Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE SHAN-E-PUNJAB EXPRESS TO DELHI

BECAUSE IT WAS A SACRED CITY, a howling but deaf and discontinuous mob, mostly pilgrims, kicked along the streets and lanes of Amritsar. These sun-baked streets were thick with stinging dust and smelly traffic, and the traffic included sacred cows, three-legged dogs, old cars, twisted bikes, scooter rickshaws, pedicabs, the usual trotting two-wheeled pony carts—tongas and gharries—and rusted buses. There were heaps of sorted and pawed-through garbage; the sidewalk overspill of fix-it men and their antique tools—spoke-shaves, chisels, cobbling awls, soldering irons, treadle-powered sewing machines; blue exhaust fumes, oily dirt, fresh dung, the fountain in the middle of the miserable road with its sign, Amritsar Improvement Trust, the temples so attractive to beggars because holy precincts encouraged the giving of alms; and loud noise trumpeting the simple but firmly held Indian delusion that honking horns sped the flow of traffic.

The point about the crowds of excited pilgrims in a sacred place is that they are giddy just from physically being there. Or more than giddy—chattering, skipping, giggling, goggle-eyed with rapture in this, the center of Sikhdom, all of these turbaned men and fluttering women hurrying to the Golden Temple...

Welcome to India and the proof that, as Borges once wrote, "India is larger than the world." On the surface, nothing had changed in Amritsar. From what I could gather, the country was no different from what I had seen three decades before. This prospect delighted me. It was a relief, the mildly orchestrated free-for-all of India—something of a madhouse with a touch of anarchy, yes, but an asylum in which strangers are wel come, even inquisitorial ones like me; where anything is possible, the weather is often pleasant, and the spicy food clears your sinuses. Most of India embodies Blake's dictum that "energy is eternal delight." All you need is a strong stomach, a little money, and a tolerance for crowds. And a way of lifting your gaze upward and moving on, so that you don't see the foreground—in India the foreground is generally horrific. The reality was that Amritsar, like all Indian cities, looked as though it had been made by human hands, skinny ones, and so the result had a look of improvisation, faulty and fragile and somehow incomplete.

The horror is possibly true, or perhaps all illusion, as some Indians believe, smiling and saying, "True and not true, sar. Anekantavada, sar. The many-sidedness of reality, sar."

The austere torpor of the Stans had been wearing me down—the humorlessness and paranoia of a police state, no outward indication of struggle, a kind of beaten-down acceptance. Acceptance is not an Indian trait. In India, no one takes no for an answer: policemen are jeered at, authority exists to be defied, walls are erected to be defaced, and everyone is talking, often in English. Shoeshine boys, rickshaw wallahs, taxi drivers, beggars, businessmen, shopkeepers, and Surinder ("I am agent, sar") Singh with his gimpy leg and his practiced patter, all of them demanding attention. Surinder had assured me of a ticket to Delhi, though the train was full. He had connections, though his ragged clothes did not inspire confidence.

When I remarked that Amritsar hadn't changed, Indians clicked their tongues or sucked their teeth in annoyance. They insisted it had been modernized. I never saw where or how. It is a border city, only a few miles from the Pakistan frontier, and consequently not a place for investment. Besides, being a holy city in India is plenty, since Indians are instinctive pilgrims, liking the ritual, the spiritual boost, and the companionship of a pilgrimage, which always involves a great number of people, a long train ride, loud music, and platters of food.

I was at the main railway station with Surinder.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Guess."

"Please tell me, sar."

"Go ahead, guess. What do you think?"

"No, this is very serious, sar," he said, snapping at me for my facetiousness. "You must tell me now."

I told him.

"You are lucky," he said, sounding resentful. "Very lucky today."

"Why would that be?"

"You qualify for Old Age Exception."

This meant 100 rupees off the 400-rupee fare to Delhi, $7.50 instead of $10, because I was over sixty. And a 25-rupee supplement for a seat, which required a large form to be filled out in triplicate—sticky blue copies and perforations. In the age of computers, which Indians excelled at—so I was told—many government forms were still filled out by hand in triplicate, on thick sewn-together pads, with flimsy sheets separated by carbon paper, using blunt pencils, following the printed direction Press Hard.

