Three Travellers in Asia: Delhi to Pushkar on the Shatabdi Express

story by Maggie
photos by Dave

“Don’t you know we’re riding on the Shatabdi Express?” I can’t get Crosby Stills and Nash out of my head.

An hour out of Delhi, the air is still thick with fog, but it's not as brown as Delhi’s haze. The landscape could be Normandy in a dry year, pasture spotted with round deciduous trees. I nurture that image for all of three minutes when a village interrupts the illusion. Even the villages shatter stereotypical images of villages all quaint and clean and colourful. These consist of blocky houses, once-painted walls stained and crumbling at the edges. But the people here, farmers, appear wealthy compared to what we've just seen in the urban slums on the outskirts of Delhi. These people have room to move.

We’re in first class, but again, the image those words conjure has little to do with reality. The seats are comfortable and the car is relatively clean, but the paint has worn off the metal armrests and peeled from the window ledges, and the stains of old mould line the cloudy windows. A tear in the fabric of my seat has been mended in neat hand stitches.

The men's room: squatter. The women's has a western style toilet.

We slow for a town. Outside, piles of bricks. A woman and a cow pick through rubbish. Pampas grass waves as we pass.

Meals on Wheels delivers a tray with a set of steel cutlery and a bunch of packages: a sealed slice of bread, ketchup, butter, sugar, jam, and a wet wipe. Already we’ve had a bottle of water, a cup of tea with biscuits. And soon, a bowl and a package of cornflakes. And the server pours steaming hot milk over the cereal. Later, something hot in a sealed tinfoil tray, almost as good as airplane food.

Bread, banana, sambar, coconut chutney, vada and idli.

Half way through the trip, we are well into the state of Rajasthan. Of course it looks completely different than I’d imagined. The picture I’d had was of rolling dunes topped by ancient palaces. That’s probably because the most iconic photos are from the tourist camel safaris out of Jaisalmer, their common destination a desert called Sam. But this place is green and fertile, a patchwork of neatly tilled farms. It is winter, between growing seasons other than the occasional patch of cotton ready for picking. Lower patches of dirt are filled with puddles; the monsoon was good to Rajasthan this year. We pass tall cones of what looks like cornstalks, probably food for livestock. A pair of workers binds reeds together. Women in ones and twos scythe the grass. A tractor pulls a wagon, heaped with the same brown stalks, along a potholed track. A cluster of cows mingle in a farmyard. I never expected this pastoral scene.

The further west we go, the dryer conditions become. Now the fields are brown and the fog gives way to dust. Still the small plots, but now most of them lay fallow. We speed through villages and slow through towns. At every crossing, motorcycles and trucks and wagons collect, their drivers all looking in the same direction, to the end of the train.

We’re seated at a table across from a retired English couple who trade stories with Dave, veterans of many years of travelling (and working) in India. Across the aisle there are others who have also been many times. Seems there are a lot of Indiaphiles who come here every year. They hate it and they love it, so they say. It’s an entertainment of sorts, I suppose, a journey guaranteed to be full of surprises.

We hit a cow. We barely feel it. We’re told a hydraulic brake line might be damaged. An official in a suit paces the length of the train, talking into his radio. We’re stopped beside some highway construction where a really small truck dumps red soil down an embankment and several men go at it with shovels. It’ll be a while before this road is complete. We’re stopped for maybe half an hour when we get the news that the train is fine, and we are on our way. The cow was not so lucky.