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From New Delhi I traveled to Lucknow on the Shatabdi Express Service—which, like the Bomb, is for many Indians a symbol of modernity and progress. It is clean, equipped with aircraft-style seats, and brutally air-conditioned throughout—pretty much everything an Indian train isn't supposed to be. And punctual, too. My Shatabdi left New Delhi right on time, and was soon hurtling through a countryside that had remained unchanged for millennia: buffalos lounging in village ponds, tiny houses decorated with drying cowpats, the immense sky bruised black with the coming monsoon. The Shatabdi blasted imperiously through the smaller stations without stopping, and I wondered if this created any resentment. The answer came in the form of an enormous bang, as a stone hurled from a passing village cracked one of the windows. Then another rock clanked off the side—and another.
The passengers, mostly businesspeople, seemed oblivious. They pored over documents or glanced hopefully at their mobile phones to see if there was a signal, which of course there wasn't. This was rural Uttar Pradesh, a state bigger than most countries and the heart of India's "cow belt." No mobile phone rang here. So the high-tech Shatabdi glided onward through a no-tech landscape, silent except for the crash of rocks ricocheting off its thick metal hide, and the soft beeps of passengers playing "Snake" on their otherwise useless Nokias.
The decline of Lucknow was an Indian tragedy. By the mid-19th century, the Nawabs of Avadh, the country's last ruling Muslim dynasty, had created a city famed for Urdu poets, dancing girls and lavish architecture. While ravaged during the 1857 Indian Mutiny—the ruined Residency still stands as a shrine to British imperialism—Lucknow's deathblow came a century later with the violence of partition. The Muslim élite fled for Pakistan, to be replaced by thousands of Punjabi Hindus. The Nawabs' treasured monuments—like the Great Imambara, with its breathtaking vaulted ceiling—now moldered unloved amid a sea of modern concrete.
If Lucknow's woes went unnoticed, it was partly because of its proximity to Ayodhya—a town upon which the fate of secular India itself depended. Ayodhya was once home to the 15th century Babri Mosque, built—so Hindu hard-liners claim—on the site of a temple marking the birthplace of Ram. In Dec. 1992, a Hindu mob stormed the mosque and destroyed it, sparking nationwide sectarian riots. Then, in February this year, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims left Ayodhya for the west Indian state of Gujarat, where it was set ablaze by local Muslims, killing 58 people. Egged on by politicians, vengeful Hindu mobs went on a rampage that left over 2,000 Muslims dead. Seemingly unperturbed by the horrific echoes of partition—women gang-raped, neighborhoods torched, charred corpses spilling from trains—the Indian government was criminally slow in deploying troops to quell the violence.
Not surprisingly, Ayodhya was a profoundly eerie place. Its empty cobbled streets were lined with stalls selling pictures of Hindu deities; many were run by Muslims. But there were no worshipers, Muslim or Hindu; just edgy soldiers patrolling the streets while monkeys bounded across the rooftops. Security at the temple complex itself was astonishing. The area was guarded by high barbed-wire fences and hundreds of government troops. Even air traffic over Ayodhya was banned. To enter the temple, you must submit to three rigorous body searches, then proceed through a long, narrow walkway flanked by four-meter-high steel fences. Eventually you arrive at an opening in the fence, through which you glimpse a small shrine bearing a statue of Ram surrounded by sandbags. There is just enough time to stop and pray before a guard tells you to keep moving. Exiting the complex you pass a huge crater—all that is left of Babri Mosque.
Ayodhya had a significant visitor the day I arrived. His name was Vinay Katiyar, a radical Hindu politician with solid low-caste credentials, who had participated in the mosque's destruction. The Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had recently elected Katiyar as its leader in Uttar Pradesh to boost the party's flagging popularity among voters. (An Indian newspaper had announced his election with the wry headline DEMOLITION MAN TO REBUILD PARTY.) Like other politicians eager to garner conservative Hindu votes, Katiyar had sworn to build a grand new Ram temple where Babri once stood. Long-term residents of Ayodhya—whose voices are rarely heard—resent this incendiary issue being exploited for political gain. Afzal Ahmed, a retired army captain who has lived there for 30 years, says locals had always lived in harmony—as long as the politicos stayed away. "If a Hindu brother dies, we go to the riverbank," he says. "If a Muslim brother dies, we go to the graveyard. We're like a big family." A local Brahman priest also expressed his disgust with "both Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists."
A different kind of storm was brewing over Ayodhya. The monsoon was due any day, and I was anxious to reach India's remote northeast before the inevitable floods made travel there impossible. I traveled onward via Varanasi, waiting beside potbellied gurus smeared with holy ash, for a connection to Calcutta. There the monsoon hit with full force, and soon barefoot rickshaw wallahs were wading thigh-high through Calcutta's already insanely congested streets.
I headed north on a sleeper train, a muffled symphony of snores and burps emanating from its curtained-off berths. By noon the next day we were passing through the "chicken's neck," the sinew of land which attaches northeast India to the rest of the country. My destination was Siliguri, the starting point of the famous "toy train" that chugged up through tea plantations to the British hill station of Darjeeling. But the monsoon got there first. Sections of the track had been destroyed in a mudslide, and the service had been suspended indefinitely. The same floods had also forced thousands of people across the northeast to abandon their homes.
So I continued east in a third-class carriage scented by fermenting lavatories. The train seemed implausibly full. Somehow, a wiry peasant woman struggled aboard with three sacks the size of baby elephants, followed by an old man with an enormous pot of gulab jamun, a sweet smothered in syrup, perched on his head. Then a conductor battled heroically through the crush in an outsized blazer and absurdly baggy trousers, as if in his very effort to collect tickets he had sweated off half his body weight.
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