Travelling Through India on the Himsagar Express

These young men had very little education. With some difficulty, Kumar, who was twenty-six, could write in Hindi his name and a brief description of the work that he did. In the years preceding independence, while in a British jail in Ahmednagar Fort, the future Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had bemoaned in his magisterial “The Discovery of India” that “of our millions how few get any education at all.” He added this hopeful note: “If life opened its gates to them and offered them food and healthy conditions of living and education and opportunities of growth, how many among these millions would be eminent scientists, educationists, technicians, industrialists, writers and artists, helping to build a new India and a new world?” That desirable future hasn’t come to pass. The “haves” get educated and also find opportunities abroad as doctors, engineers, scientists; a large section of the “have-nots,” on the other hand, often remain trapped in virtual illiteracy. More than half of India’s population is under the age of thirty, but, according to a report by the International Labour Organization, the group accounts for almost eighty-three per cent of the unemployed.

And yet, and yet. The smartphones of the Khagaria youths also had apps, like Paytm, that allowed them to make quick online payments and send money home. In 1969—and again in 1980—India’s commercial banks were nationalized, which forced the banking sector to cater to previously ignored sections of society. Mobile banking has ushered in an unprecedented level of access to the monetary system. The new India is, of course, a digital India; this has made it easier for young people to participate in the gig economy. It has also made them more likely to be recruited for cons. Job scams are increasingly common in cities like Delhi, where armies of desperate workers employed at call centers cheat people out of their money by offering them fake jobs. Other young people are lured with offers of employment in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, where their passports are taken away and they’re ordered to work defrauding people online.

I was an eager, if somewhat nervous, participant in the digital economy. My ticket for the Himsagar Express had been purchased online. I ordered my first meal on the train using an app, and was disappointed when my lunch was not delivered. When I e-mailed a complaint that afternoon, I received a response within hours, in a departure from the slow conventions of Indian bureaucracy: order number 1751705140 had been delivered, the message stated flatly, and disputes were “subject to the jurisdiction of the Delhi courts.” So much has changed, I thought, and yet not much has changed at all. But the next day there was a fresh message. I was offered an apology and, the day after that, while I was still on the train, I was given a full refund.

The Himsagar Express is not a luxury train like the Vande Bharat Express, a new service that is fully air-conditioned and caters to affluent passengers travelling middle distances. But even on ordinary trains like the Himsagar, as in Indian society as a whole, the distinctions between the haves and the have-nots were clear: I was in an air-conditioned car, with an assigned sleeping berth, suffering only from filthy toilets and close intimacy with loud passengers; travellers like Ganesh Rajwar and Pankaj Kumar were in the unreserved compartment, packed in like people fleeing some devastating catastrophe. They sat on, or near, small bundles and other belongings, sometimes even pressed into the overhead luggage racks. The garbage can was overflowing and the sink above it was filled with empty plastic bottles. The path to the toilets was clogged with passengers sitting or sleeping on the floor, and that gave me an excuse to cease any further investigation into the space that I could smell but could not see.

I paid four thousand rupees, a little less than fifty dollars, for my ticket. I hadn’t considered the fact that I wouldn’t be able to take a shower for nearly four days. I also made the error of searching online for reviews of the train. The reviews were consistently negative. After mentioning the “nasty service,” one customer had noted stoically, “All of us know this review is not going to improve the quality of the service. I am writing for the sake of common man.”

For the sake of the common man! I decided to adopt this phrase as a credo for everything in my life!

Before my trip, I had stopped at a bookstore in Delhi owned by a friend. When I told her about my travel plans, she advised me to take only one small suitcase, and to always keep my valuables with me. Following these warnings, I abandoned my large suitcase at the bookstore. While there, I bought a memoir by Sudha Bharadwaj, a spirited activist and trade unionist who was imprisoned by the B.J.P. government, in 2018, on the basis of scant and questionable evidence. “From Phansi Yard” is a lively account of her incarceration and describes the lives of women behind bars in an unjust patriarchal legal system.

I was reading an important testimony, but I was flooded with self-pity. Faced with the squalid claustrophobia of the air-conditioned compartment of the Himsagar Express, I began to identify with the feelings of the entrapped prisoner. Worse, I read with fascination—and, yes, with increasing identification—the stories that Bharadwaj was telling about the blocked, stinking toilets in the jails.