I searched for social changes. Joginder's greasy café and pastry shop was now Joginder's greasy Internet café and pastry shop and looked two hundred years old. And the brick prewar railway station, which I'd last seen in 1973, was seriously defaced by foot-high graffiti in Hindi and English. I recognized the word Zindabad—strike, a commonly heard term in India—and was told the entire building had been scribbled on during the strike that had taken place a month before, but painted so professionally the angry slogans looked like advertising—which they were, promoting a mass sit-down. That had passed.

"But they will repeat it. So the writing will stay."

***

IN A WORLD OF CHANGE, India is exceptional. Everyone talks about India's great leap, Indian modernity, Indian millionaires, and "You must see the transformation of Bangalore." "The Indian miracle" was a boasting rant in every Western newspaper and magazine, but on the evidence of Amritsar this assertion was a crock, not just a joke in bad taste but the cruelest satire. It seemed to me that little had changed except the size of the population, an unfeedable, unhousable, uncontainable 1.3 billion people, not many of them saying "We are modern now" because more than a third of them were working for a dollar a day. Indians boast of the miracle, but when I mentioned to entrepreneurs the 400 million people living below the poverty line, they just bobbled their heads and hummed or else went silent, darkening in resentment that I raised the question and refusing to tell me what they paid their employees.

Yet the country still ran, in its clunky fashion, all its mends and patches showing, and what looked like chaos in India was actually a kind of order, like furious atoms spinning. Surinder Singh merely appeared to be a tout and an opportunist. In fact he was part of the complex system of Indian ticket buying. As I was congratulating myself on having secured a $10 seat on the express to Delhi, he showed up again, demanding the equivalent of an additional $10.

"What's that for?"

"Baksheesh, sar." A bribe.

But he had kept his word.

No one succeeds in India without exploiting someone else, defrauding him, sitting on his head, twisting his arm, getting him to work for 12 cents an hour. The news is all about the winners—big business, call centers, manufacturing, textiles, all the rest of it. But for there to be big winners in India, there have to be bigger losers. It is the system.

Who shares in the wealth? In the Punjab, I heard of a powerful Indian lawyer who earned $1.5 million a year and still paid his driver $20 a week and got his shoes shined for 25 cents. Later in my trip I met a lawyer, a woman, who had been offered, by an American firm, a guaranteed $1 million a year plus profits on contracts, but she held out for more and eventually joined a rival firm that offered her almost $2 million. Nothing wrong with that, Indians say; it is an example of market forces, and the conventional Indian response is to say how such tycoons are great philanthropists. It is the Indian paradox: driving hard bargains, underpaying people, becoming a corporate slave driver, and later these same desperate employees will qualify for handouts.

The losers in India have their revenge, always, as I saw all over Amritsar: not just the strikes and sit-downs and go-slows to torment employers, but the visible fact that the biggest, fastest limousine is forced to travel at a crawl behind the pony carts and the skinny men on their bicycle rickshaws. That is the other truth about India, that so much of it is a moral lesson, a set of simple visuals; so much of it is vivid symbolism, the cows and the rickshaws and men pulling wagons, slowing the progress of limos and delivery trucks. The truck might be delivering computers, God knows, but the computers won't get through any quicker than the man with ten sacks of beans in his wheelbarrow.

By chance I met Amar Singh. He owned a car. He had functioned for years as a go-between for journalists. He said, "We're a big power now."

"In what sense?" I asked.

"Better than before. Much stronger."

"Give me an example."

"We're like America now," he said.

In Amritsar this statement was debatable, but I was impressed by his confidence. No one would have said that thirty years ago. Yet in order to say such things you have to ignore the mangy cows, the stalled traffic, the squatters, the beggars, the crowds, the dirt, the squalor.

It was a relief to me that Amritsar was not very different. I liked it as it was—progressing, obviously, but so immersed in its past and its pieties that it could not change much. Because it was a holy city, its visitors put up with more inconvenience: dirt and distance and noise were the price of sanctity and blessings.

I had walked for quite a while, but then hailed a taxi, and it was Amar Singh who drove me slowly through the crowds. We passed a sign saying Service to Humanity Is True Service to God.

I wrote it down in my notebook.

Amar Singh said, "You're a journalist?"

"Sort of."

We went to the Golden Temple, but the crowd was so large there was no way a car could get near. I left Amar Singh and walked the last half mile with all the skipping pilgrims—good-humored and frisky yatris, because they were near the object of their long yatra. Some were stepping out of their shoes and sandals and tiptoeing on the scalded bricks this hot day at the entrance to the temple; others were flinging scarves into a big barrel, or selecting scarves from it to put on their heads.

"What is this?" I asked.

