Download - National Geographic June 1984 Magazine(by Rail Across the Indian Subcontinent)

Across IndianSubcontinent

By PAUL THEROUX

Photographs by STEVE McCURRY

BREAKFAST between Peshawar and Lahore is a dizzy

adventure for bearers who pass trays betweenthe dining car and first class, where locked insidedoors assure security. Inherited from Britain in

1947 and unequaled for presenting a pageant of humanity,an epic rail system takes the author from the KhyberPass to Bangladesh. He rekindles some memories-

warts and all—that helped inspire his best-selling workThe Great Railway Bazaar.

SimlaPAKISTAN /

' NewDelhi\ Darjeeling J

ittagong

BANGLADESH

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It takes a narrow-gauge iron horse to negotiate these Himalayafoothills. It took iron men to blast 103 tunnels through

Last ride with a pet clouds the face of a farmer's son taking the Varanasi-to-Calcuttatrain a few miles to market

to sell the goat. The railway is an indispensable fixture of Indian life,carrying 3.7 billion passengers a year.

Into scenes of "temple India" the trains also bring tourists. At Agra Fort station,where a cartop attendant adjusts a ventilator,

hey see domes and minarets of the Jama Masjid, a mosque completed in 1648 underMogul Emperor Shahjahan.

NDIA. How does this vast overpopulated subcontinentmanage to run, and even to prosper? For 130 years the chiefreason has been the railway. Dusty and monumental, its trainsoften seem as ancient as India itself. In Pakistan they look likepart of the landscape. An old reliable network of track bringshope to beleaguered Bangladesh.Much of Indian life is lived within sight of the tracks or the sta-

tion, and often next to the tracks, or inside the station. The railwaywas one of the greatest imperial achievements of the British raj,and now, a larger system than ever in a subcontinent divided intosovereign nations, it still has the powerful atmosphere of empireabout it.

I had happy memories of the trains of India, and after a ten-yearabsence I wanted to return and to trace a line from the KhyberPass in Pakistan, and through India, to ChittagonginBangladesh, taking as many trains as possible.

rom the corner seat in a railway car I could see anenormous amount of this land: moving east from thestony cliffs of the North-West Frontier in Pakistan,crossing Punjab and the valleys of the Indus, thencutting into India on an express, traveling up anddown, linking the hill stations of Simla and Darjeelingwith the long straight journeys of the plains—viaDelhi, the Taj Mahal, and the holy city of Varanasi onthe Ganges. After Calcutta I could nip into Bangladeshto the end of the line (map, page 747).

The statistics associated with Indian Railways areelephantine (ten million passengers a day, 11,000 locomotives,1.6 million workers), but the memorable details are simple enough;It is self-sufficient in rolling stock—India manufactures all her owncoaches and engines— and it makes an operating profit of 12percent revenue over expenditure. In many respects, India is oneof the world's greatest railway nations—in total number oftrains, stations, and longdistance travelers; and also in anegative sense, with the most cockroaches, the greatest numberof rats living under railway platforms, the most forms to fill out,and some of the dirtiest sleeping cars. In India the railway is notmerely a way of going to and from work, but rather a solution tothe complex demands of the family's life. Birth, death, marriage,illness, and religious festivals all require witnesses and ritualsthat imply a journey home.

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Administrator

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Administrator

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TO CHITTAGONGI started in Pakistan, from Jamrud, a deserted station a short

distance from Jamrud Fort, which, having been built in 1836, isjust ninety years older than the Khyber Railway. It was an earlymorning in July, and very hot—the monsoon was weeks overdue.

Once a week the Khyber train descends the 3,500 feet from thehighest point of the Khyber Pass, carrying the refugees and travel-ers who can afford the seven-rupee (35-cent) fare. The train is re-quired to climb such steep inclines that it is powered by two steamengines—one at the front and one at the rear of the five coaches—both belching smoke and whistling as they make the journey to andfrom Landi Kotal.

"Once there was no trouble here," a man told me as we clatteredacross the plain. "There was no water, no trees. Only small vil-lages. Then a dam was built and water came to the valley in astream, and since then there has been constant fighting."

Tempers were very bad. Months of drought had scorched theface of the land and made it so hot that people had moved out oftheir houses and set up their string beds under trees. Men sat on thebanks of the trickling stream beside the railway tracks and chattedkeeping their feet in the water.

There were more than 35,000 people in the Kacha Garhi refugeecamp, and nearly as many in the one at Nasir Bagh not far away.Driven from their homes in Afghanistan by the war, they lay inhammocks, they cooked under trees, they waited for the weeklyshipment of food; they watched the train go by. Across ten miles ofgravel are the high gray-brown mountains that mark the border ofAfghanistan, and the black smoking train makes its way across thedead land.

This was always a tribal area, the people were always dressedlike this, and always armed, the train was always pulled by smok-ing, screeching steam engines, and the nighttime noises were al-ways human voices and the clopping hooves of the tonga ponies,and when—hours late—the train pulls into Peshawar Cantonmentstation, it is pitch dark and 110°F. Most people make straight forthe bazaar.

"This is the Qissa Khawani Bazaar," said Ziarat Gul, a power-fully built and kindly soul who was known in Peshawar as "Guj-jar—Buffalo Man." He was pointing at a labyrinth of alleys toonarrow for anything larger than pony carts.

"This means the Storytellers' Bazaar. In the old times all the ka-filas [caravans] came from Persia and Russia and Afghanistan,here to Peshawar. They told stories of their journeys."

Peshawar is once again a great destination. Now the travelers

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are Afghan refugees, and the stories in the bazaar concern the hero-ism of Pathans ambushing Soviet convoys. There are said to bemore than three million refugees, and many of them bring goodsand food to sell at the bazaar—carpets and jewelry, embroidery,leatherwork, cartridge belts, pistol holders, rifle slings, almonds,dates, prunes, and fresh fruit. The bazaar has never been busieror more full of hawkers. Everywhere are the beaky, craggy facesof the travelers, turbaned men and shrouded women, rifles andpistols, and the tea drinkers huddled around samovars—story-tellers again.