Let’s go back for a moment to Sastry’s film. One of the questions asked in “I Am 20” is about the most significant changes in the country in the previous two decades. Had India changed its sanitary practices? In February, 1916, in a speech at the Banaras Hindu University, Mahatma Gandhi chided his audience for not knowing “the elementary laws of cleanliness” when travelling on trains. The result, Gandhi said, was that there is “indescribable filth in the compartment.” That was more than three decades before independence. During my boyhood, more than three decades after independence, the toilets in trains opened onto the tracks. As a boy, I looked on these with fear, and, even when I was a bit older, as I saw railroad ties and gravel ballast passing in a blur, I made sure that my watch was strapped securely to my wrist.

On the door of the toilets on the Himsagar Express, there was a sign, green letters on white, saying “Fitted with Bio Toilet.” This was a part of the new India. The toilet used bacteria to convert human waste into water and gases. The opening in the floor was gone, but the stink remained. The fittings in the toilets for toilet paper and a soap dispenser were all broken and empty.

There had been another change since the journeys of my youth: a cleaning staff. One cleaner, wearing a deep-blue uniform, came by at least once or twice daily with a brush and passed it over the floor of the toilets. The water on the floor was gritty and black, and the man moved the filth around. Even the walls of the tiny bathroom were covered with a wash of black. There was also a second cleaner, who swept away the plastic bottles, wrappers, empty juice containers, plates of food, and other garbage that the passengers tossed on the floor. I appreciated the man’s work, but, on my second or third evening on the train, as we were passing verdant fields, I saw him collect all the trash at the end of the train car and then, opening the door, sweep the whole pile smoothly into the emptiness outside.

I had started my journey a little after midnight in Jammu Tawi, Kashmir, the beginning of the line. My phone wasn’t working because there are restrictions on mobile phones in Kashmir—India’s only Muslim-majority state, where civil unrest and demands for secession have been in the air for decades. Often when there is violence, at the hands of the Indian Army or separatist militants, the government restricts phone use and imposes a ban on internet use in Kashmir; even in more normal times, it is almost impossible to use either prepaid phones or phones that haven’t been registered locally. Two and a half hours into the journey, I woke up a little before three in the morning, when the train stopped at a station. A man in an ascetic’s orange garb was sitting on the platform floor eating a green apple. Unoccupied steel benches nearby gleamed in the night. A young Sikh policeman, flashlight in hand, came through the train. He stopped by my berth and asked me to put my cellphone and bag under my head. He said they would be safe that way. When we started moving again, the sound of snoring from different berths around me reminded me of the croaking of frogs, as if in a relay, in a village pond during the monsoon rains.

An hour or two later I was woken up again. Close by there was a boy shouting, “Papa, Papa.” He, too, had a flashlight. He belonged to a family of four. They were the Modis—husband, wife, daughter, and son. Lights were switched on, and everyone’s bedding was laid out on the berths close to mine. We had crossed into Punjab, and my phone was working again. So was Mrs. Modi’s phone. She was interested, despite the hour, in watching videos on her phone. The videos had a syncopated, asthmatic laugh track. This was annoying, and then it became funny. Instead of composing essays in my head about the degradation of public and private spaces, I sent a message to my elder sister, who I was sure must be blissfully asleep in Patna. She understood the suffering of travel on Indian trains. When I was in college in Delhi, she was attending medical school in Jamshedpur, a town in eastern India. When she visited me, she would arrive twenty-four hours (or more than thirty, if there were delays) after boarding the train, her face strained, her lips dry and dark. She didn’t drink water during those trips because she didn’t want to risk needing to pee, nor did she want to endanger herself, a lone woman, in a dark passageway of the train or, heaven forbid, the toilet.

Early in the morning, Mrs. Modi’s phone rang. Her ringtone was a parrot’s call. She answered all her phone calls on speaker. She asked her brother in Delhi to get a kilo of fresh vegetables; he could hand them over when the train stopped there in the afternoon. Already various people in the train car were becoming familiar to me from their insistent ringtones. Soon, the Modi daughter was up. She started watching a show on her phone. I could hear the lines delivered at a high emotional pitch: “Do you not know who I am? I am the same girl who you were madly in love with four years ago.” The next time the train stopped, I saw a man sitting cross-legged under a tree, drinking tea. Noise inside, quiet outside.

That was the day that my lunch didn’t arrive. But I was unfazed. At the next station, I bought bananas and peanuts on the platform. Also newspapers. A dictatorship had been toppled in Bangladesh. There was a photograph from Dhaka with the caption “People take away a duck and an electric bulb from the PM’s residence.” The Indian men’s hockey team was in contention for a medal at the Olympics. My horoscope began, “Your mind will remain unsettled.” The Modi family’s devotion to watching shows on their phones, each at a high volume, began to weaken me. I watched a cockroach crawling in the aisle. I had hoped to talk to people—I wanted to ask someone on the train, “How is your life different from how your mother had lived at your age?”—but now I withdrew. I wanted solitude.