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JOHN STANMEYER/VII FOR TIME
India: Preparing for departure
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Growing up, I used to hear about the trains. My grandfather had worked for the railways—as district traffic manager for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway—and for long periods the whole family would live on trains, crisscrossing the subcontinent. When my grandfather was "on line," as it was then called, my mother and her siblings would travel with him in a special compartment equipped with two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and separate quarters for the servants. The dog would poke its head excitedly out of the window, the little girls would eagerly order asparagus from the dining car, and when even the fans couldn't keep the wasting heat away, stewards would haul in huge blocks of ice covered in sawdust.
The Indian railways were, of course, a perfect model of how Britain sought to tame—and consistently failed to break—its grand possession: a vast demi-continent engirded by binaries along which monstrous vehicles mechanically churned through the swarming darkness, though often at an Indian rather than an Industrial Age pace. Then, when the British left, trains became a hideous model of the mess its former rulers had left behind them: during the chaos of partition, trains would roll into stations piled high with slaughtered bodies, their carriages running with blood. Even this February, when Hindu-Muslim violence broke out again in India, it began with an attack on a train. Trains in India stand for a world laid down (quite literally) on foreign lines, yet haunted to this day by tribal divisions that no timetables or stationmasters can begin to wish away.
Asian history is in fact defined, to some extent, by trains and all the wonders and the horrors they have brought into daily lives. Everywhere you turn in Asia you meet the train, whether in the local express that just drowned out your last sentence in a Japanese suburb, or that image of Marlene Dietrich slinking down the corridor in Shanghai Express. "At the beginning was the train," writes Victor Brombert in Trains of Thought, his recent memoir of a typical 20th-century boyhood of deracination. Trains are, of course, a feature of every continent. But in the U.S., Amtrak is threatening to cancel all its long-haul trips this fall (this year the U.S. government will spend 60 times as much on highways as on passenger rail), and in Europe, the Eurail Pass has converted the long-distance trains of Italy and France into rolling college dorms for American students on vacation. Today, trains seem to belong especially to the continent of the Eastern and Oriental Express.
To catch, therefore, all that changes—and does not change—in Asia, we took this summer an extended train trip, in many stages: from Pakistan's border with Afghanistan to a small town at the tip of northern Japan and back across Siberia to Moscow. Trains are how one senses both the nature—and the human nature—of a place, and they offer a perfect way into a continent known for its energy and its stillness. In South Asia, trains stand for all the ways in which people are connected and divided. (In Rohinton Mistry's new novel Family Matters, for example, the trains of Bombay are actually seen as a model of how the city sometimes forgets its differences, as passengers on a car reach down to pull a latecomer up and into the safety of the train.) In Southeast Asia, one sees, from the train and inside it, the 21st century bumping up against the 18th. China's trains ferry money, mobility and crime across an enormous landscape. And on the Korean peninsula, the train offers the prospect, however dim, of building a connection, a link of sorts, between poignantly severed halves of the nation.
One thing that makes train travel ideal is that the country unfurls outside your window at a reassuringly mammalian pace. Riding the Reunification Express in Vietnam, say, you pass through several seasons and dramatic landscapes in two days, and all the while the human Vietnam is going about its life around you in the compartment. Families are tucking into bowls of pho (noodles), grandfathers are snoring, a young couple is shyly courting in the corner. I flew once around Burma, and the memories I brought back were as jerky and unconnected as slides. I traveled, my next time in Burma, from Mandalay to Rangoon by third-class overnight train, and met vendors renting out books for the duration of the 12-hour trip, and children sleeping by the track and springing up at 2 a.m. to sell snacks and cups of tea. When the cars pulled into the capital, I felt as if I had passed through several lifetimes.
Part of the special romance of trains in the jet age (a steam-puffing Romantic Train will take you around the western hills of Kyoto) is that they seem to belong to a slower and more gracious time (white-gloved waiters, in the imagination at least, tend to the privileged in the Palace on Wheels as it rolls across Rajasthan). That may be why little boys, to this day, dream of being train drivers more than they dream of being pilots or ships' captains. To those in the country, the train brings an alien world of speed. Who can forget, in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, the sudden roar of the train as it speeds through the fields, thrilling the village children?
Indeed, the distinctive magic of the train is that it takes in even those who never move. Stations are whole cities in miniature where people sleep and live and trade. The last time I visited Victoria Terminus in Bombay, it was to discover a "ladies waiting room" in one place, a "general waiting room" elsewhere, a booth offering "manual booking refund on pre-bought ticket," and another catering to "freedom fighters" from the fight for independence half a century before. Under the dome sculpted by students of Kipling's father, thousands of dabba wallahs, or exalted deliverymen, were carrying tiffin box lunches to workers all across the city. In Nagano, in the Japanese Alps, the train station that once resembled a temple is now, thanks to the 1988 Olympics, a 21st-century concoction: with a McDonald's at its northern entrance and a McDonald's at its southern. Even in Java once, at 4 a.m., as I tried to catch a night's sleep, I found myself accosted in the train station by a slim-hipped epicene, eager to deliver a lecture on the difference between Olivia Hussey and Grace Jones.
It is no surprise then that the train still rolls across the imagination, even of those who have never sat on one, taking us into tunnels (and everything they connote) or sounding their whistles through the fog, as in André Malraux's evocation of Shanghai in Man's Fate. Trains offer the prospect of escape, and just the sound, the sight of them reminds us we are not stuck only where we are. As Paul Theroux writes, on the first page of his first travel book The Great Railway Bazaar (chronicling, of course, a train journey across Asia and Europe), "Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories." People come together in stations (as in the deathless Brief Encounter), and they say goodbye forever there (as with friends of mine who had to leave their parents behind when racing for the trains that took them out of communist China in 1949).
When I think back to my most memorable moments in Asia, it is to thoughts of trains that my trains of thought return: my first night in Thailand, when taking the overnight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai and awakening in a newborn quiet of paddy fields and cool mists; bumping across China, my first day there, in a hard sleeper that lurched from Guangzhou to Beijing, my feverish brow taken care of by a kindly student from Mongolia; or, just last year, coming upon the aromatic, Havisham-worthy station in Kuala Lumpur that sits among the gleaming high-rises like a family heirloom.
Trains taught me about both the England where I had grown up and the India I had seldom seen when I returned to my parents' home for my first real trip through Asia at the age of 17. Night after night drifting by in the sleepers, the steady racket of the wheels, the sudden stops in total darkness, and then, out of nowhere, Agra or Khajuraho or Mysore. What I remember most is just India: the piles of P.G. Wodehouse novels stacked up at the station bookstores, the garrulous men in the compartment with their theories of life and endless questions, the conductors who somehow seemed to produce a glass of tea for everyone at 6 a.m. Sitting in the carriage in the rolling, clackety calm, surrounded by friendly strangers and watching every century go past—long rows of shantytowns, and then a water buffalo under trees—I came upon a past that would become a large part of my future. And realized, as I did, that nothing in the sober, timetabled England that I had left could ever compare with a life on the trains of Asia.
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