"Trains are wonderful.... To travel by train is to see nature and human beings, towns and churches and rivers, in fact, to see life." - Agatha Christie
At six 0'clock in the morning the roads of Delhi are surprisingly calm and the coach driver negotiates a swift and easy passage to New Delhi railway station until we get to within five hundred metres or so and there is absolute chaos. He can go no further so we disembark and risk our lives as pedestrians negotiating our way through the streets where drivers consider pedestrians as fare game.
Luckily we didn't have our suitcases because these had gone on ahead so all we had was a backpack and a cardboard box of pack-up breakfast.
The reason that we had to leave so early was because we were on the express train and the express train has to leave first or else it gets held up by all the trains that follow and have to regularly stop.
The railway station is like a refugee camp with people sleeping on dirty rugs and shrouded in threadbare blankets but despite the crowds, the noise, the chaos and the commotion the faces on the crowded platform showed no tension, anxiety or anger that you find in a major railway station in England, everyone is confident that the train will arrive more or less on time, will leave more or less on time and everyone has a ticket and a guaranteed seat on board. Everyone appears patient and tolerant, some read newspapers, some have breakfast picnics, some ask to have pictures taken with Kim. Very unusual.
It was still dark when the train left the station and although it was an express train it wasn't especially express for the first twenty miles or so as it made ponderous progress through the suburbs of Delhi.
The train is comfortable and the ride smooth but soon we travel through rather more uncomfortable areas of Delhi, open landfill sites where people rake through the rubbish to make a living and shanty towns constructed of scrap
Family houses built adjacent to rubbish tip sand dangerously close to the railway tracks. Constructed of bits of discarded timber, cardboard and plastic sheeting. Look sort of OK today but I wonder if they stand up well to monsoon rain in a month or so . My Indian travel partners turn a blind eye as though wearing blinkers, I ask them about it but they are surprisingly dismissive. This is how it is. Some people can afford a train ticket from Delhi to Jaipur but many cannot because they live on a rubbish tip.
The prepacked breakfast box turned out to be desperately disappointing and most of us unprepacked it and dispatched it immediately to the rubbish sack but we didn't go hungry because our ticket price included a breakfast, mid morning tea and biscuits and then a full lunch. My picture doesn't really do it justice because it really was very nice - lamb curry, vegetable curry, potato something or other rice and naan. I enjoyed it.
The railway line is surprisingly busy. Not with trains but with people. Indian people use the railway lines like public footpaths and wander carelessly along the tracks seemingly dismissive of high speed express trains thundering past at eighty miles an hour or so. and overhead cables carrying twenty-five thousand volts of electricity. Cows and bullocks graze idly by the track side, children cross the lines on the way to school, women search through the track side litter and and young men sit and watch them and chat dangerously close to the rails.
When I was a boy we used to like to play on the railway lines doing stupid things like putting a ha'penny on the track in the optimistic hope that the weight of the train would squash it into a penny and double its value but this was never successful because once a forty tonne engine has run over a ha'penny it can never be found again.
Sometime in the early sixties the line was electrified and this made it even more dangerous. One day a man from British Rail came to our school and addressed morning assembly to warn us about playing on the railway.
His name was Driver Watson and he proudly wore his navy blue uniform with red piping and told us that the electricity was so powerful that we would need to wear wellington boots forty-two feet thick if we were to be safe from electrocution if we were to touch the overhead wires. He ended every warning with the phrase 'Boys (short pause for effect)… You Will Be Electrocuted' almost as though he was going to arrange it personally. That sounded convincing enough to keep me away from the tracks in future and anyway British Rail started putting up fences so it was difficult to get there anymore. There were no fences along these railway lines.
After four hours or so the train arrived in Jaipur in Rajasthan, gave away our breakfast boxes to the beggars (they would have preferred rupees of course) were reunited with the coach and our luggage and made off into the city.
First stop, the Jantar Mantar is a collection of astronomical instruments built by the Rajput king Sawai Jai Singh, the founder of Jaipur. He built his first sundial but was then unhappy that it might not be entirely accurate he built a much bigger one just to be certain. The monument was completed in 1734 and consequently features the World's largest stone sundial and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
And here it is, the World's largest sundial...
After the visit we left immediately for lunch which was very, very good and included entertainment...
But I really wanted to know why that ten year old boy was not in school.
There was a long bus ride now to the hotel which was some way out of the city. It was a very nice hotel but it was in a poor location. Venturing out we were very quickly in a local neighbourhood with women and children working the landfill site stopping briefly as we passed to ask for money. As I was becoming accustomed to the men sat in roadside shack cafés drinking tea and squandering time. I was uneasy about going too far but we needed wine and we were told that there was one close by.
There was, found it and wasted little time getting back to the hotel. It wasn't dangerous I am certain but it was a little uncomfortable.
S
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