Ticket touts, turds and a taddle-tale

Picture – if you will – a steel-panelled cylinder made in the 60s, seventy feet long and twelve feet wide. Picture two hundred peasants, merchants and general riff raff crammed inside. Picture it creeping through the baking hot Indian countryside. Picture this happening at dawn after a night with no sleep. And lastly, picture three unhappy western travellers – accustomed to niceties such as a couple of inches of personal space, seats which don’t crush the spine and the absence of some irritating toilet-trader excavating his feet and clearing his throat like a two-stroke tuk-tuk in front of one’s face. If you can, you are picturing General Population Class train travel from Mumbai to Ahmedabad during Diwali, when nothing else is available.

The all-emcompassing dreadfulness of the experience begins with the ticket purchase the day before. You’re directed from one non-functioning and utterly nonsensical website to another before you discover the entire process is designed to break the spirit of the wired traveller. So you give up and grudgingly trudge through the crowds to the station.

The train station you’ve been directed too is, naturally, unable to help. So you spend an hour in a four wheeled furnace driven by a guy who’s played too much rally driving on his Commodore 64, and eventually you get to the right station. This, you soon understand, is but a physical manifestation of the website, but with the additional delights of unbearable heat, sickening stench, and – in addition to the thousands of men standing around and shouting apparently at themselves – the flagship of Indian bureaucracy. They are prouder of this than anything else.

The form-filling in India deserves a moment’s digression. Everywhere you go and everything you do, there’ll be a form to be filled out – usually complete with irresistible contradictions – and a sheer litany of details required. An internet café – I kid you not – will usually demand not merely your name, age, birth date and address in India, but passport number, visa number, passport issue date, passport issue place, visa issue date and place, address outside of India, email address, contact phone number and, (in one excruciating place which offered dial-up speed and a suspiciously sticky keyboard) both parents’ full names.

“Tell them to sod off!” you might retort. This – I assure you – doesn’t work. Resistance to the form filling process is met with looks varying from manifest incomprehension to curious bewilderment to barely-veiled hostility. You can try compromising – filling in some of the details and drawing a line at “Age Of Mother’s Loss of Virginity”, or “Average Daily Bowel Movement Frequency” – but all this leads to is the aspiring bureaucrat traipsing back demanding more. Exactly the same process takes place at every hotel. Every booking in a travel agent. Forms and forms and even more forms all demanding the minutiae of your life. Time and time again.

Ultimately, you concede you’re not in a bargaining position at all. Because stone-age bandwidth and sticky keys notwithstanding, this is travel, and this is the 21st century. And you need Internet more than he needs the aggravation of someone from the Ministry of Pedantry coming round with a clipboard.

The form filling is everywhere – and most of the time it’s a time consuming but tolerable nuisance. But at the railway station – oh Lord! – the least accessible system conceived by Man is accompanied by about as much organisation and forethought as you’d get in show-and-tell for special ed kindergarteners. First you need to find your train number and fill it in. This is not easy. Once done, you queue for a reservation form. This is not easy either, because the child in front has shat itself without a nappy, and twelve barefoot urchins are eyeing your backpack. Nevertheless, you fill out the form and get to the front of the queue, open your mouth to speak, and immediately three men push in and start barking Hindi at the official behind the desk. You push and shove and shout back but they speak about as much English as you speak Hindi, and moreover, the official is ignoring you and attending to them. You then realise that this is India, and the only way to get attention at all is to push through as many people as possible, elbows flailing backpack swinging, and completely disregard the existence of the queue in the first place. This will get you served.

But of course it won’t – because you get instructed by the bored official that you forgot to enter “Father’s Sperm Count” and “Girlfriend’s Fellatio Technique” in the box at the bottom. Once the form is complete, the really awful truth dawns. This is Diwali week – the festival of lights in which everyone in India travels and the consequences of which you were too stupid to anticipate – and every train for the next eight days is not merely full, but has a three-figure waiting list.

Until this point, you’ve not noticed the eighty or ninety sly and ridiculously-moustached men loitering furtively in the shadows. Like the cheetah in the grass waiting for the limping gazelle, they wait for the moment your travel plans collapse around you and your face reveals your desperation – and they strike.

These men are the touts, and they call themselves – again, I kid you not – “corruption agents”. I suppose you have to commend their candour. They explain to you – and you manage to corroborate this – that paying under-the-table to the train officials is not only the done thing, but in fact the only way to get a train ticket at all. At, of course, a criminal mark-up.

“But”, you protest, “All the trains are full!” You point to a 10x8 seat availability matrix on the board showing trains down the side and classes across the top – and it’s filled exclusively with zeroes. The shady-looking one with rodentish eyes who's pushed to the front sniggers. And clears his throat and spits – sending a shimmering oyster of beef-coloured phlem flying past your head. You fantasise about cutting his eyeballs out with the pocket knife you’re fingering in your pocket, but the idea of a week trapped in Mumbai helps to quell this urge.

The long and the short of it is that you (and by this I mean everyone, not just gullible rich tourists) pay these guys to buy tickets for you. All the train network employees are corrupt too, of course, so they claim the trains are full when they’re anything but. So the phlemmy rodent-man pays the corrupt douchebag of an official, and sure enough you get your ticket at an exorbitant rate.