OCCUPIED an air-conditioned compartment on the KhyberMail, and in its grumbling way the machinery actually worked.I was soon traveling under a bright moon through Nowshera

and across the Indus River at Attock. We passed through Ra-walpindi and Jhelum, too, but by then I was asleep.

Just before Wazirabad at dawn there was a knock on the door omy compartment. "You wanting breakfast?"

I could have been wrong, of course, but it seemed to be the samebrisk man who had asked the same question ten years ago: He hadthe same bad eye, the same dirty turban, the same lined face. Andthe breakfast was the same as well—eggs, tea, bread on heav;stained crockery.

Scattered showers of the monsoon had begun to appear. The;darkened Lahore, once the princely city of Akbar and Shah Jahannow the capital of Punjab. It was cooler here, and the rice fieldhad water in them; planting had begun; the grass was green. Thesoil was mostly clay, and so brickworks had sprung up, each onewith a steeple-like chimney. Little girls, fully clothed, some looking as young as six or seven, were digging mud and clay out of pitsfor bricks and carrying it in baskets on their heads. Meanwhile,

By Rail Across the Indian Subcontinent

Famed gorge reverberateswith the music of steam as atrain, part of Pakistan's raillegacy from Britain, nears atunnel in the Khyber Pass(facingpage). A secondengine, out of sight at rear,helps power the train upgrades.

Near the Afghanistanborder a Pathan tribesman(left) hefts a wrench used totighten track bolts. Whilemany Pathans work for therailway, too many of theirAfghan kin are passengersfleeing combat betweenSoviet troops and Afghanfighters. Some three millionrefugees have sought shelterin Pakistan. Some of thehomeless get no farther thanthe tracks, where refugeecamps sprawl in a bleaklandscape.

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A very careful shave iswhat a barber gives hisconspicuously armed customer inPakistan's Peshawar Cantonmentstation (facing page).

Superintendent Abbas Afi Shah(above) boasts of the station'scleanliness—"The few that areclean realty stand out," agreesphotographer McCurry.

Rail links between India andPakistan were severed when warbroke out in 1965 and remainedclosed for 11 years. Trade is nowbrisk, with Indian iron ore and pigiron rotting into Pakistani steetmills.

little boys played in the grass or swam in ditches. It appears the ab-surd custom of the country to require little girls modestly to remainclothed and do most of the laborious work, while naked boys canfrolic all the livelong day.

The decrepitude near Shahdara Bagh was interesting, becausenot far from Shahdara station is one of Pakistan's most gloriousbuildings, the Tomb of Jahangir, with its vast park—grander thanthe Shalimar Gardens—and the marble mausoleum inlaid withgems; all of it in a perfect state of preservation.

WHEN INDIA was partitioned in 1947, so was the railway, butthe trains didn't stop running until the 196S Indo-Pakistaniwar. For 11 years the steel rails connecting Wagah in Pakistanwith Atari, the Indian border town, were silent. And then in1976 the trains began to run again. Very little had changed onthis line; the steam locomotives, like all steam locomotives inIndia, looked filthy, ancient, and reliable; they are great sootythunder boxes, and there are 7,245 of them still operating inIndia. The coaches were battered, and the train was very slow.This was the International Express.

The train left on time, which surprised me, considering that thethousand or so people on board had all had their passports stampedand their luggage examined. We traveled across a plain toward In-dia. After an hour every man we passed wore a turban, the symbol-ic headpiece of the Sikhs. We were nearing Amritsar, spiritualcapital of the Sikhs, and as practically all Sikhs are named Singh,we were among the great family of Singhs.

Sikh is from the Sanskrit word shishya, meaning "disciple." TheSikhs are disciples of a tradition of ten gurus, beginning with 15th-century Guru Nanak, who taught monotheism, espoused medita-tion, and opposed the Hindu caste system. On the approaches toAmritsar, Sikhs herded goats, Sikhs dug in the fields, Sikhs pro-cessed the passengers on the International Express. At Atari sta-tion the operation took several hours: everyone ordered off thetrain, everyone lined up and scrutinized, everyone ordered backon. Then the whistle blew and the black smoke darkened the sky,and we proceeded into India.

But it was not only black smoke in the sky. The clouds were thecolor of cast iron; they were blue-black and huge. It is usually pos-sible in India to tell whether it will rain from the whiteness of theegrets—they look whitest when rain is due—and these dozens fly-ing up from the paddies near Amritsar were brilliantly whiteagainst the dark clouds massing over us.

We arrived just before one o'clock at Amritsar, and as our trainpulled in, passing buffaloes and scattering the goats and ducks andchildren, the storm hit. It was the first rain of the monsoon—pelt-ing gray drops, noisy and powerful and, only minutes after it hadbegun, already erupting from drains and streaming under thetracks. The rain in its fury put the Indians into a good mood. It wasthe sunny days and blue skies—intimations of drought—thatmade them bad tempered.

Because of the rain, only pedicabs were running in Amritsar.Automobiles lay stranded and submerged all over theinundated city. I sat inside, deafened by the rain, and studied thetimetable,

708 National Geographic, June 1984

and after a while I became curious about the route of a certain trainout of Amritsar. This particular mail train left Amritsar at ten inthe evening and headed south on the main line to Delhi; buthalfway there it made a hairpin turn at Ambala and raced north toKalka where, at dawn, it connected with the railcar to Simla. Itwas an extraordinary route—and a very fast train: Instead of goingto bed in the hotel, I could reserve a sleeper, board the train, andmore or less wake up in the foothills of the Himalayas, in Simla. Itwas not a popular train, this Simla Mail. Its odd twisted route wasundoubtedly the result of the demands of the imperial postalservice, for the British regarded letter writing and mail delivery asone of the distinguishing features of any great civilization. AndIndians feel pretty much the same.

My sleeping car was unswept; like a cell, it had barred windows

and a steel door. "Use the shutters," the ticket collector said, "anddon't leave any small articles lying around."

The whistle of the Simla Mail drowned the sounds of music fromthe bazaar. I was soon asleep. But at midnight I was awakened byrain beating on the shutters. The monsoon that had hit Punjab onlythe day before had brought another storm, and the train struggledthrough it. The thick raindrops came down so hard they spatteredthrough the slats and louvers in the shutters and a fine spraysoaked the compartment floor.

