The Great Railway Bazaar

Chingleput

And so forth. I counted. It stopped ninety-four times in all. I had got my wish, but I wondered whether it was worth the penalties.

The train gathered speed; the brakes squeaked; it lurched and stopped. It started again, and no sooner had it begun to roll easily than the brakes gave this metal wail. I dozed in my compartment, and each time the train stopped I heard laughter and the stamping of feet past my door, a muted galloping up and down the passage, doors banging and the ring of metal on metal. The voices ceased when the train was under way and did not start again until the next station, a commotion at the doors, shrieks, and clangs. I looked out the window and saw the strangest sight – children, girls and boys of anywhere from seven to twelve, the younger ones naked, the older ones wearing loincloths, were leaping off the train carrying cans of water. They were wild children, with long lank hair faded brown by the sun, with black shoulders and dusty faces and snub noses – like Australian aborigines – and at every station that morning they dashed into the sleeping car and got water from the sink in the toilet compartment. They raced with their cans to camps by the side of the track where thin older people waited, aged men with yellowing curly hair, women kneeling over cooking pots in front of crude lean-tos. They weren't Tamils. I assumed they were aborigines, like the Gonds. They had few belongings and they lived in this dry zone the monsoon had not yet reached. All morning they raided the sleeping car for water, skipping in and out, shouting and laughing, making their scavenging into a noisy game. I locked the inner door, preventing them from dancing down the corridor, but allowing them access to the water.

I had made no arrangements to eat and had no food with me. In the early afternoon I walked the length of the train but could not find a dining car. I was having a snooze at about two o'clock when there was a rap at the window. It was the conductor. Without a word he passed a tray of food through the bars. I ate Tamil-fashion, squelching the rice into a ball with my right hand, mopping the ball into the soupy vegetables, and stuffing the whole business into my mouth. At the next station the conductor reappeared. He took the empty tray and gave me a drowsy salute.

We were travelling parallel to the coast, a few miles inland, and the fans in the compartment gave very little relief from the pressure of humidity. The sky was overcast with clouds that seemed to add weight to the suffocating heat, and the train was going so slowly there was no breeze at the windows. To shake off my feeling of sluggishness, I borrowed a broom and some rags from the conductor; I swept out my compartment and washed all the windows and woodwork. Then I did my laundry and hung it on hooks in the corridor. I plugged the sink and sluiced myself with water, then shaved and put on my slippers and pyjamas. It was my own sleeping car, after all. At Villupuram the electric engine was replaced by a steam locomotive, and at that same station I bought three large bottles of warm beer. I plumped the pillows in my compartment and, while my laundry dried, drank beer and watched the state of Tamil Nadu grow simpler: each station was smaller than the last and the people grew increasingly naked – after Chingleput there were no shirts, undershirts disappeared at Villupuram, and further on lungis were scarce and people were running around in drooping loincloths. The land was flat, featureless except for an occasional storklike Tamil poised in a distant paddy field. The huts were as poorly made as those temporary ones thrown up in the African interior, where it is considered unlucky to live in the same hut two years in a row. They were of mud and had palm-leaf roofs; the mud had cracked in the heat and the first of the monsoon would sweep those roofs away. In contrast to this haphazard building, the rice fields were cleverly irrigated by complex plumbing systems and long canals.

The greatest annoyance that afternoon was the smoke from the steam engine. It poured through the windows, coating every surface with a fine film of soot, and the smell of burned coal – which is the smell of every Indian railway station – lingered in the compartment. It took much longer for the engine to build up speed, and the trip-hammer sound and the rhythmic puffing was transmitted through the carriages. But there was a gentleness in this power, and the sounds of the thrusting wheels gave a motion to the train that was not only different from the amplified lawnmower of the electric engine, but made the steam engine seem animal in the muscular way it moved and stopped.

After dark the compartment lights went out and the fan died. I went to bed; an hour later – it was 9.30 – they came on again. I found my place in the book I was reading, but before I finished a paragraph the lights failed a second time. I cursed, switched everything off, smeared myself with insect repellent (the mosquitoes were ferocious, nimble with their budget of malaria), and slept with the sheets over my head, waking only at Trichino-poly (Tiruchirappalli) to buy a box of cigars.