"It is the system," a man said.

"What is the system?"

"Cloth on head for temple."

"No open head," another man elaborated. "No exceptions."

He meant: No exceptions for ferringhis—foreigners. But I was wearing a hat.

A Punjabi woman interrupted to say, "Your hat is acceptabubble."

The label of my hat, a style called the Traveler, said Locke's The Hatter, St James, London W1—surely suitable headgear for the Holy of Holies?

I walked with a tramping crowd through a trough of water meant to purify our feet, but because it had been walked through by thousands of pilgrims, the water was foul—green and viscous, like swamp water. This was the usual thing—if a pool or a tank or a trough was considered sacred, it didn't matter whether it was stagnant. The holier the pool, the more foul-smelling it was.

Never mind. This was the India I remembered, and I was grateful to be here. The Golden Temple looked golder, brighter, more effulgent. I walked down the hot marble causeway with the happy pilgrims, but because I didn't have the faith, it was just a glittering palace of roistering Sikhs, a feature, a sight to see—the crowds interesting me more than the gold domes and chanting priests.

"Get over here!" and "This is so neat, Ma!"

Sikhs with American accents, Sikhs with the west London whine, Sikhs from California, Sikhs from Scotland and Canada. I glided around the hot walkways for a while, made a circuit of the sacred pool, found my way back to the entrance and my shoes, and then hiked to the car.

"Do you know Mark Tully?" the driver Amar Singh asked.

Mark Tully, known in India as Tully Sahib, was for many years the BBC correspondent in India—a much-loved man for his sympathetic but scrupulous reporting, his truthfulness, his love for the country.

"I met him once," I said. "He's a great journalist and a friend of India."

"I took him around here during the Blue Star action," Amar Singh said.

So this taxi driver whom I had met by chance at the railway station turned out to have been one of the resourceful operatives during Amritsar's crisis in 1984.

Operation Blue Star was a military assault by the Indian army on the Golden Temple—an unspeakable, unjustified defilement of the holiest shrine in Sikhdom, Sikhs said. It was disastrous: heavy artillery in a small overcrowded town. It came about because Sikh militants had occupied the towers and cellars and kiosks of the temple. They were part of a revivalist movement that had also called for a separate Sikh state, to be named Khalistan ("Land of the Pure"). Led by a Sikh preacher named Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, this action was watched closely by Sikhs worldwide. Bhindranwale (a prophet to some Sikhs, a pest to nearly everyone else) was disruptive; he called for the murder of Hindus and moderate Sikhs. His beard reached to his waist, he was said to be charismatic, he was well armed, and he wouldn't budge from the temple he occupied with many of his followers and an arsenal of weapons in May 1984.

In June of that year, after some days of fruitless negotiation, Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, gave the order to dislodge Bhindranwale and his men. The army occupied Amritsar in large numbers, and black-suited commandos stormed the temple complex. They were cut down by machine-gun fire from Bhindranwale's men. Some soldiers fired from a distance, but succeeded only in killing civilians and wrecking parts of the temple. Indian army officers begged for backup, insisting they needed tanks. After initial refusals—because of the danger to civilians—permission was granted. Thirteen tanks were lined up and were met by a barrage of antitank fire and rocket launchers. Hundreds more died.

Still, Bhindranwale was trapped, and it was only a matter of time before he ran out of ammunition. He decided to go down in a blaze of glory. In the course of the siege he had become messianic, and in one version of the events he said to his men, "Those who want to be martyrs, come with me." He emerged from his hiding place firing his machine gun, and was mowed down with fifty of his men. Six hundred men on both sides had already been shot or blown up.

That was not the end of the business. Sikhs were furious that the Golden Temple had been desecrated by the assault, and Mrs. Gandhi was blamed. Stories circulated that Indian soldiers who occupied the temple drank alcohol there and, much worse, smoked tobacco. Sikhs have a unique horror of cigarettes. Mrs. Gandhi hunkered down, protected by a number of bodyguards. But Sikhs got their revenge four months later when, in October, Mrs. Gandhi (who had ignored several warnings) was murdered by two of her bodyguards, who were Sikhs. One morning in Delhi, on the pretext of guarding her, they pulled out their service pistols and shot her dead.

With their obvious turbans, their full beards, and their characteristic silver bracelets, Sikh males are among the most easily identifiable believers in the world. In the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination Sikhs were singled out and set upon by Hindus—dragged from trains and buses, stabbed in bazaars, set on fire as they tried to flee in their cars. Perhaps three thousand were killed—no figures are accurate, just round numbers of a tragic event that no one has forgotten.

