A Book of Railway Journeys

by Ludovic Kennedy

  A woman crawled into the rain from the shelter of the platform. She appeared to be injured: she was on all fours, moving slowly towards the train—towards me. Her spine, I saw was twisted with meningitis; she had rags tied to her knees and woodblocks in her hands. She toiled across the tracks with painful slowness, and when she was near the door she looked up. She had a lovely smile—a girl’s beaming face on that broken body. She propped herself up and lifted her free hand at me, and waited, her face streaming with rain, her clothes soaked. While I was fishing in my pockets for money the train started up, and my futile gesture was to throw a handful of rupees on to the flooded line.

  At the next station I was accosted by another beggar. This was a boy of about ten, wearing a clean shirt and shorts. He implored with his eyes and said rapidly, “Please, sir, give me money. My father and mother have been at station platform for two days. They are stranded. They have no food. My father has no job, my mother’s clothes are torn. We must get to Delhi soon and if you give me one or two rupees we will be able.”

  “The train’s going to leave. You’d better hop off.”

  He said, “Please, sir, give me money. My father and mother—”

  He went on mechanically reciting. I urged him to get off the train, but it was clear that apart from his spiel he did not speak English. I walked away.

  It had grown dark, the rain was letting up, and I sat reading the engineer’s newspaper. The news was of conferences, an incredible number of gatherings in the very titles of which I heard the clack of voices, the rattle of mimeographed sheets, the squeak of folding chairs, and the eternal Indian prologue: “There is one question we all have to ask ourselves—” One Nagpur conference was spending a week discussing “Is the Future of Zoroastrianism in Peril?” On the same page two hundred Indians were reported attending a “Congress of Peace-Loving Countries,” “Hinduism: Are We at a Crossroads?” occupied another group, and on the back page there was an advertisement for Raymond’s Suitings (slogan: “You’ll have something to say in Raymond’s Suitings...”). The man wearing a Raymond suit was shown addressing a conference audience. He was squinting, making a beckoning gesture; he had something to say. His words were, “Communication is perception. Communication is expectations. Communication is involvement.”

  A beggar’s skinny hand appeared at my compartment door, a bruised forearm, a ragged sleeve. Then the doomed cry, “Sahib!”

  At Sirpur, just over the border of Andhra Pradesh, the train ground to a halt. Twenty minutes later we were still there. Sirpur is insignificant: the platform is uncovered, the station has two rooms, and there are cows on the verandah. Grass tufts grow out of the ledge of the booking-office window. It smelled of rain and wood smoke and cow dung; it was little more than a hut, dignified with the usual railway signs, of which the most hopeful was TRAINS RUNNING LATE ARE LIKELY TO MAKE UP TIME. Passengers on the Grand Trunk Express began to get out. They promenaded, belching in little groups, grateful for the exercise. “The engine has packed up,” one man told me. “They are sending for new one. Delay of two hours.”

  Another man said, “If there was a cabinet minister on this train they would have an engine in ten minutes’ time.”

  The Tamils were raving on the platform. A native of Sirpur wandered out of the darkness with a sack of roasted chickpeas. He was set upon by the Tamils, who bought all the chickpeas and demanded more. A mob of Tamils gathered at the station-master’s window to howl at a man tapping out Morse code with a little key.

  I decided to look for a beer, but just outside the station I was in darkness so complete I had second thoughts. The smell of rain on the vegetation gave a humid richness to the air that was almost sweet. There were cows lying on the road: they were white; I could see them clearly. Using the cows as road markers I walked along until I saw a small orange light about fifty yards away. I headed towards it and came to a little hut, a low poky shack with mud walls and a canvas roof. There was a kerosene lantern on the doorway and another inside lighting the surprised faces of a half a dozen tea-drinkers, two of whom recognized me from the train.

  “What do you want?” one said. “I will ask for it.”

  “Can I buy a bottle of beer here?”

  This was translated. There was laughter. I knew the answer.

