The Bombay Express
India
I made my usual messy entrance to a long train trip at Haridwar Station the day after Holi Festival. My backpack swung heavily from side to side, sandals had come undone and my pash mina shawl was covered in dust after a horror rickshaw drive.
While my face was streaked with red from the Hindu paint festival and my hair was drenched in sweat, there was still a group of men nearby smiling at me sleazily like I was a star in their own private adult film.
Flattery or not I had to get on that train.
Slowly, slowly I thought, as I began my preparation routine. First move involved grabbing a milky chai and sitting down on my pack to sweat it out on platform one.
I lit a cigarette, raising eyebrows from well-dressed women in pastel-coloured saris nearby. Already a flicker of interest had started from my entrance and the number of stares increased ten-fold as I drew back on my smoke.
Nearby there were extended families on rugs eating chapattis and dhal and a youth who had fashioned himself on the latest Bollywood star, inhaling deeply on a Gold Flake cigarette. Each time I looked at him he smoothed back his jet-black hair, pulled up his jeans and winked at me from his left eye.
In record time a beggar ambled by, rattling a tin in my face. He was armless and struggling on a rickety cane. I threw some change in and sighed, pulling my shawl up around my head.
One of India’s wandering holy men, a sadhu, was swathed in orange robes and gazed through indifferent eyes across from me. I tried to mirror his meditative gaze, but as usual in India, was too distracted by the flow of human traffic to maintain focus.
Near the sadhu sat a small child with big eyes who held a baby in her arms. She smiled at me coyly while playing with the baby’s silver anklets. For half an hour we had a conversation with our eyes until the Bombay Express finally heaved its way towards the platform.
A riot of movement erupted, as men, women and children scrambled to their coaches. Saris billowed, Hessian bags swung in the air and the babble of Hindi rose and fell as passengers fought their way onto the train. Chai-wallahs started up their droning in coach aisles while food sellers dragged their portable kitchens onto the train to start the day’s trade. In no time at all the express was bursting with people.
Amid all of this I stood dumbfounded. Why did I have coach number eight on my ticket when there were physically only five coaches on the train? I wasn’t alone. Two Mexican girls nearby looked equally as confused. So I clung to them as closely as I clung to my backpack. Together we ran frantically from one side of the platform to the other, on a mission to find the elusive number eight. In desperation we jumped onboard a random coach as the train began heaving slowly towards Bombay.
A group of people sitting on seats near windows laughed as we landed in their second-class aisle out-of-breath. They pointed graciously at an empty section. After barely a minute a man draped in security chains tried to flog us his wares as we settled into our seats. We waved him off with our hands. He smiled, held up his hands to the sky and walked on.
A group of Hijras sashayed past us in red and pink saris singing their blessings and asking for alms. One of them wanted my oval-shaped moon stone and did a little dance in front of me, bowing at the end in prayer position. I smiled back and said no.
Most of the Indian passengers humoured the eunuchs of India, who traditionally performed at weddings. Others dropped some spare rupees into their tin for good luck.
From the back of the coach a young male voice sliced through the train’s white noise. The Hindi melody struck me inside. I couldn’t stop a tear sliding down my cheek after the morning’s chaos. I peered down the coach to catch a glimpse of the singer.
The boy, who looked anywhere between eight and 12 years old, wore dirty trousers and a checked shirt with rips along the cuff. He was making a drum beat by hitting two cement slats together. His singing merged with the sound of babies crying and the distinctive drone of the chai-wallahs. Then for a second or two, it would soar above it, drowning out any background sounds.
People turned to watch him as he sang loudly without any expression at all – a rarity as most entertainers were told to move on by the passengers. Some onlookers weren’t impressed by the imposition. From out of a nearby seat a tall Sikh man stepped up and slapped the singer across the face, shouting at him to quiet down.
The boy’s voice cracked and he was drowned out by the train’s white noise, while the man shook his chin from side to side. Tears welled up in the boy’s eyes and he wept quietly after being silenced. I reached out and brushed his cheek lightly. Likewise, a middle-aged Indian businessman reassured the boy of his talent and quickly exchanged a few heated words with the offender.
The businessman with the briefcase then turned to the boy and waved for him to continue. So, the boy with the hard face but the seeping tears resumed his song. At first he whispered the melody and it floated around in the air for a couple of seconds. However, in no time he had worked up to a good volume and was belting it out from his lungs.
So infectious was it that many in the coach clapped along to the song. After singing his last note, the boy raised an aluminium cup to my face. I laughed and dropped some change in, amused to purchase this moment on my last train trip across the subcontinent. After all, more than chai was needed for the forty-plus hour journey.