"It was terrible," Amar Singh said. "So many people killed."

"But it finished the problem of Bhindranwale, didn't it?"

"It finished problem, yes. But danger for us lurked everywhere."

"What did you think of Mrs. Gandhi?"

"A nice woman," he said, but he was being polite. Even Indira Gandhi's closest friends would not have called this manipulative demagogue a nice woman.

"Do people still talk about Khalistan?"

"In villages, some people. Not city people."

Nevertheless, Khalistan, "an aspirant Sikh nation," has an office in Washington, which sends out press releases, campaign information, furious rants, and images of the Khalistan flag.

That night I was making notes in my room in a cheap hotel in Amritsar, where there are no good hotels. It occurred to me why the Golden Temple looked golder and brighter and better kept than it had when I'd first seen it. Because of the damage of the siege and the reassertion of Sikh identity, the temple had been renovated, regilded until it dazzled.

I called Amar Singh the next day to get a ride to the railway station and to say goodbye. He mentioned the other journalists he had taken around. Besides Mark Tully, there was Satish Jacob, whom I had also met many years ago—Tully and Jacob had written the definitive account of the Blue Star operation.

"And David Brown from the Guardian— I drove him, too. He is now in Jerusalem. I helped him."

Amar Singh said he still listened to the BBC. He followed world news and always looked for word of journalists he had driven. I complimented him on his curiosity and helpfulness.

"My aim is good service," he said.

It could have sounded like a cliché, but it didn't. It was serious and sincere, and it touched me coming from this old driver who had a book and a newspaper on the front seat of his car, who lived at the periphery of journalism, who kept up with the news. That was part of the pleasure I felt being back in India again, where everyone seemed overqualified for whatever job they were doing. Though their talk could be maddening and their demands exasperating, I loved the fluency of Indians. The crowds of people seemed worse than ever, but I was pleased to be back in the Indian stew.

***

AMRITSAR CENTRAL STATION had been built in 1931; the date was carved on its red brick façade. The antique weirdness was another pleas ure of India. Entering the station, I felt I could have been walking backwards into the past, passing the big gloomy station restaurant and its overhead fans, the urchins chasing each other on the platform, the Sikh in a brown suit and blue turban, the man in dusty pajamas sleeping against a pile of burlap bags. And there were the station's hustlers, children mostly, selling bottles of soda they carried in a big bucket, or ice cream bars they hawked out of a wooden box, or with shoeshine kits slung over one skinny shoulder, all of them completely fluent in English but illiterate.

"What does that sign say?"

The boy was about thirteen, and I was pointing to one of the more dramatic-looking examples of railway strike graffiti.

"I don't know. I don't go to school."

Half-naked sadhus, holy men with metal tridents and all their possessions in one small cloth bag; groups of women looking tidy and serene amid the squalor; a man hoicking just under a No Spitting sign; fierce mustached matrons and small girls, nearly all the women in saris or Punjabi dress, all the men in turbans. It could have been the 1930s; it could have been 1973, when I had been on the Railway Bazaar trip. Superficially, nothing had changed, and it was uplifting, as though time had stood still, as though I were young again.

"What is your bogie?" the conductor asked.

I told him and he showed me my seat. It was a day train, the seven-hour trip to Delhi, not as fancy or as fast as the Shatabdi Express, but comfortable, on time, with a meal service, and soon rolling and bouncing through the wheat fields of the Punjab—Pakistan just a few miles to the west.

I had thought of taking the train to Lahore, but the news from Pakistan discouraged me. Riots had recently taken place in many Pakistani cities, Lahore included, after this week's court case in which a man in neighboring Kabul, one Abdul Rahman, was put on trial for converting to Christianity. The charge was "apostasy." One of the Hadiths specified death as the punishment for a Muslim who abandons the faith. But when the man's life was spared, riots broke out, huge mobs crying "Death to Christians!"

"Death to America!" was another shout, and "Abdul Rahman must be executed!" Meanwhile, court officials pondering the man's baptism said, "Rahman's mental health will be evaluated."

These Koranic laws were enacted in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which theoretically were our allies. But I knew it wasn't safe. The journalist Daniel Pearl had been recently abducted and beheaded in Pakistan, and Westerners were routinely harassed in the bazaars. This was the result of billions of dollars spent and many lives lost in the futile attempt by the U.S. government to prop up the governments of these countries.

