A bit of India

I know I've been WAY slacking on my blog- but I have a ton of work to be getting done right now. This is a travel writing piece I did on India- I figure I'll let you at least have a taste of my India experience! I plan on doing one big blog post about everything once my work is done. Everything is due within the next 4 days, so it will come soon! Until then:

Lilly Sutherland
India piece.
Prior to reaching India, the tour company that I was traveling with emailed our entire group. They told us all the details of our upcoming trip. The email said, “The overnight train will take some tough skin and will not be your most comfortable night of sleep in your life. The train will be full and some of you may be sleeping close to locals you don’t know.  Watch out for each other and your belongings and those of you who are brave please step up and sleep on the outsides of the group closest to strangers.” After reading this, I was pretty scared.
Fear was a common feeling for me before reaching India. All my professors were using the same words: hot, smelly, crowded, sad, dangerous, and many more words, none being positive. I tried to erase all the preconceived notions from my mind, as I had attempted with all our other ports, but it wasn’t working for India. The train was just one more reason for me to fret.
The typical trip for Semester at Sea students to do while in India was Delhi, Agra, and Varanasi. I fell into this trap as well, but did it a bit differently.  Instead of flying from Delhi to Varanasi, we took a thirteen-hour train ride. There were 38 of us, and none of us knew what to expect. We had all received the same email about having ‘tough skin’ so I think the general feeling was nervousness. 
On the bus ride to the train station, our tour guide Joseph stopped the bus. “You all have five minutes… that’s 300 seconds… to buy whatever liquor you want here.”  For some reason, every time Joseph gave us a time limit, he broke it down into seconds. We were already cutting it close to our departure time and I knew this was a bad idea. Half the group seemed to agree with me, while the other half was running to the liquor store.  We had all just had a little wine with dinner and some people were already a bit tipsy, including our tour guide. Even though I’m sure a few more drinks would have calmed my nerves quite a bit, I also knew that the sleeper train was something I wanted to be fully aware for. 
At about 11:15pm, we got to the train station.  None of us had our tickets or knew where we were sitting. Joseph called us all together and called out our names with our seat numbers and told us to get on the train. After about 10 names, he started yelling names that none of us had ever heard before. We realized that the rest of the names did not belong to anyone in the group. Joseph just told us to pretend, and sit in the seats anyway. After about ten minutes of the confusion, the train car was completely filled up. The last twelve of us were still standing on the platform with Joseph. The train was going to leave in five minutes and we were not on it. Joseph ran us back about ten cars, and told us to hop on and just find a place. There were only four empty beds, but he told us to just stay there. We all stood in the doorway while Joseph was outside trying to see if there were any more empty cars. The doorway was next to the bathroom, or hole in the floor that people used as a bathroom, and it smelled so incredibly awful. It was like rotten tuna fish, only worse. We were all sort of uncomfortably laughing, not really sure what was going on, and what he had just gotten ourselves into.
All of a sudden the train started moving, and Joseph was nowhere to be found. The twelve of us were standing in the doorway in silence wondering what just happened until someone said “Well, we’re on the train, I guess that’s all that matters!”  We all headed back down the narrow dirty isle to where the four empty beds were and claimed a spot. We decided that we could do two to a bed, so the other five people went to find another car. I shared a bed with my friend Ian. I was lucky to have a close friend in the group of people that got left behind, this would have been a pretty awkward night if I was with someone I didn’t know.
Now that we were all as settled as we could be, I had time to take in my surroundings. The ‘bed’ that we were on was no more than two feet wide and filthy.  The compartment had six beds, three stacked up on each wall.  There were two shorter beds stacked up against the long wall of the train. On that bed, my friend Jamie and another semester at sea girl slept sitting up the entire night. Above them was an Indian man. Ian and I were on the middle bed on the left side. Above us was one semester at sea girl sleeping with all our bags. Below us were two more semester at sea people. Two more girls slept on the top bed across from us, and the two bottom beds were taken up by a young Indian family.
The smell of the train was the most awful smell. We were close to the bathroom again, so the smell of urine was very present. The bathroom itself was just a hole in the floor of the train leading to the train tracks. I hoped so badly that I didn’t have to use it at all that night, but that was just not realistic. I had to hold my breath when I was in there, and I still gagged.
I tried to get some sleep because I knew I had two long days in Varanasi coming up, but sleep did not come easily. The smell was hard to stop thinking about, and the chains holding the bed up were digging into my side, so Ian and I switched who was on the outside every once in a while. The train stopped a number of times throughout the night, and I woke up every time. A lot of the stops were very noisy. I wished that I was close to a window so that I could see what all the commotion was about outside, but getting down to look would have just take too much effort. One stop sounded like an all out war. Partly due to our delusional sleep deprived state, we all woke up and thought we were hearing gun shots. Ian even put his shoes back on “just incase I have to make a run for it,” he explained.  In the morning, we realized that it was probably just a construction site.  Whenever the train stopped moving, I always wanted it to start again because the movement and sound helped me sleep a little. I probably got a collective total of four hours of sleep. I woke up when the sun started shining, but it was only 6:00. We were only half way done with our train ride.  Ian woke up too, and soon after the rest of our friends did too. The woman and young son across from us woke up, and then her husband and another man traveling with them came from another part of the train to join them. Ian had coloring pages and crayons with him, so he gave them to the little boy. He said thank you, and colored away.

