On Train Rides and Extremes

Above Photo: Jeena Shah, AIF Fellow

Over a south-Indian meal of uttapam and coconut chutney, one of the wonderful individuals I met in New Delhi, a consultant to the American India Foundation named Payal, appropriately stated that even a walk down the street in India can be an intellectual experience. It’s now the end of my 4th week in India, and everything I have experienced so far has confirmed her opinion (I must add that it's equally easy to intellectualize a walk through any part of San Francisco, but that's besides the point!). So I thought I'd describe a small part of my overnight train ride from New Delhi to Ahmedabad to highlight this truth.

Leaving New Delhi in the first place was a bittersweet moment: I was excited to head toward Ahmedabad – the city in which I currently sit to type this post, and will continue to reside until the end of June – but sad to leave the individuals that I had so much enjoyed getting to know. With me for the ride, thankfully, was my new roommate (another AIF fellow placed in Ahmedabad), Jeena Shah. We arrived on platform 6 of the train station a good hour early, but were told that we couldn't board the train until 15 minutes before departure. So we stood around awkwardly, shifting weight from one leg to the next, swatting at flies, moving our western bags out of peoples way every few moments, simply staring at the train which would soon carry us across a good part of India’s northern region to a city we would attempt to call home. After finally being admitted onto the train and shoving our luggage under and above our seats, we anxiously awaited the arrival of our cabin mates. Moments later in strolled a family of 4 (mother, father, uncle, child), followed by a young man traveling alone with shiny black hair, shiny black shoes, and a shiny silver ipod-shuffle clipped to his belt.

Relieved that we would most likely be avoiding the horror stories of aggressive or unfriendly cabin mates, I cozied up against the window with my headphones and a book. As we pulled out of the train station it soon became clear that the title of my book, “Plant of Slums”, would teach me less than the observations right outside my window. So I watched. I watched mothers and their children dig through trash mounds, I watched squatter settlement (under bridges, between buildings) after squatter settlement pass by, I watched young boys chasing each-other barefoot by the tracks, stray dogs barking at each other, children and old men alike bathing with buckets of water and a bar of blue soap, cows eating grass, cows eating trash; the city felt like it just kept going, and the reality of urban life thinned and thinned until the scene out my window shifted from urban, to semi-urban to rural. When my mind finally caught up to my eyes I turned away from the window, and right there inside my comfortable AC cabin was the young child of our cabin-mates being force fed by his parents and uncle: bright orange cheese puffs, followed by rotti (think flatbread) and a potato stew painted yellow with turmeric, then biscuits, more cheese puffs, some more rotti with yellow potatoes, and finally they helped him wash it all down with bright orange soda. I watched him chug the sugary substance and wondered how soon he’d be spewing it all back up, but just as he put the bottle down out came a new bag of chips, harder to open this time because of all the grease on his hands. In a matter of seconds I had gone from watching severe poverty and malnourished adults and children in New Delhi’s urban sprawl, to watching an upper/middle-class family force-feed their child into what will soon be type II diabetes (not to mention the child later peed on my backpack, so I was unimpressed all around). I thought of a NYTimes article I had read last year about malnourished youth in India, raised my eyebrows in uncomfortable disbelief, and asked Jeena if she had any fiction I could borrow – my brain could take no more.

A few hours later I picked myself up out of R.K. Narayan’s The Guide, and noticed Jeena’s report on caste discrimination peeking out of her bag (a report she recently wrote in law school for Human Rights Watch), so I asked her to tell me a bit about the focus of her research. Ten minutes into our conversation about one of India’s darkest and ugliest realities – caste discrimination and the fate of manual scavengers – we were caught off guard as we witnessed the extreme opposite: the beauty of India's plurality. Right before us in the cabin, in the small space between the benches and bags, the young man (the one with shiny hair, shoes and ipod) laid out a small green and white carpet and began his evening prayers. I had noticed moments earlier that he had gotten up to go to the restroom, but had no idea that it was to wash his hands and feet. As he stood and fell to his knees repeatedly before an Agnostic (me), a Jain (Jeena), and a family of Hindus, all the while murmuring his prayers, I found myself overwhelmed with euphoria, so much so that my mind went blank and all I could wonder was whether he was praying in Mecca's actual direction*. As I turned to face Jeena I could sense she was experiencing the same emotions; we exchange a smile of appreciation, tacitly ended our conversation, and gazed back out the window. The setting sun had turned the sky an awesomely rich and peachy blue, and at that very moment I knew I had made the right choice in coming to India.


*We would see the young man pray twice more before reaching Ahmedabad the next day and each time he prayed in the same direction, so I'm pretty sure that there was no way to know where Mecca was in relation to the moving train, but who really knows.