"This is a young democracy," the American secretary of state remarked when Abdul Rahman's life was on the line for his crime of apostasy, and Afghanistan needed apologists.

So I didn't revisit Pakistan. Instead, I headed south and intended to keep going until I got to the southernmost tip of India.

Many people boarded the train at Ludhiana, among them Kuldeep and Kumar in the seats next to me. Neither wore a turban, yet I guessed they might be Sikhs—Westernized from their residence in England, where they said they lived, both in Ilford, Essex. Kuldeep had gone to England as a ten-year-old; Kumar had been born there. Both were visiting relatives in Ludhiana. Kuldeep was the more talkative of the two.

"Could you live here?" I asked him.

"I'm a Punjabi, I could live here easily," he said. "But my wife was born in England. She'd find it hard to adjust in a village."

"What would it be like for her?"

"Maybe too quiet. But I tell you, village life is good. Plenty of food, cost of living is low, no stress. I don't need nightclubs. I'd like it." He seemed a bit rueful that he was heading back to England. "This India is different from the India I left. Some people are coming back."

"Building houses?"

"Plenty. Big villas. Not many in Amritsar, because it's a border town. No one wants to risk living so close to Pakistan. But Ludhiana is quiet and safe. Jullundur, too. There, you see?"

We were passing a cluster of houses in a walled compound.

Kumar said, "We have two growing seasons. You see all this wheat?" I did, it was unmissable, green and gorgeous, silky in the sunshine. "This will be harvested in a few weeks. Then the rice will be planted, and the rains will come and fill the paddy fields."

"This whole place is connected, too," Kuldeep said. "Those farmers look like rustics and hicks, but they all have cell phones. Hardly anyone uses a land line."

"What do they worry about?" I asked.

"They worry about democracy, as I do," he said. "The scheduled classes, for example."

By scheduled classes he meant the lowest castes in India—the Dalits, the so-called Untouchables, whom Mahatma Gandhi called Harijans, Children of God. What Kuldeep was questioning was a system that had its American parallel not only in affirmative action programs for minorities, but also in the stubborn resistance by the rest of the populace to the preferential fast track.

"They are now better-off than we are. They have so many advantages. These advantages were written into the law, to lift them up, and these laws have never been taken off the books. It's becoming a problem."

"How many people are we talking about?"

"A big group—maybe thirty percent of the population."

"What else worries you?"

"The north-south divide—lots of friction. The Punjab and Haryana are feeding the whole country," Kuldeep said. "So much of the country's water comes from here. And what are we getting for it?"

Interesting, this man from Ilford, Essex, growing passionate and indignant about resources in the Punjab. He did not live here, but this was where his heart was.

"The pity of India is the bad roads—bad for so many reasons. We are not keeping pace with other countries with respect to roads. Corruption, mismanagement. It can take hours for a simple journey. Everything else is going ahead, but not road building."

Kumar said, "And there's the population. Look at this."

The railway car was full—more than full: all the seats were taken, many people were standing, luggage was piled to the ceiling, and every time we rounded a sharp bend or stopped suddenly, passengers toppled and fell. The platforms of passing stations were jammed. People hung out the windows. People jostled, and there may have been passengers on the roof—it was a common occurrence. Everyone was civil, but there was no escape from the mob.

And for all the talk of modernity, the train was in tough shape—very dirty, broken seats, filthy toilets, loose wires tangled in the passageways, chipped paint, and the usual stinks.

Yet, amid the chaos and the crowds, life went on, the conductors punching tickets, passengers making phone calls, food sellers squeezing from car to car, calling out, "Cutlet! Cutlet!" or "Ess krim! Ess krim!" or "Jews! Mungo jews!" or "Chicken rice!" or "Pani! Vutta! Pani! Vutta! Buttle vutta."

"What's your biggest worry?"

"The division between rich and poor is growing," Kuldeep said. "It's huge at the moment and it's getting worse. Many people have everything, but also many people have nothing. How to fix?"

To change the subject, he said he was looking forward to the England-India cricket match in Delhi. "It's tomorrow. You should go."

"Maybe I will," I said. "Who should I be watching?"

"The bowler, Harbhajan Singh. They call him Bhaji—he's great."

That was when I was certain Kuldeep was a Sikh. He had no beard, no turban, no steel bracelet. He had been Anglicized, but still he rooted for India, still was loyal to his race and religion: he mentioned the only Sikh player on the team.