The guard knocked on the door at 5:20 to announce that we hadarrived at Kalka.

It was cool and green at Kalka, and after a shave in the Gentle-men's Waiting Room I was ready for the five-hour journey throughthe hills to Simla. I could have taken the small pottering SimlaQueen or the express, but the white 20-seat railcar was already

Favorite side trip, a trainto Simla crosses a tieredmasonry-arch bridge asIndians graze cattle below.Prior to train service in1903 it took eight gruelinghours by horse-drawn tongato reach Simla, adored byRudyard Kipling as a place"where all things begin andmany come to an evil end."

"Peopled Express" meanslots of people crammed intolittle space (facing page).They are expressly advised tobe patient because serviceoften runs hours late. SuchJanata trains offer only no-frills second class.

That India's strength liesin her poor is reflected by herrailroad. Even in 1904 nearly200 million rode lowest classon a system barely half acentury old. Today second-class railway earningsoutstrip others nearlytenfold, although thehumblest fare averages aboutthree-fourths of a cent a mile,among Asia's fewest.

waiting at the platform. I boarded, and snoozed, and woke to seemists lying across the hills and heavy green foliage in the gladesbeside the line.

Two hours later at 5,000 feet we came to the little station atBarog, where every day the railcar waits while the passengers havebreakfast; and then it sets off again into the low tumbling cloud.Occasionally the cloud and mist were broken by a shaft of light,and parted to reveal a valley floor thousands of feet below.

The opinion of the Indian in the hill station is that the plains aredisorderly and crime ridden: As soon as people climb above threeor four thousand feet, they tend to behave themselves. The trainguard at Simla station was full of complaints about lowland van-dalism and tardiness and "mischief— especially political mischief"on the railways.

"You're very frank, sir," I said."It is because I have resigned," he replied.The residents of Simla, where once the high officials of the raj

and their ladies went to escape the hot season, are often visited byrelatives. "They always say, Tm coming for two or three days,' butafter three weeks they're still here. And there is something aboutthis air that excites them and makes them difficult."

The man speaking was an army colonel. He had a remedy forunwelcome guests. He made lists of sights that were not to bemissed in Simla. Each one was a day's walk from his house, and itwas usually at the top of a steep hill. After a few days of this sight-seeing, the starch was out of his guests, and they were fairly gladwhen it was time to go.

The most knowledgeable railway buff I met in Simla was a manwho, over a period of years, had traveled all over India on trains,visiting racetracks. He seldom stayed overnight. He would hurryto Lucknow on a night train, gamble all day at the track, and thencatch the sleeper to Calcutta and do the same thing. I said it seemeda difficult thing to do, all that railroading. No, he said, the difficultthing was putting on a sad face and hailing a tonga and then ridingthird class so that no potential thief would guess that he had 5,000rupees of winnings in his pocket.

GLIDED DOWN from Simla in the cozy little blue train toKalka and then in the late evening boarded the sleeper for Delhi.It was air-conditioned, and the bed was made—starched sheetsand a soft pillow. There was no better way to Delhi. The next

morning I looked out the window and saw the outskirts of the city,simmering under the gray lid of the sky.

At Old Delhi station it seemed to me that the unluckiest railway-man in this season of heat was a fireman on a steam locomotive. AsI rambled around the station yard, however, I discovered an evenmore exhausting job: boilermaker. The boilermaker is essentially awelder, but because he must deal with all aspects of the boiler, he isoften required to use his welding torch inside the boiler or thefirebox.

Today it was 103°F at the Old Delhi loco shed, but SureshBaboo, a boilermaker, crawled out of a locomotive's firebox totell me that he was not deterred by a little thing like heat.

He was a railwayman grade two and earned a thousand rupees a

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Treated like maharajas, who once possessed not only these elegant cars but their ownrailways, tourists dine in the Palace on Wheels. Pulled by a steam, engine

named the Desert King the train was restored for six million dollars to earn foreign exchange, often at theprincely sum of 1,090 dollars for an eight-day trip.

month ($100), of which four hundred was his "dearness allowance"("because in Delhi, food and living are very dear"). Was thisenough to live on? Not in Delhi. "We are asking for an increase inthe dearness," said Suresh Baboo.

Near New Delhi I found the best organized railway station in In-dia. This was Hazrat Nizamuddin station, just south of the cityand a short walk from Humayun's Tomb.

There were flowers and shrubs in pots on the platform, and ev-eryday on the orders of the stationmaster, G. L. Suri, ant powderwas sprinkled along the walls. Mr. Suri proudly took me on a tourof the station. He hadn't been recommended to me by the RailwayBoard—I had simply stopped on one of the 180 trains that passthrough each day and noticed how unusual it looked. How was itpossible to keep a station so clean in the hot season?

Mr. Suri said, "I do my duty—I get satisfaction from it. Some-times I work 16 hours a day. I do not accept excuses." He noddedand added softly, "And I am very tough."

HE Madras-Janata Express passes through Hazrat Nizamud-din station without stopping, which is odd, because "Janata"means "people" and the "People's Express" stops everywhere.

It is probably the slowest express in the world. It would be severaldays before this long rumbling steam train arrived in Madras. Itwas cheap, but it was not really meant for long-distance passen-

gers; it went 1,400 miles, stopping at virtually every station—justlike a country bus—and most people only went a few miles.

In India it is easy to tell the long-distance travelers. They areheavily laden and always carry a big steel trunk. At railway sta-tions in India one sees the family grouped around the trunk—theysit on it, sleep beside it, use it for a table, and when their traindraws in, they hire a skinny man to wrestle it on board.

"My mother was typical, "a man told me on this train. "She car-ried all her jewelry and all her saris—30 or 40 of them. She broughtglasses to drink out of, cooking utensils, plates, and the trays wecall thali. She took the essential household. All Indians do this.The trouble was that my mother used to take all these things even ifshe was only going away for a day or so."It seemed that the trunk was an Indian's best defense against beingrobbed, contaminated, or stranded: At any moment, using thetrunk, an Indian could set up house. "You're not going far," I wasreminded.

