written during an uncomfortable train-ride in India

This is a sleeper carriage in India. This is a long way from Darjeeling Limited. Everyone told me that first class tickets were relatively cheap, so when I asked work to buy me a train ticket to India for my semi-business-trip, I was not expecting something like this. People just stare, and I can’t read this expression. At first glance it appears to be contempt. The men in the restaurant last night, the three brothers, one of them said to me that I was their international guest, and that tourists were to be treated like gods. Well, that explains the contempt. Also, I suppose I look British, I wonder if that has something to do with it? I would like to ignore the fact that my leg is going numb, it took so long to find a position which I could write in. This bed is small, high off the ground, ceiling too low, but hey, who’s complaining? At least it’s noisy.

 

I wish I could have been given a better first impression of this place. 

My last stop in Nepal was Sonauli, the border town. Money changers and food places, giant boom gates and trucks everywhere. I got there by hanging onto the back of a truck. There were no seats, so myself, the young ticket-seller, and an older and more respectable man, held on to the roof rack and stood on the metal step on the outside as the van bumped and bounced. One of the men inside, mortified that I should not be able to sit, started jostling everyone around inside. I managed to explain to him that I was enjoying myself, and I would much rather be out there with the wind than inside, squashed together with everyone like cattle. This led to a conversation in which the awkward question came up. It is difficult, because in Nepal, the question “Kun dharma(What is your religion)?” is a way of asking “What is your culture? Do we have any common ground?” Hindu, Buddhism and Chrisitanity are the dominant cultures here. In my flawed Nepali, I tried to explain that it was complicated, and that I liked some aspects of different religions. He nodded sagely and said "Yes, there is one god, but there are many different ways"

So I left Kathmandu and moved busward to Bhairahawa. That journey was shared by three other foreigners: One, a skinny long-haired British man, a true relic of the ‘60s, going for the Sai Baba Indian guru look. Two, a man from Virginia, who looked like he had Indian heritage, who had served in the US army for a long time and was now a business man. Three, an old Lithuanian man, who I’d met once before, and who was trying to let me in on the secrets of the universe. He used evidence to back up his thoughts, as a scientist would, when it suited him. “They found tropical food in the stomach of a woolly mammoth. Scientists cannot tell us why this happened!” He said this with feverish excitement. My politeness did not permit me to say “They’re not trying very hard then, are they? There could be any number of reasons why this happened, strange though it is.” And when it didn’t suit him to use evidence, he didn’t. He was friendly enough, but of course he didn’t care much about what I had to say, so I stayed quiet. 

He beckoned me to sit closer, I declined. I was interested in what he had to say about Lillith, I’ve always been curious about that girl, the woman created before Eve. According to him, she woke up before Adam, looked at his sleeping form, and thought to herself “seriously, this is who I’m sharing all of creation with?” And she went to the devil. I looked at the Lithuanian guru who I was forced to share this 8 hour bus ride with, and could not help but sympathise. After he was talking about this black rock he’d bought in Goa, and how every religion “mentions a black rock”, I gave up and slowly leaned back against the window, let my eyes start to close. Eventually he stopped talking. When we got off for toilet stops and breaks, these three unlikely friends were quick to light up joints. US army man asked me a lot of questions about what I was doing here in Nepal, where I was going, etc. but was not very good at remembering the answers. The English guru was really tense and uncomfortable, and collectively the three of them moaned a lot about one thing or another. I was glad to be done with them. One of my Nepali colleagues mentioned “The hippy invasion of the ‘80s” a while ago, I cannot imagine how strange it must have been for Nepal, a kingdom which had opened its gates to the outside world only a few decades before, and now found an influx of people who came seeking enlightenment, but were too busy acting enlightened and preaching from the mount to really notice. So I went to Bhairahawa, to say some hellos and goodbyes, and then I grabbed onto the back of a truck and hung on until the Indian border. It was open at the back, like a military truck, and it was the same shade of green. On the outside, myself and the little ticket-boy smiled at each other. The respectable man sort of smiled too. Since I’ve arrived in India the only genuine, heartfelt smiles I’ve received have been from Westerners or Nepali folk. But I’m jumping ahead again. At the border I asked the truck driver where the best place to change money could be. He took me for a walk, explaining to everyone along the way that he was taking his Australian friend to get money changed. The border gate was a huge arch, with those famous eyes of Buddha, those eyes which are painted everywhere. No-one can explain much to me about them, when I press the subject, people look at me as if I’m stupid and say “It’s a Buddhist thing.”