Stretching my legs on the platform between coaches, taking the air, I struck up a conversation with Mohinder Singh. He was a businessman, living in Ludhiana, but on his way to Delhi. I mentioned that I had just come from Uzbekistan.

"We sell lots of woolen goods from Ludhiana to the Stans—Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan," he said. "Pullovers, scarves, mittens. They buy from us. We export everywhere. Bike parts. Ludhiana was in the Guinness Book of Records as one of the largest makers of bikes. Because of the successful bike industry, the motorcycle company Hero Honda located here."

Jullundur was also a big maker and exporter of sports equipment. Soccer balls, cricket bats, cricket balls, hockey sticks. For religious reasons, many Hindus will not make anything involving leather, which they deem unclean. Sikhs, with no such sanction, have cornered the market.

He said, "Lots of agricultural land is being converted into housing colonies. There's a big housing boom in the Punjab. Not just locals but nonresident Indians from Canada and the U.K. investing in real estate. Small farmers sell up their land and use the money to send a son to the U.K. or Canada, to emigrate and make a go of it. Hoping he will succeed and send money back."

He asked me if I had been in India before. I told him that I had last been in Punjab thirty-three years ago.

He asked, "What do you think is the biggest difference?"

I said, "What you're doing now. Talking about progress and praising India's economy. Confidence and self-esteem. I never heard that before."

He agreed, saying, "And phones. When we lived in Simla, my father was a paramilitary. Twenty years ago it was almost impossible to have a telephone. I remember the day we were notified that we could have a telephone. We rejoiced!"

"How long had you waited?"

"Two years!" he said. "Now it isn't a mark of status. Even rickshaw wallahs have mobile phones."

We were watching the Punjab go past from the breezy passageway of the express train. With its fields of wheat, the women in shawls and the men in turbans, bicycles on the dusty roads, the countryside was unchanged from what I had seen all those years before. But Mohinder Singh's confident mood and the good humor of Kuldeep and Kumar were something new. My memory of India was of people looking to the past. What struck me now was meeting Indians who looked to the future.

I said, "What do you think is India's problem?"

Mohinder Singh said, "Crux of India's problem is overpopulation. As soon as we build any kind of infrastructure it becomes inadequate because of," he shrugged, "we have too many people."

***

BUT AFTER ALL THE TALK in the Shan-e-Punjab (Glory of the Punjab) Express of the success of India, the wealth of Punjab, the national renewal, all the optimists got off the train in the darkness at New Delhi Station to find the old India stubbornly clinging to life. A thousand passengers disembarked, burdened by bags, suitcases, sacks, children, old grannies, and jerry cans of ghee, to find thousands more waiting for onward trains under the glaring lights—brighter in India than anywhere else I've been, the dazzling light that prevents you from seeing things.

The permanent residents of the station lay stretched out under sheets and blankets. Mark Twain, who saw such crowds of travelers and squatters, includes a satirical two-page description of a big-city railway station in India in Following the Equator (1897). And then he loses his jollity; he is baffled and disturbed by the squatters: "These silent crowds sat there with their humble bundles and baskets and small household gear about them, and patiently waited—for what?" The squatters were still there, still waiting, the scene unchanged, Twain's words as true now as they had been a century ago. The people were sleeping, hundreds of them, completely covered, big and small, some like corpses in body bags, some like campers, some like mummies; lying in family groups under the lights at the Ajmeri Gate side of the station.

All the optimists from Punjab who got off the train with me walked past these hordes of homeless sleepers, beggars, squatters. The distressing scene, another fact of Indian life, was so obvious no one mentioned it, or even glanced at it.

In this dry season the Delhi air was a settled cloud of dust, of smoke, of car fumes, a fog of eye-stinging grit, and most of all a sweetish stink of too many people, the emanation of their outdoor habits that clots your nostrils. It is not a city smell but a suggestion of deforestation and desert and pulverized brick and wood-fueled cooking fires, the odor of humanity, which is also an odor of death. Even in the pitch-darkness of one of the frequent Delhi power cuts, you would know you were in an overpopulated place that existed in a crisis of old-fangledness.

I stayed in the Delhi hotel where I'd stayed before. It was now luxurious. In a mood of self-pitying nostalgia I remembered how, long ago, I had tried to phone my wife in London from here and had met only frustration—her faint and evasive voice, not much warmth, and then a rising tide of static. "Speak louder," the hotel operator said over a sound like crashing surf on the line. Phoning was no problem these days. As the man had said, "Even rickshaw wallahs have mobile phones." From my window I could see that the dust cloud of the night had resolved itself into a grainy fog that hovered over the great horizontal city—no skyscrapers but many tombs, domes, monuments, mosques, temples, riverside forts, ancient walls, and obelisks, wreathed in the vapor that had a human smell.