  “About two kilometres down the road”—the man pointed into the blackness—“there is a bar. You can get beer there.”

  “How will I find it?”

  Beggars boarding a train on the Iran-Pakistan border

  Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson

  “A car,” he said. He spoke again to the man serving tea. “But there is no car here. Have some tea.”

  We stood in the hut, drinking milky tea out of cracked glasses. A joss stick was lit. No one said a word. The train passengers looked at the villagers; the villagers averted their eyes. The canvas ceiling drooped; the tables were worn shiny; the joss stick filled the room with stinking perfume. The train passengers grew uncomfortable and, in their discomfort, took an exaggerated interest in the calendar, the faded colour prints of Shiva and Ganpati. The lanterns flickered in the dead silence as our shadows leaped on the walls.

  The Indian who had translated my question said under his breath, “This is the real India!”

  The south was unexpectedly cool and lush: the greenness of the countryside matched the green on the map, the sea-level colour of this area. Because it was still early, and because Indian villagers seem to think of railway tracks as the margin of their world, there were people crouched all along the line, shitting. At first I thought they were simply squatting comfortably to watch the train go by, then I noticed the bright yellow hanks under them. I saw one man; he portended a hundred more, all facing the train for the diversion it offered, unhurriedly fouling the track. They were shitting when the train pulled in; they were still at it when the train pulled out. One curious group—a man, a boy, and a pig—were in a row, each shitting in his own way. A dignified man with his dhoti drawn up squatted a little distance from the tracks. He watched the train go by and he looked as if he would be there for some time: he held a large black umbrella over his head and a newspaper on his knees. Indeed, he seemed the perfect symbol for what a man in Delhi had called “The Turd World.”

  I think the next ten miles were the most exciting I have ever travelled in a train. We were on the coast, moving fast along a spit of land, and on either side of the train—its whistle screaming, its chimney full of smoke-white sand had drifted into magnificent dunes; beyond these dunes were slices of green sea. Sand whipped up by the engine pattered against the carriages behind, and spray from the breakers, whose regular wash dramatized the chugging of the locomotive, was flung up to speckle the windows with crystal bubbles. It was all light and water and sand, flying about the train speeding towards the Rameswaram causeway in a high wind. The palms under the scudding clouds bowed and flashed like fans made of feathers, and here and there, up to their stupas in sand, were temples flying red flags on their crooked masts. The sand covered the track in places; it had drifted into temple doorways and wrecked the frail palm-frond huts. The wind was terrific, beating on the windows, carrying sand and spray and the whistle’s hooeeee, and nearly toppling the dhows in full sail at the hump of the spangled horizon where Ceylon lay.

  “Few minutes more,” said the conductor. “I think you are sorry you took this train.”

  “No,” I said. “But I was under the impression it went to Dhanushkodi—that’s what my map says.”

  “Indo-Ceylon Express formerly went to Dhanushkodi.”

  “Why doesn’t it go there now?”

  “No Indo-Ceylon Express,” he said. “And Dhanushkodi blew away.”

  He explained that in 1965 a cyclone—the area is plagued with them—derailed a train, drowning forty passengers and covering Dhanushkodi with sand. He showed me what remained, sand dunes at the tip of the peninsula and the fragments of black roofs. The town had disappeared so thoroughly that not even fishermen
lived there any more.

  “Rameswaram is more interesting,” said the conductor. “Nice temple, holy places, and tombs of Cain and Abel.”

  I thought I had misheard him. I asked him to repeat the names. I had not misheard.

  PAUL THEROUX,

  The Great Railway Bazaar

  Iran before the Ayahtollahs

  The train pulled out of Tehran at one o’clock precisely. I was going to Tabriz, four hundred miles away, on the Russian border, to see the American consul. His name was Carleton Coon. I shared a compartment with an Iranian who wore a black coat and pepper-and-salt trousers. His hair was parted in the middle, and he had a thin mustache. He looked like a bank clerk.