No, only to Agra—six hours on this slow beast; but six hours wasnothing on an Indian train, where some people might say,"When do I arrive? Let me see. Today is Thursday and to-morrow is. . . . " I was sitting a cross from Bansilal Bajaj, one

of the great number ofIndians who workabroad. Mr. Bajaj was onhome leave from AbuDhabi. Every two yearshe got

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two months' leave, and he spent a month of that on Indian trains,going up and down the country. "In Abu Dhabi all we do is work,"said Mr. Bajaj. "I am in the catering and cleaning business, butI am no more than a machine. When I come back to India, I amhuman again."

It was a lovely evening, very clear, just after a heavy rainstormof the monsoon. Now there was not a cloud in the sky, and in thewest it was the color of a tropical sea—greeny blue, reflected in per-fectly still pools and paddy fields. There was a sweetness in the airand for a number of miles no people—just color and empty spaceand darting birds.

Bearing any burden, corps ofvendors haunt the stations. InNew Delhi a porter balancesthe luggage of first-classtravelers to Agra (left).Licensed by Indian Railwaysand identified by red jacketsand brass tags, porters usuallysell their services for theequivalent of 20 cents a bag.For readers a bookseller(above) hawks a pile ofcurrent titles. Vendors offerfood and trinkets of every kind,including the great Indianstatus symbol, sunglasses.

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A deep breath helps onesurvive in New Delhi, assecond-class passengers cramthemselves and theirbelongings onto the Assam.Mail (right). Of suchcompetition, photographerMcCurry found, advantagecan be taken. "As a trainnears a station," he says, "agroup of guys will jump onand take the seats ofpassengers getting ready toleave the train. Then the guysauction the seats off to thenew passengers getting on."Failure to get a seat canmean standing for eighthours or more. Resting up forher journey, a woman awaitsher train near New Delhi(facing page). But suchhardships of second classappear outweighed byrewards—the ability tocommute, to worship, and tojoin family in myriadcelebrations.

Just after dark the lights in the train failed, and we traveled clat-tering through pitch-blackness, with the steam engine puffing andwheezing and the whistle blowing off-key. Sparks from the smoke-stack sailed past the window like fireflies.

It was almost nine by the time we arrived in Agra. The town isnothing. The Agra Fort is substantial. Akbar's Mausoleum atnearby Sikandra has character, and the Moti Masjid (the PearlMosque) has personality; but the Taj Mahal is something else. Justlooking at it, you are certain that you will never forget it. It is notmerely a visual experience, but an emotional one—its pure sym-metry imparts such strong feeling; and it is a spiritual experience,too, for the Taj Mahal is alone among buildings I have seen. It isnot merely lovely; it looks as if it has a soul.

N THE Ganga-Yamuna Express to Varanasi, it was along night. There was no bedding, no food, no water; hot

cinders blew in the window; even first class was filthy.Dawn broke at Kanpur, and two hours later at Lucknow it was

very sunny and bright, a noontime heat, though it was hardly halfpast seven in the morning.

All the paddy fields were brim full. The rains were dangerouslystrong in Hardwar and had flooded Delhi, but here beside the lineof the Ganga-Yamuna Express they had guaranteed a great ricecrop and had given the landscape a serene lithographed look—thepalms very still, the buffaloes obedient, the Indians up to theirshins in water. An emblematic mother carrying her infant weededvegetables in the middle of another field under the shade of a bigblack umbrella.

For miles, for hours—for days on these plains—you see nothingelse at this time of year; men, women, and children planting or


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plowing or tending the crop, and all of them working under theblazing sun and burned as black as their buffaloes.

The villages were mud huts and grass roofs, like a glimpse ofcentral Africa in the state of Uttar Pradesh, except that in the centerof every frail village was always a substantial stone temple. Noneof these villages were signposted, but sometimes a tiny station or ahalt displayed the name. We were going the long way to Varanasi,taking the "Faizabad Loop," via Ayodhya, where monkeys on theplatform sat on the inkblots of shade. At Shahganj, rice plantersstood scanning the blue sky for clouds.

ARANASI STATION has the contours of a Hindutemple, and like a temple it is filled with holy men andpilgrims. It is also full of sacred cows. The cows at

Varanasi station are wise to the place—they get water at thedrinking fountains, food near the refreshment stalls, shelter alongthe platforms, and exercise beside the tracks; they also know howto use the crossover bridges and climb up and down the steepeststairs. "We are installing cow-catchers," the station superintendenttold me—but he did not mean the traditional ones, on the engines;he meant fences to prevent the cows from entering the station.

National Geographic, June 1984

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Varanasi, for Hindus, is a most holy place to die, or failing that,to be cremated beside the river. Also, Buddha preached his firstsermon nearby; the Jains, too, have their own reasons for reveringVaranasi. It is the goal of many pilgrimages. Here the beggars aretesting the piety of the pilgrims; and those small narrow bundlesthat are being carried through the streets are in fact humancorpses, headed for the cremation fires on the ghats.

Because nothing that is holy in India can be regarded as dirty,holy Varanasi with its thousand temples is one of the filthiest of In-dian cities and positively stinking with sanctity. I met an Indianmedical student who had just arrived in Varanasi. He was on hisway to the Ganges to take his ritual bath. He said he was definitelyplanning to bathe in the Ganges, among dead goats and monkeysand the occasional corpse of a beggar who died at the station andwas taken to the river and thrown in."Oh, yes," the medical student said. "I will immerse myself.""What about the health aspect?" He said, "It is a question ofmind over matter." That was not the only contradiction I saw inVaranasi. Nailed to a wall that was smeared with betel juice wasthe sign SPITTING INPUBLIC IS INJURIOUS TO HEALTH.

Timeless scene in a time ofchange. Men and womenwash their clothes by theYamuna River as a trainthunders toward Agra on adouble-decked bridgecarrying a roadway below.For railroad buffs Indiaremains a land of blissbecause steam engines stillaccount for nearly two-thirdsof its fleet. But now theywork the short hauls, whilediesel and electriclocomotives carry more than80 percent of both freightand passenger traffic.

