Thirty years ago, Ian Jack fell in love with riding the rails in India. When he returned this winter to board the famed Delhi to Kolkata Express, would he find the same romance? In The Guardian, UK:
On the night train from Delhi to Kolkata, trying to persuade myself to sleep, I started to count the Indian railway journeys I’d made. I reached 100 or so and then gave up. So many journeys, so many early-morning cigarettes smoked over tea drunk from those disposable clay vessels called kulhads – the platform littered with their smashed fragments – as I got down at a junction and waited for a change of locomotive: dawn the best time of day in India, Gold Flake the best cigarette, steam the best smell, an engine whistle the best noise, tea the best drink. Also remembered: so many conversations with my fellow travellers, salesmen who would tender cards with telegraphic addresses (“CHEMCO, KANPUR”), amateur and professional astrologers, army officers going home on leave, conversations that happened bunk-to-bunk after the conversationalists had unpacked their bed-rolls and spread out their sheets – one-night friendships, often surprisingly intimate (“Tell me, do you love your wife?”), their only souvenir a business card found years later, tucked in a notebook.
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