  We rattled through the Tehran suburbs, and the waiter brought lunch. First there was tomato soup with an egg in it, and then grilled chicken and rice. I had already eaten Persian rice and found it the best in the world, soft and dry and very sweet. We were out in the country now; on either side was flat, sandy desert, and in the distance a range of mountains capped with snow. It was a beautiful day with sun and blue sky and an amazing purity of light. Twice we stopped at tiny brick-built stations. The first was in the middle of nowhere, with no roads leading to or from it, and no reason at all for its existence. The second was equally small; but about three miles beyond it, across the sand, lay a walled village with a squat, gleaming mosque. Here quite a lot of people got out.

  After lunch I slept—and woke to see my companion in the act of waxing his mustache. Our eyes met, and we both looked away, embarrassed. He went into the corridor to gossip with another Persian, a man who hadn’t shaved for days, and whose teeth were mostly gold. Then he went down the corridor, and this other man poked his head round the door.

  “Hullo,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” I said. “And you?”

  “Very well, thank you.”

  I could see he wanted to improve his English, so I asked him in and he came and sat down.

  “Is this your first visit to Azerbaijan?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are a businessman, yes? You are going on business?”

  “No, I’m a writer.”

  “A writer? You are a writer?”

  “Yes. What are you?”

  “I teach. I am a teacher.”

  “What do you teach?”

  “Persian literature. My wife is a teacher, too.”

  “Is she? What does she teach?”

  “Gymnastics.”

  “This other gentleman,” I said, indicating the empty seat. “You know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He is a railway official. He works for the railway.”

  “Ah.”

  He gave a little smile and said, “You are American, yes?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m British. But I’m writing a book about the Americans. That is why I’m going to Tabriz. To see the American consul.”

  His eyes lit up. “You are writing a book about the Americans? That is very interesting. They are a fine people, yes? I have a son and a daughter who are studying in the United States.”

  Now it was my turn to look surprised. “Have you?”

  “Yes. My son is studying engineering and my daughter business.”

  “That must cost you a lot of money,” I said.

  “Yes, that is so. That is why my wife and I both work. So we can send our children away to have a good education. That is what my country needs, to send more and more people away to the United States. To learn things, to teach us what to do.”

  I was hoping to find out more about how he had managed to send his children to America, but suddenly he got up. “Please, sir,” he said, “I am taking up your time. I will go.” And he went.

  At seven-thirty, when it was growing dark, the waiter announced dinner at the other end of the train. I made my way there through several wooden carriages where women in chadors were nursing babies, and soldiers sat gossiping or playing cards. It was a bright, modern dining car, already full. They gave us the same soup as at lunch and a delicious chello-kebab, and a pot of yoghurt, and masses more rice with about two ounces of butter laid on top. Opposite me was a family in which were two small girls in identical dresses, red with green spots. One looked quite normal, but the other had huge cheeks and great bushy eyebrows and an unusually dark skin. She shoveled her food into her mouth with both hands like a demented old woman. Next to me was a policeman with his cap on, and then the railway official came in wearing a green felt hat. Headgear in Persian dining cars seemed to be à la mode.

  When I returned to the compartment, I found the door locked. The teacher was standing outside.

  “The railway official,” he said, “has locked the door. Against robbers, yes?” He took out his wallet and showed me photographs of his son and his daughter, an enchantingly pretty girl of twenty-one. I showed him photographs of my wife and children.

  “Your wife is beautiful,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “She used to be a ballet dancer.”

  He seemed surprised.

  “Yes. She made a film called The Red Shoes. It was very famous. Did you see it?”

  “No. I do not often see the films.”

  We chatted some more, and then the railway official came back and opened the door. But he didn’t stay long. An inspector arrived and bundled him out. He was followed by a man in blue dungarees, who made up three beds. Then an army officer wearing dark glasses came in, and behind him a charming Iranian of about thirty, who said he had been four years at college in Denver, Colorado. “My friend and I,” he said, “are traveling second class, but we have paid the difference in order to get a good night’s rest.”