By Rail Across the Indian Subcontinent 721

One-man parade, a lineinspector pushed by hisretinue rolls past j\gra's TajMahal during a check forwear and tear on the rails.While serious derailntentsare rare, mishaps caused byovercrowding—hanging outwindows, riding the roof—are all too common onurban lines.

From a distance in the early morning Varanasi looks wonderful,and the most glorious sight of it is from the express to Howrah as itcrosses the Dufferin Bridge that spans the Ganges just east of thecity. From the high vantage point of the bridge, the whole popu-lous riverbank and all the ghats can be seen gilded in thelight of the rising sun, and the city's splendor is intensified be-cause the distance hides its decay, and at this time of day—theearly morning—the river is filled with the pious, washing, swim-ming, and generally going about their prayers.

The Howrah express, one of India's best trains, leaves Varanasiat 5 :30 in the morning, just as the passengers from Delhi are yawn-ing and peering out the windows and getting their first glimpses of


the holy city. And the people waiting on the platform at Varanasiare watching the train with admiration, because this train repre-sents luxury—it has three chair cars, and sleeping cars, and a pan-try car, where food is cooked and dished up in trays that aredistributed around the train by waiters. The Howrah express is ef-ficiently air-conditioned; it is famous for being fast, and it is practi-cally always on time.

From here—the outskirts of Varanasi all the way to Calcutta—the land is waterlogged and fertile, an endless rice field. At noonthe train stops at Gaya, near where Buddha received enlighten-ment. Gaya also marks the beginning of a very strange landscape.Sudden hills are thrust out of the flatness like massive dinosaurs


petrified on the flat Bihari plain; and other hills are like pyramids,and still more like slag heaps. They don't seem to belong to anyrange of hills, and they have a comic plopped-down look.

It was wet and cool and jungly four hours later whenwe entered West Bengal, and when the trainstopped, some blind beggars got on. The ticket examiner asked them to beg in a different partof the train, and they meekly agreed.

This ticket examiner was a wom-an—one of three or four women who work on

the train. Her given name was Ollie

Frances. "I was a Christian," she said. "But then I married Mr. Ningamfor love, and so I became a Hindu. It was for the children's sake; itwould have been too confusing for them otherwise."

Mrs. Ningam had seven children, the eldest eighteen, the youngestfive. She missed them when she made this Calcutta run, but herrelatives helped look after them. She had worked for the railways for20 years.

What Mrs. Ningam liked best about the Howrah express was itsspeed—less than 14 hours from Varanasi to Calcutta. As the train drewinto Howrah station, the daylight was extinguished by smoke and rainmixed with fog; frightening numbers of people were making their waythrough the mud and lamplight.

On a real milk run,villagers riding to marketbetween Varanasi andCalcutta hang bulky cans ofmilk outside the train(facing page), thus avoidingdelay in wrestling them onand off. In Kanpur station acow's sanctity gives it freerummage in the trash(above).

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On this railway line dogs sleep between the tracks, and childrenplay on the tracks and roll toys along them, and the tracks are alsoput to practical use by men who push huge logs along them—skid-ding them downhill on the rails.

The four coaches are nearly always full, if not with legitimatetravelers then with joyriders—the train is part of the life of the longseries of mountainsides en route to Darjeeling. Some people onlyride a hundred yards, others are going miles. The toy train is full ofbusinessmen, farmers, Buddhist monks, and schoolchildren. Ev-ery ticket is made out in duplicate, though none of them costs morethan a few cents.

The train passes by the houses, a few familiar inches from thewindows. A boy reaches out and plucks a flower from theembankment covered with blue hydrangeas, yellow primroses,carnations, and ros,es, and hands it to a woman in a shop.

The valleys and these hillsides are open to the distant plains, andso the traveler on the toy train has a view that seems almost unnat-ural , it is so dramatic. At Sonada it is like standing at the heights ofa gigantic outdoor amphitheater and looking down and seeing theplains and the rivers, roads and crops printed upon it and flattenedby the yellow heat. There are wisps and whorls of cloud down theretoo. But up here it is dark green, wet hill country. Nearly everyonehas rosy cheeks.

AFTER SONADA we came to Jor Bungalow station and then toGhum, the highest railway station on the subcontinent at 7,407feet. The mist shifts slightly, and farther along, towardDarjeeling, it is possible on a clear day to see the long irregularridge of Kanchenj unga, massively white in the great folds of snow-covered rock.

The so-called Batasia Loop is the famous descent in which thetrain appears to be tying itself into a knot while at the same timewhistling impatiently to clear its own caboose out of the way. Aftertwo complete spirals the train continues on its way, gliding intoDarjeeling, still following the main road and bumping past theshops and sharing the thoroughfare with the Buddhist monks andthe bullock carts.

Darjeeling, also a famous hill station, is unlike Simla. It is not anIndian resort but rather a Nepalese town. It is a solemn place, fullof schools and convents and monasteries. It is barer than Simla,not as populous; it is muddier, friendlier, rather un-Indian in as-pect. Simla has visitors, Darjeeling has residents; Simla is Anglo-Indian, but Darjeeling is Oriental. It is not posh. Darjeeling is ahospitable place.

The curse of the town is its traffic—an endless procession ofhonking jeeps and trucks. It seemed to me that Darjeeling's trafficproblem could be solved with an updated version of the railway,which was completed a hundred years ago. The train was a greatsolution then, and it still serves the town, for many people com-mute from places like Ghum to jobs in Darjeeling—to the shops, tothe government offices, and even to the stranger occupations inDarjeeling such as the carver of yak bones and the clerk who standsunder the sign Licensed Vendor for Ganja & Bhang. Ten grams ofganja (marijuana)—30 cents.


The tram badly needs to be improved, but of course the wonder of it—like the wonder of much else m India—is that it still operates . India is acomplex place. The phones seldom work, the mail is unreliable, theelectricity is subject to sudden stoppages. There are numerous naturaldisasters, and there are 700 million people. It seems almost inconceivablethat this country is still viable, and yet there are times when one getsglimpses of its greatness. Near the^ end of my Indian journey I decidedthat India runs primarily because of the railway. It is an old-fashionedsolution, but India has old-fashioned problems.