But no! He returns, touching and placating you with mock sincerity, and hands you a document with the ominous initials WL. Waiting List. You get into a heated argument (helped by having a gargantuan travel companion who can trample them under his clown feet) and you get some of your money back with the understanding you show up at the station an hour before the train leaves the next day, and some more money will get you assigned seats – presumably at the expense of a family of poor chumps going home to visit their relatives for the holidays.

5am the next morning, you arrive ticketless expecting a relatively deserted station only to find 50,000 people engaged in what can only be a faithful recreation of the First Zulu War. You track down the thieving pustule of an imp-man who shafted you the night before, you find out that the waiting list – unsurprisingly – has gotten longer rather than shorter, and you end up paying way, way too much for General Population Class. Also known as the way the Germans took the Jews on holiday to Auschwitz.

So, we’re back to the sweltering, steel cylinder creeping across India at the speed of a motorised wheelchair running low on batteries. After waiting on a platform which looks over an enchanting view of piles of human effluent dropping straight down from the toilets, you take your seats – benches, actually – which provide roughly half the width and a third the legroom of an economy class airline seat. Through the sleepless morning fog and the atrocious smell and the overwhelming noise of people yelling and pushing in the Indian way, your heart sinks at the prospect of ten hours huddled like battery hens in this oven (the accompanying photo, by the way, was before anyone really got on board and doesn’t begin to tell the story). You find you’re sitting next to a bunch of people carrying a stench that could outlast religion. So you and your travel companions move to some seats five metres away in order to sit together. A sudden hush - the din stops as people struggle to comprehend anyone sitting in other than assigned seats. And then you encounter a complete and utter pubic louse of a man who’s having his shoes shined by a miserable and malnourished child and telling everyone his opinion on everything. Although obviously due to patriarchal pride and overcompensation for the shame of having to travel Auschwitz Class, he’s a person you want to disembowel and force feed his innards. You wouldn’t wish him on your worst enemy.

He starts lecturing us on why we need to be in our proper seats. Irate, we retort that if his compatriots had only learned about Imperial Leather instead of just imperial mistreatment of everyone else, we wouldn’t need to move in the first place. The ticket inspector arrives and the pubic louse sees his moment. Standing up to impose his full five feet of height, he excitedly recounts the story of how the three westerners left their assigned seats!! – something apparently unprecedented in Indian transport history. Eventually, our use of logic and reason is considered cheating, and we’re forced back to our assigned places. We huff and sulk. We check our watches to find there's almost the entire journey to go.

Five men clear their throats, spray snot out of a nostril in no particular direction, and spit.

But it’s about to get much worse. Much, much worse.

Because although all the seats are full as you pull out of Mumbai Central Station, this doesn’t mean the carriage – which the Germans must’ve sold to the Indians during Partition – is full. Not at all. The two hundred people sitting down are a mere third of the carriage’s capacity.

So you pull into Borivali in the outskirts of Mumbai, to be greeted by a platform of people one hundred deep. The moment the train stops, they engage in an orgiastic display of violent pushing and screaming. The doors are immediately crammed with three people who are now of course, wedged stuck and being pushed by three dozen people behind them. In the crowd, women and children are pushed over, elderly men thrown aside, punches thrown (well, this is India, so girly slaps really), and eventually bones give, the dam breaks and the three guys in the doorway tumble forward and everyone charges on board.

The two hundred in the carriage becomes five hundred within seconds. With absolutely no comprehension of personal space or the acceptability of leaning over a complete stranger and dangling sweat-sodden armpits in his face, the newcomers fill every square inch of floor space. Including the small gap between your seated legs. For Londoners, imagine the Northern Line, southbound at 8am. Double the people, double the heat, quadruple the smell, increase the cacophony by five orders of magnitude, and halve the ventilation. Oh yes, and it’s ten hours.

But it gets worse. Because then the beggars, the Eunuchs and the vendors arrive and the carriage is transformed into a heaving and chaotic bazaar. The Eunuchs – dressed in saris and make-up and with male voices – push through, forcefully begging. You have to feel for them – many were boys castrated by their beggar parents in order to earn more money. The women start cooking food on the floor, and the noise of everything is just deafening. People start singing, which is only mildly better than the constant yelling and pushing. And all you want to do is stretch your leg, take a moment’s respite from the heat, go to the toilet (bad, bad idea – best to soil yourself, really) or kill people en masse.

And anyone who’s ever tried to sleep in church knows how hard it is on hard, straight-backed benches. Your head lolls, your back cramps, and your buttocks go numb – and this is with the salubrious tedium of a sermon to help your reverie, not the chariot scene from Ben Hur going on around you while all the men hack and cough, stare, take off their sandals and begin picking their feet with toothpicks which then go back in their mouths.

I’m not saying don’t take the train in India. On the contrary, I’m writing this moment on the express from Jaipur to Agra and then Amritsar. The scenery is stunning (see photo). I have a seat to myself, and the smell is really no worse than you’d get bathing in a septic tank after Glastonbury. I’m just saying: don’t do it during Diwali. Don’t take Auschwitz Class. Don’t under any circumstances venture into the toilets. Don’t queue – always push. And if some silver-haired, shoe-shined, diminutive taddle-tale is sitting around like Lord Muck and opining on everything under the sun, don’t be unnerved by your inclination to disembowel him or carry him into the toilet and shove his face down the squat hole. Nurse that inclination, embrace it! Let it grow! In India, sometimes it’s the only way of knowing you’re still human.