All the negative things that came with the dark went away as the sun came up. The train was waking up and I could see everyone around me better. There were a lot of interesting people around. People selling chai started walking through the train, making it more lively. The family sitting with us started to talk to us, and they were so nice. I overheard the man talking to the woman, and learned that her name was Esme. She was wearing a red sari, and had a bindi on her head.  The man was dressed in jeans and a sweater, as was their son. They were a very goodlooking family, and they all smiled often. The boy was four years old, but wise beyond his years. He practiced his English, and tried to teach us Hindi. I couldn’t see out the windows from where I was sitting, but he would always point out the window and say “In English… cow. In Hindi… “ and then the hindi word for cow, or whatever it was he was pointing to. He would say it and then tell us to repeat.  His voice would always rise at the end of his sentences. It made us all laugh. Whenever the train would stop and go again, he would say “My train is going slow now. Now my train is going fast!” His voice rose, almost like a question, after every two words. His mom and dad laughed, and praised him for his correct English.
The mom and dad asked us questions like “Who is your favorite American leader?” “Do you like Obama?” “Who are your favorite actors and actresses?” “Do you know any Indian actors or actresses?” They knew a few of the people we knew, and we knew a few of the people they knew. Their favorite was Shakira. The women started singing a Shakira song and everyone laughed. Ian played them a few songs on his ipod, and they loved them.
While talking to the Indian family, I noticed another white man sitting a few seats over from me. He was sitting next to the window, so the light was coming right in on him. He had blonde hair and a full beard. He was probably about 30 years old. He was handsome, in a scraggly looking way. He was reading a book about Hinduism in Spanish. When I see interesting people like this, I make up stories about them in my head. He looked broken to me. His eyes were heavy and his face looked tired. Not the kind of tired you feel from not getting a good nights sleep, but the kind of tired that you feel when you have seen too much. He looked like he was missing something. I decided that he was traveling India trying to find whatever it was that was missing in his life. I think I made this up because he looked like a blonde Christopher McCandless.
The man was sitting alone for about an hour, and then a girl joined him. Someone in my group started talking to them. It turned out that they were from Argentina, on vacation for two weeks.  This ruined everything that I had made up before, he was so much more interesting as a broken man. 
There were other interesting characters on the train as well. There was a man on the top bed in the compartment next to us that just stared the entire time. He was very skinny. It looked like he hadn’t eaten in months. He had very long, messy grey dread locks tied on top of his head with a few hanging down in his face. His clothes had a lot of orange in them, and just sort of hung off him. It looked like he had paint on his face a month ago, and never washed it off.  He sat cross-legged on his bung but bent over so he could see all of us. He never spoke, and didn’t take his eyes off us… even when we stared back.
I got up every once in a while and walked to the door of the car where I could see outside. The countryside was beautiful. It was a nice change from the cities we had been in the whole time. There were little huts everywhere made out of what looked like cow dung patties. There were stacks of these things everywhere. They were the size of a Frisbee and made out of cow dung. The Indian family told us they were used for fuel, but I’m not sure they were clear on what we were talking about. It was quite the process of drawing pictures and sign language to try and ask what they were. They spoke good English, they just weren’t understanding this one question. 
After a while, I realized that without our tour guide, we had no idea when to get off. The stations were not announced. At about 12:30 in the afternoon, the nice Indian family told us that the next stop was Varanasi. We were so thankful to have them there to help us through out the trip. They translated when we needed it, and just made the train more fun and the time pass faster. The train stopped, we said our goodbyes, got off and found the rest of the group. They all had a wonderful nights sleep. They had their own beds and air conditioning. My smaller group just laughed and kept moving. We had just survived an extremely uncomfortable night on a sleeper train in India together, and none of us will ever forget that.