How to Get a Ride on a Train in India
By Korski

It’s the season of Indian vacations and because of recent rapid development more and more Indians are sliding into a category called middle-class and are going on vacations, and they’re going to go by any means possible. You hear before going to India for the first time that if you want to ride a train you had better get a ticket several days ahead of time. But this isn’t how you travel. Everything you do is spur-of-the-moment, catch as catch can, all about impulse, a feeling in the gut. The one thing you don’t like to do when you travel is plan—not for getting around, not for a bed for the night, not for what you’ll be doing when you get wherever you’re going, not even for where you’ll be in two days or two weeks.

You’ve never been on an Indian train and you’re going to have to try at least one or two, maybe five or ten, who knows? It’s not about money, it’s about trying something different, different ways of seeing, getting about, new and small adventures without names.

You’re less than a week in India and you’re in Pena and you decide to take a train south, in the direction of Goa. The Goa direction, or going south, is all that matters. You go to the train station with the idea of going tomorrow. You weave among all the people sitting on the ground outside and under trees and waiting to go or sleeping, and you pause and stop and stoop and switch back and forth between your 10-22 mm zoom and your 28-300 mm and take thirty or forty shots. More good ones, you think. There’s no shortage of good and great shots in India, wherever you go in this country with way too many people.

Then you’re inside the station and you ask a few questions from someone who looks like a station official. He directs you to a window to make a reservation for a southbound destination. You can’t simply buy a ticket, you first have to get a reservation, and this, you quickly discover, means filling out a form with all kinds of questions. Where you’re going, where you’re coming from, and lots of other little details, all this on a cheap piece of paper, Third World toilet kind, you think.

You fill out the rectangular piece of paper and go up to the window where you got the form, and the woman mumbles something about everything not being in order. You didn’t fill in the train number. The train number? You haven’t a clue what it is. You told her where you want to go, isn’t that enough?

This woman whose job is to pass out reservation forms and tell you what you forgot to fill in and gives refunds on reservations that led to a ticket that wasn’t or couldn’t be used, writes the number of the train you want to take near the top of the form. She doesn’t write it in the space provided. That’s your job. It’s your job to copy the number that sits less than an inch away from the appropriate line.

You think: Could she lose her job if she fills in the train number and it’s the wrong one? Is this all part of India’s twenty-first century educational program?

You think: Why such inefficiency, the wasted effort? Now she’s going to have to sit there and watch you copy the number she just wrote down and check to see that you didn’t make a mistake. Probably one in twenty-five people transposes a train number. But before you can copy down the number she could have written in for you, you have to spend some time fiddling around finding a pen in one of my pockets.

She now looks at the reservation form you have handed her for the second time and she looks it over carefully, and satisfied she nods and offers a small smile and then tells you to get in the line at the next window. There’ll be another wait of indefinite duration. One that proves to be more than a half hour because a couple of people in front of you have something wrong on their reservation forms and they are told to step aside and make corrections and then return to the window as soon as they have done what needs to be done. While they’re making their corrections a man with a cane wobbles to the front of the line and demands attention. He goes to the front of the line because he had been here earlier this morning or yesterday and either has the right or thinks he has the right to go to the front of the line. You’re not sure which. This is India after all, and India is not quite like any other place you’ve been. What makes it unlike any other place you’ve ever been is the number of surprises per unit of time, which surely has something to do with the rate at which a country grows relative to how fast it theoretically could grow. And, of course, the nature of that seed planted long long ago that produced this incomparable mess called India.

Finally, it’s your turn, or your turn while others are having their turn at the same time it’s supposed to be your turn. The ticket issuer copies your name and other information on your reservation form into a computer, and then he prints out a ticket with all kinds of information on it, with column headings in English and Hindi. Train number, date, whether you’re an adult or child, the class of train, the train number, your sex, your age, the cost of the ticket, where you’ll be boarding, the scheduled departure time, the time the ticket was purchased, and some other codes and numbers here and there that make no sense. Or make no sense to you since this is the first time you are encountering this novel little aspect of India. Now he takes your money and gives you change and as you’re about to leave, he says, Come back tomorrow half an hour before the train leaves and I’ll give you a seat number.