NDIA'S relations with Bangladesh could not be described as warm; perhaps on the theorypropounded by Robert Frost that good fences make good neighbors, India has recently announced itsplan to secure its national boundary with Bangladesh with a 1,500-mile barbed-wire fence.

Passenger trains have not crossed the border for some time. I flew to Dhaka (Dacca) and took theUlka Express east and south toward Chittagong. The Ulka Express, 15coaches long—one was first class—was pulled by a diesel engine. Iwould have gone second class, but I would not have gotten a seat, and Iwas not prepared to stand for nine hours.

This train was on the world news the day I boarded it: It was the onlylink between Dhaka and Chittagong. Every other road was under fivefeet of water, and scores of people had drowned in the torrential rains.But the monsoon comes every year to Bangladesh, and it is alwayssevere. Its damage comes so regularly it is not remarkable. The feelingon the Ulka Express was that Bangladesh was having another unluckyweek. It was not immediately obvious that the rain was a disaster. Todaythe sun was shining, and this whole southern part of Bangladesh hadbeen turned into a spectacular lake—hundreds of miles of floodwater.And the only things showing above all that water were the long straightrails of the track.

Moral stricturestrumpeted in stations (right)do little to deter that wilyand ubiquitous Indianspecies, the fare dodger. Lastyear a two-week crackdowncaught 90,000 passengerswithout tickets, prosecuted10,000, jailed 5,000, andrecouped millions of rupeesin lost revenue. But on abranch line to Calcutta,farmers see nothing wrongwith grabbing a free ride totake their hay a shortdistance to market (facingpage).

(H>KMQ WINDOW orctis era*'— THE ARU.IVM^.CLOSES SPUN! 5DEPARTURE.

1CKETLESSTRMtt-IS SOCIALEV\L


I

w'EACHT94'BEFORE

Portrait of the depot as village, Howrah station serves Calcutta and embraces acommunity. The sleepy sprawl anywhere, beggars beg, mothers suckle infants.


Some vendors live here permanently. Enthusiastic travelers may arrive three days early and campout. Howrah, India's largest passenger terminal, has seen all.By Rail Across the Indian Subcontinent

"So wild and interestingand exciting and enchantingthat it ought to take a week/'declared Mark Twain in 1896of his eight-hour trip on anarrow-gauge train fromSiliguri to the cool heights ofDarjeeling. Beyond the mistsaid to be a boon for one ofthe town's attractions—plantations of tea—loomsanother, Kanchenjunga, at28,208 feet (8,598 meters)earth's third highest peak.

Begun as a sanatorium forthe disease-riddled East IndiaCompany, Darjeeling wasreached by rails in 1881. Itstill features innovations suchas the "Batasia Loop," bornof a lofty and ticklish terrain.High above the town, thetrain executes a steepspiraling descent—as Twainput it, "Like a snakeswallowing itself."

At Tongi junction I saw another train pull in. There were perhaps50 people clinging to the sides of the engine and hanging from thecarriages and sitting and standing on the coach roofs. Theseseemingly magnetized people had the effect of making the trainlook small. They completely covered it, and of course the payingpassengers were jammed inside.

I leaned out the window and saw that, apart from my coach, mywhole train was exactly the same—people everywhere, holding onto the sides, the engine, and crowding the roofs. To the sound of ayoung beggar boy's flute, the train rattled south.

In this hot, stricken country the only things that moved were thetrains. But there was no panic. At Akhaura ("Change here for Syl-het") a man stood up to his waist in a flooded field thoughtfullywashing his cow, and farther on boats had penetrated to villages—the larger boats were beamy, like old Portuguese frigates, and the


smaller ones were gracefully shaped, much like Persian slippers."You will see where President Zia was assassinated in Chitta-

gong," Mr. Shahid said as we rolled along, as if he were passing ona piece of tourist information.

At Comilla I met a young man who had just opened an office toencourage Bangladeshis to enroll in a voluntary sterilization pro-gram. "They need incentives. . . . " What sort? I wondered. "Wehave tried money and clothes as a sort of reward, but it is notenough. We need something more substantial. There is no prob-lem with middle-class people. I have two children myself, and Ithink that is a good number. The problem is with the poor. But thisis a democratic country, and so we do not make sterilizationcompulsory."

Was he making any progress?"Very slow progress," he said. (Continued on page 742)



Darjeeling's "toy train,"loved by children of all ages(facing page), chugs up a gradeon track set only two feet apart,narrowest in India. Attendantsriding the engine sprinkle sandon wet rails for better traction.Carrying more than tourists, carsecho with Bengali, Hindi,Tibetan, and Nepali. This ethnicdiversity is attested by Nepaleseschoolgirls (right), whose malecomrades hitch rides on thetrain. Tracks lead to market foryouths who haul firewood theycut nearby (above).

Too much of a good thing, monsoon floods drive Bangladeshis to the only highground. Once part of India's network, the railway was partitioned in 1947 along

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with East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Passenger service has been suspended fornearly 20 years by strained relations and sporadic border violence.


739

HE WORST of the floods were south of Comilla, at the townof Feni. With a kind of gloomy resignation some people reso-lutely bailed out their houses and fields, and others took baths.The children in the area were swimming and diving and hav-

ing a wonderful time. The floods had also brought fish to thesehungry people, and where the banks of rivers had been breached,fishermen were enthusiastically using nets, scoops, lines, buckets,and ancient-looking fish traps.

The day continued hot, but the flood did not abate. Just aheadlay Chittagong, simmering under the sun, an unprepossessing

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settlement on the estuary of the Karnaphuli River—docks, moldybuildings, prowling seamen, blackened palm trees, storm-damagedroads. The airport had been closed for three days. It too wasunderwater.

Even the people in Chittagong admit there is very little to see there.They say, "Go to Rangamati" (known for colorful tribesmen), "SeeKarnaphuli Reservoir" (a big lake), or "Go to Cox's Bazar" (a seedyresort farther down the Bay of Bengal).

I did not make any more plans. For me this was the end of the line.