I got a box and filled it with my coat and gloves, my fleece vest, the icons I'd bought, and my maps of Georgia and Turkmenistan. I sent the stuff home, unburdening myself. Changing trains, I had found summertime; no more cold weather until Japan. With a lighter bag, just a change of clothes in it, and my small briefcase of papers, I was eager to move on.

Looking for onward train tickets, I went back to New Delhi Station and found the international booking hall. In the past, as in Amritsar, I had paid an Indian to stand in line for me. But this was well organized— not much of a line, and I could pay in dollars. A proportion of railway seats were now set aside for foreigners, as a way of stimulating tourism, which in India is relatively small. The state of Hawaii has more than twice as many visitors (seven million) as the whole of India.

Seeing my application, Mr. Sharma said, "You're the writer."

"That's me. Back again after many years."

Leaping to his feet, he said, "How can I offer you service?"

"Just looking for trains."

I showed him an itinerary that would take me through old India, new India, poor India, India of the miracles, India of the maharajahs, India of The Great Railway Bazaar: Delhi-Jodhpur-Jaipur-Bombay-Bangalore-Madras-Rameswaram, from north to south.

"Please meet Mrs. Matta, my boss."

Mrs. Matta was a middle-aged woman in a blue sari. She sat at a desk in a back office that was furnished in the Indian manner: a full Pending tray, a cup of tea, photographs of smiling children and a framed one of the prime minister, a wall map of India showing all railway lines, and a shrine to the elephant-headed god, Ganesh, with a flickering vigil light in a yellow dish.

"Famous writer," Mr. Sharma said. "Back again."

Mrs. Matta offered me a cup of tea and the visitors' book, saying, "Please add your name. Write comments. Mention your satisfaction, if you please."

I wrote, India works because the railway works.

I had believed that on my first visit; I still believed it. Because of the vast network of Indian Railways, I could go anywhere in the country. I could sleep on the train in comfort; I could eat on it, read a book, write my notes; I could talk with anyone. There are buses in India, there are taxis and limos. But as Kuldeep had told me on the train, The pity of India is the bad roads ... It can take hours for a simple journey. There were many new airlines, but delays were a certainty, security checks were awful, and the airports were like garrisons, full of soldiers and impatient passengers, overcrowded and understaffed. Because they were an institution, Indian railway stations were well organized and efficient. And in India the train was the only way of being sure of leaving on time and arriving safely. The trains are slow, some people say, but in India being in a hurry is foolish and deluded—and often bad manners.

With a handshake from Mr. Sharma and an approving head-wobble from Mrs. Matta, I left the booking hall with all my tickets, chits, vouchers, and supplementary fare receipts. The clutter and dusty pillars and uncomfortable chairs in an Indian office are no indication of its effectiveness. Out of the chaos of receipt books, carbon paper, flickering computers, and fat files tied with faded ribbon arises decisiveness and clear results, even if you can't read the writing and your fingers are smudged with ink from handling them.

I marveled at what I was able to accomplish in a morning in Delhi: the train tickets I needed, the very notebook I was looking for, some medicine for my gout (no prescription required in India for indomethacin), and the hottest ticket to be had, a seat at the England-India test match.

***

I HAD MANAGED SEVENTEEN years of exile in England because I had not been an Anglophile—Anglophiles don't last long in England, and my detachment had kept me from being a cricket fan. I do not know the rules of the game, much less the subtleties, yet bowling, batting, and fielding are easy-to-appreciate skills, pleasurable to watch. Most of all I wanted to go to this cricket match because it was the event of the week and because I wanted to see fifty thousand Indians in one place.

I was glad I went. Cricket matches in England are famously sedate, characterized by limp hand-clapping, a yelp or two, the crack of the bat, the thump of the ball on the pitch, and now and then the bone-breaking sound of the collapsing wicket. But that was a world away from the pandemonium at Ferozeshah Kotla cricket ground in north Delhi—howling spectators, Indian flags, loud whistles, horns, flutes, trumpets, chanting. The Indian cricket crowd (so I learned) is noted for its barracking—hooting at errors, screaming at questionable calls, and the occasional display of racial insensitivity, shouting "Monkey! Monkey!" (Bandar! Bandar!) at black players on the British or West Indian teams.