Why didn’t he give you one right now? He doesn’t say, and you’re too caught up in all the details of this little Indian adventure to ask.

You walk away shaking your head, thinking, These guys do more computer and paperwork and get more information on you for a little old cheap train ticket than those paranoid repressive no good bastards in Burma demand, and that’s saying a lot.

You think, and not for the first time: Is India a police state?

You arrive an hour early, just to be on the safe side. You take a few photos outside the station and on the street and among all these Muslim women in black walking among camels and dark women in eye-riveting saris before heading to the window to get your seat number. But it’s not going to be so simple. There’s a line of about fifteen people at the window where you’re supposed to get your seat number. If yesterday was any measure of how long it’ll take to get your turn, the train will have left for Pena and be well on its way before you’re at the window.

You remember the man with the wobbly leg, so you go to the front of the line to get your number. Before you can get the ticket man’s attention, a woman taps you on the shoulder and you turn and she says, Go to the back of the line like everyone else. You ignore her, and the ticket man turns to you and says, You’re on a waiting list. You’ll have to wait to see what happens.

What? He didn’t say anything yesterday about being on a waiting list when you bought the ticket.

Then he says, Go to that window over there. He points. It’s the reservation window where you got and filled out the form to be able to get a ticket. You go there, right to the front of the line and ask the woman how long you’ll have to wait and the woman says, You just have to wait and see.

Just have to wait and see? The goddamn train is going to leave in less than half an hour and you don’t even know where the platform is or how to get to it!

You look around for someone else to find out what to do. An official looking sort of Indian who looks lost is standing by himself away from all the windows on this long wall with numbered windows. You go to him and say, I have this ticket and now I’m on a waiting list and the train is going to go soon so what am I supposed to do?

Go to window number 23, he says, and points to another part of the station, inaccessible because of some large iron see-through gates. A part of the train station that you just can’t directly walk into. You have to walk nearly out of the station and find another entrance, and when you go in you see people everywhere, and more numbered windows, and also the exit out onto a train platform. Is this your platform? You have no idea.

You walk this way and that way, and you simply can’t find window number 23. Must be your eyes, or the time of the day, or all those beers you had last night, you think. Maybe you’re just dumb when in India.

Now there are less than fifteen minutes until the train is supposed to leave, and you have no idea whether Indian trains leave on time or ten minutes or two hours late.

You return to the window where you bought the ticket, and where you were told you were on a waiting list, and you say, Well, have you got a seat number for me now?

You’re still on a waiting list, he says.

Shit. You look around the line for a sympathetic face. You turn to one woman and say, What do I do now? She shrugs her shoulders and shakes her head and you don’t know whether it’s your American accent or the fact that she speaks one of the 400 languages in India and yours is not one of them.

An older woman in glasses and western dress and a pretty flowery print dress standing beside her looks at the frustration on your face and says, Just go to the train and get on it. Don’t worry that your ticket is not confirmed.

Thanks, you say. Thanks much for the Indian Truth!

The only thing you wanted to hear, you think as you walk away and look hard at the ticket and find out the train is leaving on Platform Two and you have no idea where it is.

Ah yes! It’s over there, up the ramp, and up the stairs, and along the walkway over Platform One. Time for a fast walk--no a fast run—if you’re not going to miss your train.

Whew! It’s still there. You get on and go through two cars and then your eyes land on two empty seats in the far right rear. You take the one by the window and put your bag with your valuable shit between your feet. And you think, Come on, Let’s get rolling! Once the train wheels start moving it’s going to be pretty damn hard to throw you off.

Before the train gets moving, a young, very dark Indian man sits beside you. He tells you he’s a soldier on leave for fifteen days. He’s stationed up north, along the border with Pakistan. He says he can’t tell you more, like who likes to start the shooting or how many bodies go south in boxes each week. That’s all classified information. But he can tell you that because he’s a soldier he gets free passage on the train.

The train starts, jerks, moves, jerks some more. And before you’re two miles down the track a train man in a blue uniform and a long gray drippy beard and a black turban is asking to see tickets and looking for names on a large folded sheet he’s got in his hands. You have no idea what he’ll say when he sees your ticket that has nothing on it that says that it’s a confirmed ticket.