Skinny-dippers' boon,railroaders' headache,monsoon waters recede fromone of the bridges along theChittagong-Dhaka line thatnow must be checked foiflood damage—and thenation has 3,633 railbridges. Consistingessentially of one large deltafed by a pair of rivers,Bangladesh is not an easyplace in which to run arailroad. But the country's1,792 miles (2,884kilometers) of track carrynearly a third of its freight.Its biggest worry today ishow to fill the outbound carssince its principal export,jute, is now in low demandworldwide. Meanwhile, thisline has been scrubbed upand completely rehabilitatedwith a loan from the AsianDevelopment Bank.

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38,000 MILES OF TRACKBy SATOW

THEN, in 1852, Freder-ick Sleigh Roberts, af-terward Field MarshalLord Roberts, V.C., ar-rived at Dum-Dum as a

young subaltern, no railway yetexisted in India. Posted to a reg-iment at Peshawar, 1,300 milesaway on the North-West Fron-tier, Lieutenant Roberts pro-ceeded up the Ganges to Banaras(now Varanasi) in a barge towedby a steamer, then traveledoverland to Meerut by horse dak(mail coach). For the final 600miles he was carried overland ina dooly, or litter, by eight-manrelays divided into teams of fourbearers; to escape the heat, theytraveled at night, led by atorchbearer. In his memoirsRoberts describes the dooly rideas the most tedious portion ofthe trip.

This trip across the breadth ofIndia took nearly three months.When Roberts departed thecountry 46 years later, he notedthat the same distance could betraversed by train in three days"with the greatest ease andcomfort." Few British, at least,still traveled at the dreamy paceof the India Roberts knew as ayoung man.

Today Indian Railways carriesnearly four billion passengersyearly (compared to 300 millionin the United States) and 270million tons of freight on a38,000-mile network of

Railway historian Michael G.Satow, who lived and worked inIndia for IS years, is coauthor ofRailways of the Raj. He currentlyresides in England.

On to the Khyber Pass: Expanding India's railway toPeshawar in 1881, the first engine is ferried across the

track. Passengers can travel in air-conditioned comfort (first orsecond class) or opt not to have airconditioning and know the land, itssounds and smells, and its people intheir unchanging fascination.

India, when Roberts arrivedthere, was governed by the EastIndia Company, whose first charterto trade in the East Indies wasgranted in the year 1600 by QueenElizabeth I. Travel was not merelyslow; it was often impossible. Themonsoon turned the roads to mudand the rivers to flood; dry weathertransformed roads into dust bowlsand reduced rivers to a trickle.Pilferage was epidemic and delaysand damage to goodscommonplace. Deployment oftroops to areas of

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unrest was hampered by terrainand climate.

The first proposals for rail-ways in India were submitted in1843, but much argument anddelay ensued before the firstschemes came to fruition someten years later. Many doubtedthe economic viability of thedevelopment plans; othersquestioned their practicality be-cause of India's difficult terrain,fickle climate, and uneducatedpopulace. The long line of com -munication between India andBritain slowed proceedingsalmost to a halt.

Matters dragged on until1847, when Lord Dalhousie,who had had experience in rail -way development in England,was appointed governor gener alof India. He soon brought his

Railway Lifeline

UUSTRATED LONDON NEWS PICTURE LIBRARY

Indus River on boats bearing timbers with track already attached. Bankside ruin remainsfrom a futile effort by Britain's indefatigable engineers to tunnel under the river.

incisive mind and decisivecharacter to bear, and in 1849agreements were prepared fortrial lines to run inland fromBombay (Great Indian PeninsulaRailway), Calcutta (East IndianRailway), and Madras (MadrasRailway).

The railway promoters fromBritain had driven a hard bar-gain: Rights-of-way and othernecessary land were providedfree of charge by the govern-ment of India, with a guaranteeof 5 percent minimum return oncapital invested. For its part, thegovernment had considerablepowers to dictate the line of therailway and the siting of evenminor stations. It also shared theprofits in excess of S percentand had a right to purchase therailway from the rail

companies after 25 years, usuallyleaving the company to manageaffairs on an agency basis. LordDalhousie decreed that only onerail gauge would be used in theland, and settled it at five feet sixinches. The first train left Bombayon April 16, 1853, to be followedjust over a year later by the EastIndian Railway and in 1856 bythe Madras Railway.

ILITARY leaders encour-aged concentration on a linefrom Calcutta to Delhi andon to Lahore. By 1857 this

line was being built but wasincomplete, and it was in that yearthat the Indian Mutiny (or War ofIndependence if you were on theopposite side) erupted in Meerut.Astrologers

had predicted that the demise ofthe raj of the East India Com-pany would occur 100 years af-ter the Battle of Plassey; 99years had passed when the se-poys of the Indian regimentsrose up against their officers andbriefly seized control of much ofnorthern India.

Whether the completion of theline would have prevented therising, which was marked bygreat heroism and slaughter onboth sides, is open to doubt; atbest it might have shortened theagony and reduced thebloodshed. As it was, the mutinyadded a further obstacle to thoseprovided by nature and delayedthe progress on the northernlines by some six months.Elsewhere in the country, workcontinued apace.

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By 1869 some 4,000 miles ofrailway, all five-foot-six-inchgauge, had been completed at acost of as much as' £20,000($93,000) a mile. At this pointthe government, by now the im-perial raj that had been estab -lished following the demise ofthe East India Company, beganto buy railway companies andinvest directly in railways. Thesebecame known as Indian StateRailways.

Short of funds, the govern-ment sought to reduce buildingcosts. The result, approved byLord Lawrence, then viceroy ofIndia, was to o verturn Dalhou-sie's "one gauge" dictum and

adopt the narrower gauge ofthree feet six inches.

In 1870 Lord Mayo becameviceroy and, as a first step in theintroduction of the metric systemto India, changed the gauge toone meter (3 feet 33/3 inches).The cost of installing metergauge is roughly half that ofbroad gauge. Rapid developmentof two separate meter-gaugesystems followed, spurred on bythe pressing need for famine-relief lines in the areas north ofthe Ganges and northwest fromMadras.

The maharaja of Mysore, oneof many Indian princes whobuilt private railways within

their states, solved the problemof travel over differing gaugesby having his luxurious salooncar jacked up, complete withoccupants, while the wheels andaxles were changed.

