinking feeling that we might be arguing our way into the most expensive restaurant in Kazakhstan. Ushering in Marzhan and Azamat, I knew it was too late to back down now, and racked my brains for the PIN of our emergency credit card. The bar was like Austin Powers’s living room, with open fires and suede corner sofas amid an atmosphere of après-ski. Surrounded by the gurgle of shishas, Azamat glanced over his shoulder and gave a low whistle of amusement at women slouched around in white fur boots and pink sunglasses, chewing on the pipes, their husbands dressed like Tony Montana. Moneyed kids with slicked-back hair smoked cigars, snapping their fingers at the staff. Over a pair of Irish coffees, Jem and I pretended not to watch as Azamat continued to ‘interpret’ for Marzhan, staring at her glossy hair and flashing us grins, while she blushed into her mint tea. Thrilled to discover a range of single malts, Marc soon calmed down; when the bill came he was pleased to see that the Bellagio was cheaper than a Wetherspoons.

  By day,   Almaty station was far from the threatening expanse we’d first encountered. Lit by the glare of winter sun, the enormous pillared building was packed with passengers shuttling around its hallways, and fringed by the usual nondescript figures who furnish every station in the world: never travelling, collecting or seeing off passengers, they can always be found loitering around as an integral part of the railway landscape. Our train to Astana was waiting on the furthest platform, the shadow of the station’s roof throwing the reverse of KAZAKHSTAN across the side in Cyrillic. As we hovered waiting for Marzhan and Azamat to arrive so we could say our goodbyes, I felt like we were in the middle of a wartime evacuation: families were hurrying down platforms wheeling barrows of boxes tied in string; wailing mothers clasped their sons to their breasts, and women gathered their skirts and children, picking their way across the tracks, rushing back for cartons of fruit and carrier bags.