I caught the local bus from Hampi to Hospet and the train from Hospet to Hubli then another train from Hubli to Jodphur, a total of forty three hours on the train.
My first day of travel started out in the gorgeous hippy traveler town of Hampi where I discovered that I could get avocado on toast. Avocado. Now this may seem like a simple thing having just come out of the Australian summer, but I haven’t seen avocado on a menu or in a market since I left Australia last year. The last time I saw an avocado I was in the Philippines. As we walked into a resort restaurant ‘The Last Filling Station’ it was poetically named, I saw a woman spreading my beloved avocado on her toast, ‘AVOCADO’ I shouted over the group and all the guests in the restaurant, such was my joy that I would be able to enjoy the creamy summer fruit. I was then embarrassed to discover that she had purchased her own avocado (possibly from her home country), and she was so embarrassed to be eating it after I had made such a scene that she gave me half.
Bringing the story back to Hampi, I ate avocado for breakfast and again for lunch in Hampi, then I set off for the train in the late afternoon. The train was late. Trains here always seem to be running late, and then no matter what they seem to arrive hours after they are scheduled to. While I sat on the platform using my backpack as a seat I stuck my nose in a novel and waited for the train.
Everywhere I go I attract a certain level of attention. My white skin does the trick, and if they don’t notice that, then my grubby backpack would probably be the next sign. After that people might notice that I’m a female on my own, and that I pass the time looking at things in a bewildered kind of way. Hospet Railway station was something special though. The train was late – and this was fine. What was a little less fine was a guy staring at me while he squatted less than a metre away from where I sat. First I nodded at him, then I said hello, then I asked him to stop staring at me, I then asked if he spoke English, all interspersed with me trying to read my novel and ignore his unflinching stare. The next time I looked at him he made an obscene tongue gesture and blew kisses to me. Entirely grossed out I moved away. He moved with me.
Fed up I went to ask the station master when the train would come, ‘another hour’ he said. He seemed friendly in an elderly gentleman type of way. His accent was very ‘British English’ and he walked with a stick. I swallowed my shame (or pride – whatever it was) and asked him the question that was burning in my mind, I said to him, ‘please tell me if I’m being a stupid foreigner, but there is a man out there staring at me and making kissing gestures at me, and I don’t know if I should just ignore him or what I should do.’ The next half an hour was a red faced whirlwind for me. He told me to get my luggage and sit on the floor next to his door where I would be safe, and then he sent someone to get the man, dragged him into his office, and yelled at him for the next twenty odd minutes.
Hospet isn’t an enormous major train station, but there were a lot of bored people on that platform, and they all came to listen to what was going on and to watch through the open door and window this man’s public humiliation. I’m not sure if I wanted to understand exactly what was said but the intention behind it was clear. I sat next to his door facing the tracks and all the onlookers while they watched me and the scene inside. I only dared to make eye contact with the women in the crowd and they were all smiling at me quietly, intent on not missing out on any of the action. After seemingly endless berating the pink shirted deviant (can I call him a deviant?) came out and knelt before me. He threw himself at my feet as he had been clearly instructed to do, and said ‘I am sorry madam. You are my mother madam’ repeatedly. Perversely, this made me feel worse than being mentally masturbated over. This man was now allowed to publically touch my feet, while he grinned through the humiliation.
He left and the crowd cleared and yet still watched me. When the train came the station master took me to a better seat and sat with me to the next station. I spent the five hours talking to a fifteen year old boy from Hubli who wants to grow up and work in agricultural management and get married to a girl who lives near Calcutta. The boy, his family, the station master and I all disembarked at Hubli and there was almost a kafuffle about who would help me to find a good hotel close to the train station. It was an incredible act of kindness and Indian hospitality, and slightly unnerving at the same time, I felt like I had been assaulted and everybody knew about it. I wished I hadn’t said anything. The station master won the battle of kindness, and while apologising profusely for the behaviour of the pink shirted man found me an excellent hotel. He also assured me as I left our shared autorickshaw that the pink shirted man would never treat foreign women in this way again. He told me that he slapped the man in front of everybody. I felt sick; I wish I didn’t know that he did that.
The next morning I boarded another train, bracing myself for thirty seven hours of train travel. Trains travel in India is generally great. There is always something to look at or listen to. The sleeper carriages are really comfortable even without air conditioning. I find it relatively easy to sleep with lots of noise and activity around me so the travel isn’t generally a problem. My biggest fear of embarking on this journey was the heat, it is getting really hot in India at the beginning of April and I had been warned that going to the desert in the heat was a pretty dumb idea. I couldn’t get an air conditioned carriage ticket because I left booking to the very last minute. A two hundred rupee bribe to an unscrupulous train official was required get any ticket at all. So thirty seven hours with the windows open in packed carriages it was to be, there were fans to circulate the hot air, I assured myself it would be fine.
After the first few hours the fans stopped working in the carriage. My upper berth seat was sweltering, my clothes were drenched with sweat. I snuck into the air conditioned compartments a few times without making eye contact with anyone, hoping I wouldn’t get in trouble. I was caught each time and I was sent back to my rightful seat in the heat. I was lucky not to be fined, I wondered if the ticket checkers had heard about my dealings the day before in Hubli, nothing would surprise me.
I was shared a berth with an amazing family of six children and three adults who did everything they could to keep me entertained night and day despite the exhausting heat. The eldest daughter of the couple was fourteen and had impeccable English. She told me what the beggars were saying as they made their way through the carriages, the lyrics of the Rajhastani songs that buskers were singing, and taught me that if you cut the end of a cucumber and then rub the two cut parts together it draws out the acidity. Imagine that! Her mother fed me constantly and despite my efforts to remain independent she absorbed me into the menagerie of children she cared for. In the cool of the evening we painted Mehendi on each other’s hands and they coloured my nails strawberry pink to match theirs.
One of the little boys in our six seats for nine people berth was ten and he was thrilled to bits that I was from Australia. I assumed this was because of cricket because all little boys shout ‘Ricky Ponting’ at me when I tell them I am from Australia, but no, this little boy was thrilled that I am from Australia because he loves Boxer Dogs, and apparently Boxer Dogs are from Australia. He was aghast when I told him that there weren’t Boxer Dogs everywhere. I would have lied if I knew what his response would be. It was as if I crushed his fantasy of Boxers roaming around the desert as most people imagine kangaroos bouncing through Sydney. I keep imagining a Boxer dog on the Australian emblem next to the Emu.
As the train chugged through the desert heat I didn’t have to worry about my luggage being stolen off the train as it was in Vietnam. There were so many people in our open berth that they overflowed from the seats and slept on rugs on the floor. This was such a memorable journey that I was sad to leave the train. It’s not so often that you get to be embraced the way I was by complete strangers, and I don’t think it could have happened like this if I wasn’t traveling alone.