Today, meter-gauge tracksrun the length of India, but it re-mains impractical to transferrolling stock from the tracks ofone gauge to another. Perhapsconfirming Dalhousie's originalwisdom, many meter-gaugelines are now being converted tomore practical broad gauge.

The period 1870 to 1900 wasone of intensive building onboth the broad and metergauges. This period also saw

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With creature comforts, including Rover under the bed, Europeans traveled first classin the 1880s. A century later India exports its own railway expertise and equipment tomany Third World nations. The high-speed Rajdhani Expresses now near a milestoneby Indian standards: 100 miles an hour.

construction of the fascinatingnarrow-gauge scenic hill rail-ways from the plains to hillresorts at Darjeeling, Simla,Matheran, and Ootacamund.The Darjeeling and Matheranlines were built on a gauge oftwo feet, while Simla used thetwo-foot-six-inch width. TheOotacamund line was metergauge and employed a cog sys-tem for the steepest grades.

Small though these railwayswere in scale, they representedmajor engineering feats. TheDarjeeling Railway climbs 54miles to an altitude of 7,407 feetand must circle upon itself andreverse up zigzags in someplaces to gain height; the Simlaline passes through 103 tunnelsin 60 miles to reach nearly thesame altitude; the MatheranRailway rises 2,363 feet in 12miles with 281 curves. In addi-tion, several states and compa-nies developed networks ofnarrow-gauge railways (mostlytwo feet six inches) to act asfeeders to the main lines.

India entered the 20th centurywith an extensive and inter-connected network of railwaylines and an assortment of loco-motives and rolling stock oper-ated by dozens of companies. In1903 the first series of standardlocomotives was designed to re-duce the problem of spares andoperation when locomotivestraveled beyond the end of theirown company's lines on tracksof the same gauge.

This standardization was notalways popular with railwayengineers, who had a not unrea-sonable mistrust of consultantscloseted in a London office, butit was important in large-scalemilitary movements over longdistances and when equipmenthad to be borrowed from otherlines. The British mold wasbroken with the introduction of

a large number of locomotivesimported from the United Statesduring World War II.

Electric and diesel engines arerapidly displacing steam on themain lines, although steamlocomotives are still to be foundtrundling along the meter- andnarrow-gauge branch lines. Indianow builds all its own railwayequipment and exports some toother countries.

Electrification was introducedin the 1920s. The heavily traveledsuburban lines serving Bombay,Madras, and Calcutta wereconverted along with the heavilygraded main lines out of Bombayand up the Western Ghats. Todaythe main trunk routes and certainheavily trafficked mining linesare being electrified at 25,000volts.

HE LAST foreign railway-men departed India some 30years ago, leaving behind atradition that has been

maintained with pride andcompetence. Some measure of thepride may be gained from theestablishment, in New Delhi, of afine and comprehensive Museumof Indian Railways.

The railways of India werebuilt by men and women whotoiled stubbornly against ap-palling odds with primitiveequipment and in the most taxingclimate. Specialist teams, such asCornish miners who were short ofwork in their own country, wouldoften be brought out to undertakesuch tasks as rock tunneling,while Indians with special skills,such as masons from Rajasthan,followed the railway buildersaround the land.

In the 19th century, mass laborwas the order of the day, withconstruction gangs of as many as40,000 souls, sometimes in campsof 10,000 and

more. Disease was frequentlyepidemic. When cholera struck acamp of 10,000 laborers in Ba-luchistan in May 1885, 2,000died. They were among 15,000builders of a line running fromSibi to Chaman on the Afghanfrontier through the confused,fissured mountain mass in west-ern Pakistan.

Landslides, mountain torrents,attacks by tribesmen, and thecomplications of building aroadbed and driving tunnelsthrough a rock face 200 feetabove a tumultuous river re-quired heroic efforts. In the sixyears after its completion in1887, the line was breached 15times by landslides and wash-outs and was finally abandonedin 1942 after part of a cliff facecollapsed under the rails.

In the lowlands a British con-tractor named Solomon Tred-well was engaged to build thechallenging line up the WesternGhats between Bombay andPune. Within two weeks oflanding in Bombay, he con-tracted fever and died. Hisyoung widow took over andcompleted the contract.

Technical skills may at firsthave come from Britain, butmany fine Indian engineersemerged. Much of the work wasgrand in concept and inspiring inexecution. The architects'imagination had free rein; noth-ing could be more imposing,than the Gothic-Saracenic Vic-toria Terminus in Bombay, ormore forbidding than the stationat Lahore, fortified withcrenellated towers at the cornersand massive iron doors at eachend to close the openings againstattack by insurgents or the hilltribes of the North-WestFrontier. Happily, most of thiswork stands to this day as amemorial to the pioneers of In-dia's railways.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVE MCCURRY (ABOVE) AND LAUREN STOCKBOWER

HE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD still can, best-sellingauthor Paul Theroux finds as he interviews employees of the"toy train" that climbs Himalayan foothills to Darjeeling on a

century-old narrow-gauge railway (above). "Every passenger waseither a Buddhist monk, a schoolchild, or a little old lady with achicken going to market," he recalls. In Darjeeling's heady ethnicmaelstrom he found Tibetan artifacts carved from yak vertebrae—"but I drew the line at buying others made from a human tibia."

Riding the rails from Pakistan's Khyber Pass across India toBangladesh was vintage Theroux. Massachusetts-born, he joined thePeace Corps to teach in Africa. His 20 books include The GreatRailway Bazaar, which chronicles a pan-Asian train trip; The Mos-quito Coast, set in Honduras; and The Kingdom by the Sea, aboutGreat Britain, where he now makes his home.

Keeping his camera dry and his hands free in a downpour, SteveMcCurry dons a shield of straw popular in parts of India and Nepal(right). A Pennsylvania native, Steve's free-lance images often reflecta passion for the Middle East and Asia. His work in Afghanistan wonthe Overseas Press Club's gold medal in 1980.

Aboard Indian trains, suffocating crowds sometimes forced him tojoin riders on car tops. "Once I was photographing and didn't seesome low electrical lines," he says. "One hit me in the back of thehead and knocked me down, but fortunately not off the car."

On AssignmentAssignment

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