When he gets to the soldier the soldier hands him a funny looking kind of ticket and the ticket checker gets him to stand up and directs him to leave the car. You can’t understand a word they’re saying, but you assume that this young protector of India’s frontier with crazy Pakistan is going to have to ride in a car of a lower class, one without air conditioning. But the solider has no more left than he returns. He sits down and smiles. Now you assume from what follows that he told the ticket checker that he wanted to sit beside you and talk and find out how he could get to America, and then get the answer you give to all Indians who ask the same question. You want to get to America: find an American girl and marry her.

The ticket checker in the blue uniform and the long drippy gray beard asks for your ticket and without looking at you he screws up his mouth and writes something down on a large sheet that’s got names and seat numbers on it. He scribbles something on your ticket, hands it back to you, and without making eye contact, a word nowhere near his lips, he walks away.

Cool, you think. You’re starting to learn the Indian Way.

You get off in Kolphur and a couple of days later take a bus to Goa and then several days after that a plane to Delhi, and after a day in Delhi and having randomly talked to a few people you decide to get a train in the general direction of the mouth of the Ganges River. You’re thinking, I’ll go to some place called Haridwar. Sounds interesting.

You have a hotel less than a ten minute walk from the New Delhi Train Station, but decide you don’t want to go through the same shit you went through in Pena to get a ticket. So you go to a mouthy, fat, aggressively cunning (you can almost smell her cunning ways) Indian woman at a small tour agency in the hotel where you’re staying and you ask her to get you a confirmed train ticket. You tell her: Make absolutely certain the ticket is confirmed. I don’t want trouble.

She names some places in the general direction of the mouth of the Ganges you’ve never heard of. You say, Okay, wherever. Just make sure it’s a confirmed ticket.

When you return to the woman the following morning as she told you to, she hasn’t gotten your ticket as she promised she would. She’ll get it in an hour or two, she now says. You can pick it up later, which means coming back to the hotel is going to seriously cut into some exploratory and drinking time, assuming you can find a restaurant that serves alcohol, for this has not been as easy you thought it would be prior to coming, and it’s a sure bet that Lonely Planet is not going to be any help on this very critical issue.

You tell the woman, wanting to play it safe, you’ll see her later, sometime before six. You decide you’ll spend what’s left of the morning and the early afternoon walking streets and taking photos and stopping at a chemist or two or three to see what kinds of exotic dick drugs you can find for Yabe, wild man friend who has you wandering here and there all over Asia to get him magical oils in five-year-old ragged boxes and unknown brands of pills that supposedly do the same thing that Viagra does.

Jesus, am I ever a good friend! you again congratulate yourself. Twice in the same day you’ve told yourself this, an unusual happening to say the least.

The aggressive, fat, overly inquisitive pushy Indian woman has your train ticket when you return late in the afternoon. She tells you it cost a little more than usual because if she didn’t pay extra you’d be on a waiting list and you might not be able to leave the following morning at 6:50 on the train.

Great, you tell her, not even asking how much was added to a ticket that winds up costing much more than you would have paid if you had gone to the station to buy one.

You get up at five (your watch says it’s five) to get a shower and get a few things stuffed in your small bags and to check out of the hotel. But you haven’t paid much attention to the last of the three two-dollar street watches you’ve had since getting on the road three months ago. One mysteriously lost the glass on its face, the other one just stopped cold. As you get to the checkout desk to settle up on the bill you discover that the train is supposed to leave in a half hour and your watch is running slow and you’ve not been to this train station and don’t have a clue how big it is or where it is or if it’ll be easy finding the right platform.

But at least you’ve got a confirmed ticket.

Outside the hotel, you get a bike rickshaw and he gets you within half a block of the train station and then you‘re stuck behind five or six buses and ten or so little yellow and green motorized rickshaws and nine cows and seven horses and twenty or thirty of the black and yellow sheep you saw on this very street yesterday morning when you were going absolutely nuts with your camera. You’re stuck in traffic, and you feel that sense of panic coming on, so you jump out of the rickshaw and shove twenty rupees at the driver and begin weaving among beggars and pavement sleepers and green and yellow rickshaws with meters that never work--by design.