  He told me that he was an official in local government and was going to take up a post at a small town near Tabriz. I told him what I was doing, and he said, “A great many people in Iran don’t know there are Americans here. Almost as many know there are some here but they don’t meet them, and the fact makes no impact. A small number, students and Communists mostly, resent them. An even smaller number realize it is better to have them with you than to be alone. There have been times in our country when we were alone and it was no good. If we have to be on a side, it is better we should be on the American side than the other.”

  Before turning in, I went down the corridor to the wash-room. On the way I passed the teacher and the railway official chatting together. The teacher said, “I am telling my friend here what you are telling me, that your wife is a belly dancer. Like me, he finds it interesting, yes?”

  LUDOVIC KENNEDY,

  Very Lovely People

  An unusual death in Africa

  Towards the end of my stay in British East Africa, I dined one evening with Mr. Ryall, the Superintendent of the Police, in his inspection carriage on the railway. Poor Ryall! I little thought then what a terrible fate was to overtake him only a few months later in that very carriage in which we dined.

  A man-eating lion had taken up his quarters at a little roadside station called Kimaa, and had developed an extraordinary taste for the members of the railway staff. He was a most daring brute, quite indifferent as to whether he carried off the station-master, the signalman, or the pointsman; and one night, in his efforts to obtain a meal, he actually climbed up on to the roof of the station buildings and tried to tear off the corrugated-iron sheets. At this the terrified baboo in charge of the telegraph instrument below sent the following laconic message to the Traffic Manager: “Lion fighting with station. Send urgent succour.” Fortunately he was not victorious in his “fight with the station”; but he tried so hard to get in that he cut his feet badly on the iron sheeting, leaving large blood-stains on the roof. Another night, however, he succeeded in carrying off the native driver of the pumping-engine, and soon afterwards added several other victims to his list. On one occasion an engine-driver arranged to sit up all night in a large iron water-tank in the hope of getting a shot at him, and had a loop-hole cut in the
side of the tank from which to fire. But as so often happens, the hunter became the hunted; the lion turned up in the middle of the night, overthrew the tank and actually tried to drag the driver out through the narrow circular hole in the top through which he had squeezed in. Fortunately the tank was just too deep for the brute to be able to reach the man at the bottom; but the latter was naturally half paralysed with fear and had to crouch so low down as to be unable to take anything like proper aim. He fired, however, and succeeded in frightening the lion away for the time being.

  It was in a vain attempt to destroy this pest that poor Ryall met his tragic and untimely end. On June 6, 1900, he was travelling up in his inspection carriage from Makindu to Nairobi, accompanied by two friends, Mr. Huebner and Mr. Parenti. When they reached Kimaa, which is about two hundred and fifty miles from Mombasa, they were told that the man-eater had been seen close to the station only a short time before their train arrived, so they at once made up their minds to remain there for the night and endeavor to shoot him. Ryall’s carriage was accordingly detached from the train and shunted into a siding close to the station, where, owing to the unfinished state of the line, it did not stand perfectly level, but had a pronounced list to one side. In the afternoon the three friends went out to look for the lion, but finding no traces of him whatever, they returned to the carriage for dinner. Afterwards they all sat up on guard for some time; but the only noticeable thing they saw was what they took to be two very bright and steady glow-worms. After events proved that these could have been nothing else than the eyes of the man-eater steadily watching them all the time and studying their every movement. The hour now growing late, and there being apparently no sign of the lion, Ryall persuaded his two friends to lie down, while he kept the first watch. Huebner occupied the high berth over the table on the one side of the carriage, the only other berth being on the opposite side of the compartment and lower down. This Ryall offered to Parenti, who declined it, saying that he would be quite comfortable on the floor; and he accordingly lay down to sleep, with his feet towards the sliding door which gave admission to the carriage.