The man in front of me had made a large Indian flag into a poncho and was wearing it. The man next to him was blowing a bugle. Everyone was howling. I had arrived after lunch. India had batted 209 and the sides had changed. It was England's turn to bat, and they had to better that score. They scored 124, with two of their best batters.

The fan next to me, Vikram—"Call me Vicky"—told me this. He was nineteen and had called in sick at work like everyone else—Delhi businesses were quiet and understaffed as a result of this match. I remarked on the size of the cricket ground.

"It is capacious," Vicky said. Another of the pleasures of India is hearing such words in casual conversation. "That is Pietersen. He was hero of the Ashes series last summer."

"Is he any good?" I asked.

"Power in hands is there. Timing is there." Vicky was looking at the other end of the pitch. "That is Flintoff. He is great batsman."

"So England has a chance."

"I think not. We have resourceful bowlers. See Bhaji Singh. He is magnificent."

But the English batsmen were getting hits. Vicky translated the Hindi chants: "India will win!" and "Blue is shit!"—the English uniforms were blue—and "Bhaji-Bhaji-Bhaji!" The whole stadium was roaring, though some scattered claps accompanied a good hit from Flintoff. Even the most raucous soccer fans had nothing on this screaming mob, and the cricketers themselves, in celebration of a catch or a score, hugged and rolled on the grass of the pitch.

"It's a big day," I said.

"Cricket is God in India," Vicky said. "More than God."

And he went on narrating the match for me: "See, careless half-controlled hoick off full toss ... Ah, good catch in deep mid-viket ... Flintoff tried an ill-advised sweep off a straight throw ... He is out. Leg before vicket ... Harbhajan will be Man of Match ... See, player in crease."

"Is it a sticky wicket?"

"A dicey pitch, you can say."

To the cries of "India will win!" I began to think that this was a manifestation of the new India. The vast stadium, the unanimous denunciation of England, the huge crowd, and the confidence. It was also the commercial crassness of the new century, the uniforms with advertising patches stitched to them.

"India can win," Vicky said as the afternoon wore on. "We have to take five more vickets."

Pietersen lofted a strong hit into the upper tier of the stands.

"That's a six-plus," Vicky said.

But another of his big hits was caught at the boundary by an athletic fielder.

"Fare-thee-well!" Vicky shrieked.

The new batsmen faded fast: caught, blundered, leg before wicket, and soon it seemed certain the victory was India's. Assured that the match was in the bag, Vicky addressed other matters: Did I have children? What was my job? Did we have cricket in America? Did I like India?

Satisfied with my answers, he turned back to the match. And now I could see that India would win and that in a matter of minutes fifty thousand triumphant cricket fans would be stampeding out of Ferozeshah Kotla cricket ground, looking for pale ferringhis like me to taunt with their victory. So I ducked out, hurried past security people, steel fences, metal detectors, and ranks of cops holding lathis—long sticks for beating back a mob in what is known as a lathi charge. All these tough-looking men had gathered at the exits.

I was not the only person in a hurry. A stout, well-dressed Indian man in a white suit was steering his wife through a metal detector. He could have been a magnate, she a maharani. She set the detector buzzing, but she was waved on, towards a waiting limousine with a liveried driver—she was slow, heavy, trying to keep up with her tubby husband. She wore bangles, a thickness of necklaces, and dangly earrings. The diamond in her nostril was as big as an acorn.

Outside the stadium, I could still hear the crowd. In a class-conscious country riddled by divisions, the whole cricket mob chanted as one, as though it was more than solidarity—an expression of self-esteem, joyous and assertive, pleased with itself, like a hoarse gloating echo of Amar Singh, who had said to me in Amritsar, "We're a big power now."

That evening, as if on cue, an American woman entered the lobby of my hotel with her husband, and I stepped aside to let them pass. They had just returned from a sightseeing tour of Delhi, which would have included Humayun's tomb and the Red Fort and the Qutub Minar and the sight of many Indians who had not shared in the country's economic miracle. Another reminder that traveling in India is not for the faint of heart, the woman's eyes were red from weeping, and she was sniffling, dabbing at her puffy eyes. She glanced tearfully at me, then looked away, muttering, "I don't care. I'm not going out tomorrow." Then, half actressy, half sincere, but certainly upset: "Walter, it breaks my heart to see those people living like that."