Or they never work for foreigners, because this is India.

You hurry into the station and you’re met by a flood of porters in red outfits, and one grabs one of your bags, the one you can afford to lose, and as he turns and starts running away he says it will cost you 60 rupees, or something like that, you’re not exactly sure. And you don’t really care. You want to catch the goddamn train before it leaves.

He runs, and you start running. Up two flights of stairs and then you’re weaving among hordes of people and along a walkway that passes over tracks. You have no idea where he’s taking you. You just assume he knows what the hell he’s doing.

Down some stairs, two sets of them, and there’s the train. Your train, you assume. He puts down your bag and asks for the money and you say, Where’s my car? He points to a wall covered with white computer printouts, dozens of them. He says, Go over there and find your name.

Shit, you think. All I want to do is get on the goddamn train for which I’ve got a confirmed ticket.

But you sense this big Indian—and he must go all of six four and weigh upwards of 220 pounds—must know what he’s talking about. So you go over to the board and choose one end and start trying to make sense of all the goddamn numbers and names, and nothing makes sense. Well, almost nothing. Screw this, you think. Go find a ticket taker with a clipboard, he’s got to know what’s up, which car is yours.

You find him without difficulty. He looks mean, angry, haughty, and when you show him your ticket he barely looks at it before saying, You are Number 12 on the wait list. And Number 12, he goes on, is too far down the list. You will not be going on this train today. You’ll have to go back to the station and turn in this ticket and get another one for another day.

This is not possible you say, as he hands you your ticket. And then turns away.

This is not fucking possible! you shout to get his attention.

He repeats what he said, like he’s never heard the word fuck or knows what it means, like everyone shouts at him, which is just a signal to repeat himself.

You turn, and walk ten paces, and you brood, and you think, There can only be one solution to this little problem. But you don’t want to have to use that solution, so you see the porter who helped you standing over by the stairs, and you go to him, and you explain what happened. He shakes his head and gives his version of what you were told—twice. And you say, What happens if I just get on the train?

He shakes his head and says, No, you can’t do that. Just can’t do that.

Now you think: Wait a second. It worked last time, what’s different about this time?

You wave the porter away, and turn away, and you start walking down the platform, toward the engines, as far as possible from the asshole with the clipboard who told you were Number 12 and would not be going today.

You duck inside a car, and go through one, and then two, and then three, and there’s not an empty seat in sight. But then luck is with you! In car number four you see an empty seat about in the middle, and you quickly claim it. Why not? It worked last time, it’s going to work the same way again.

The train pulls out, and it’s not out of the station five minutes when the asshole who told you that this was not your day to be traveling sees you as he comes through the door. And before he says a word, you know he’s pissed, and he’s going to have words for you, and he does. He demands to know why you got on the train when he told you not to.

You shrug your shoulders and smile. Then you say, sweetly as possible under the circumstances, Because I had a confirmed ticket. You shove it at him.

He’s unsympathetic He wiggles his butt about, and adjusts his cap, and then he says, Come with me!

You’re thinking: Wonder if they’ve got a cell for people like me? I sure hope they’ve got a piss hole in it.

We go into the next car, and he finds an empty seat, and he angrily says, Sit here! You might have to get off at the next station.

Fifteen minutes into the journey you notice that two rows up there are four very well-dressed Indians. Unusually well-dressed, you think; and then don’t pay any more attention to them until your asshole friend comes into the car and scowls at you, and then goes to the four Indians who you guess, by the way they’re dressed and how they’re treated, are Brahmins.

You’re not a magician but you can right away see that they do not have tickets. There is an exchange of soft words, and amiable smiles. Your asshole friend makes a few notes on the sheet on his clipboard, then continues down the car.

You never see him again. You don’t think about him again, not until you get to these notes on how to deal with Indian trains, in a country which, as you spend more and more time in it strikes you as utterly class-riven, and as corrupt as all those other Asian countries to the east where you have spent so much time in recent years.

 

Stickman's thoughts:

Very nice.  (A note to readers: YES, submissions on other countries in the region are welcome!)

The author can be reached at korski1@cox.net
 
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.