The next morning I was visited by a Buddhist monk. His head was shaved, he wore saffron robes, and he was barefoot. He was the very picture of piety, the mendicant monk with his sweaty head, going third class on the branch line to Nirvana. He was, of course, so right for the part that I guessed immediately he was an American, and it turned out he was from Baltimore. He was on his way to Kandy in Central Ceylon. He didn't like my questions.

'What do your folks think about you becoming a Buddhist?'

'I am looking for water,' he said obstinately.

'Are you in a monastery or what?'

'Look, if there's no water here, just tell me and I'll go away.'

'I've got some good friends in Baltimore,' I said. 'Ever get back there?'

'You're bothering me,' said the monk.

'Is that any way for a monk to talk?'

He was really angry then. He said, 'I get asked these questions a hundred times a day!'

'I'm just curious.'

'There are no answers,' he said, with mystifying glibness. 'I'm looking for water.'

'Keep looking.'

'I'm dirty! I haven't slept all night; I want to wash!'

'I'll show you where the water is if you answer me one more question,' I said.

'You're a nosy bastard, just like the rest of them,' said the Buddhist monk.

'Second door on your right,' I said. 'Don't drown.'

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

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

'No,' I said. 'But I was under the impression it went to Dhanushkodi – that's what my map says.'

'Indo-Ceylon Express formerly went to Dhanushkodi.'

'Why doesn't it go there now?'

'No Indo-Ceylon Express,' he said. 'And Dhanush-kodi blew away.'

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

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

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

The story is that when Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden they went to Ceylon (Dhanushkodi is the beginning of the seven islands across the Palk Strait known as 'Adam's Bridge'). Christ went there; so did Buddha and Rama, and so, probably, did Father Divine, Joseph Smith, and Mary Baker Eddy. Cain and Abel ended up in Rameswaram, which might be the true Land of Nod, east of Eden. Their tombs are not signposted. They are in the care of the local Muslims, and in this town of Hindus, the majority of whom are high-caste Brahmins, I had some difficulty locating a Muslim. The driver of the horse-drawn cab (there are no cars in Rameswaram) thought there might be a Muslim at the ferry landing. I said that was too far to go: the tombs were somewhere near the railway station. The driver said the Hindu temple was the holiest in India. I said I wanted to see the tombs of Cain and Abel. We found a ruminant Muslim in a dusty shop on a side street. He said he would show me the tombs if I promised not to defile them with my camera. I promised.

The tombs were identical: parallel blocks of crumbling stone on which lizards darted and the green twine of tropical weeds had knotted. I tried to appear reverential, but could not suppress my disappointment at seeing what looked like the incomplete foundations of some folly concocted by a treasonous clerk in the Public Works Department of the local mosque. And the tombs were indistinguishable.

'Cain?' I said, pointing to the right one. I pointed to the left. 'Abel?'

The Muslim didn't know.

The Hindu temple, founded by Rama (on his way to Lanka, Ceylon, to rescue Sita), was an impressive labyrinth, nearly a mile of subterranean corridors, garishly lit and painted. The traveller J. J. Aubertin, who visited the Rameswaram temple (but not the tombs of Cain and Abel: maybe they weren't there in 1890?) mentions the 'blasphemous' and 'ugly' dances of the nautch girls in his book, Wanderings and Wonderings (1892). I looked. I saw no nautch girls. Five aged women were gravely laundering their shrouds in the sacred pool at the centre of the temple. In India, I had decided, one could determine the sacredness of water by its degree of stagnation. The holiest was bright green, like this.

It was a three-hour trip across the Palk Strait on the old Scottish steamer, the TSS Ramanujam (formerly the Irwin), from Rameswaram to Talaimannar at the top of Ceylon. Like everyone else I had met in India, the ship's second mate told me I was a fool to go to Ceylon. But his reason was better than others I'd heard: there was a cholera epidemic in Jaffna and it appeared to be spreading to Colombo. 'It's your funeral,' he said cheerfully. He held the Ceylonese in complete contempt, nor was he very happy with Indians. I pointed out that this must have been rather inconvenient for him since he was an Indian himself.

'Yes, but I'm a Catholic,' he said. He was from Mangalore on the Malabar Coast and his name was Llewellyn. We smoked my Trichinopoly cigars on the deck, until Talaimannar appeared, a row of lights dimmed to faint sequins by what Llewellyn said was the first rain of the monsoon.