Tourists are like gods. I’ve heard this maybe three times today. This time, it was from the man who was insisting that I come and sit next to him, ostensibly because I was like a god, although I suspect it had more to do with the fact that he didn’t want to move the bags he’d left on my bed. This time I said that I would prefer to just be treated as a friend. Is this the essence of it, my frustration? Friendship requires a certain form of equality. I took the man’s offer and sat next to him, at last getting a chance to see out of the window and have some amiable company. He relished the opportunity to play tour-guide. Whilst eagerly pointing out mango trees, he told me about India, about how hot it was. When I told him that we have many mango trees where I live, and it is also very hot, his face twisted in disbelief and concern. When asked how hot it gets in Australia, I told him that it gets over 40 degrees sometimes. His face seemed to say "why is this man lying to me?". After some pause he spoke quickly, a trace of desperation in his voice "But I work with people from Australia, and they tell me it is very cold, and they tell me they want to see what a mango tree looks like!". "Ah, maybe they are from Austria. Austria in Europe." He thought for a moment, muttering the word 'Austria' to himself, and then grew sullen, and quiet. That was the end of our conversations.

I had this idea that I would get a train from Nepal to Delhi, and that it would be fun. I would see the gradually changing landscape, I would have a cabin to myself because I’d heard that first class cabins were realatively cheap. I would ease into India like one would ease into a hot bath. Ideas are dangerous. After waiting at the station for over 5 hours, once again feeling unjustly spurned for arriving early, I finally saw something that looked like the train. Waiting at that station, trying to work out why the train wasn’t showing up on the screen, trying to find out if I needed to get a ticket, or if I could just use the print-out, trying find answers to these and more questions, I asked the nearest person who looked important. He looked at my print-out, for a while, spoke to some friends, told me very precisely what was written on the piece of paper, but since the print out was written in English, this did not reveal anything new. I tried a few different ways of asking the questions, and finally was pointed in the direction of enquiries. The train station itself was vast. I knew of Gorakhpur station as a place for catching the agents who traffic children from Nepal, before they disappear into the vast chimaera of India. I knew it was close to the border, and imagined it to be like one of those small Nepali towns, dusty, sparse, quiet. Instead, I found I was in a city. An Indian city, no less. Bustling, dirty, messy, and with smells that made Kathmandu seem like a French Parfumerie. The floor of the station was seasoned liberally with sleeping forms. It was late, so understandably everyone was lying on the ground, sleeping. I stepped carefully between them and found my way to ‘Enquiries’, which had its own crowd of jostling people. I wasn’t quite prepared for the level of pushiness, so as I stood in line, working out how to phrase my questions, several people pushed me out of the way. Eventually, I worked out that I had to push back, and I made it to the front of the line. The man at enquiries looked at my piece of paper, and motioned me over to another line with his head. So I went there, with the similar jostling, made it to the front eventually and showed the man my piece of paper. He took it, and wrote down the seat number, told me that my piece of paper was indeed a ticket, reassured me several times with a none-too-reassuring nonchalance that it would be ok. But as for the status of the train, and all of my other questions, I would have to go to enquiries.

I went off to eat some dinner. I somehow was lured into a small alleyway, to a little restaurant run by one of the most unpleasant people I had yet met. He didn’t even need to say anything, he just oozed loathing. The three-hour bus ride from the Indian border  was a conflation of claustrophobia and the exhaustion of just never knowing for sure if I was on the right bus, or if I’d missed my stop. Needless to say, I was quite tired.  I remember having problems before at the Mumbai airport with the staff who had achieved an all-new level of unhelpfulness, the idea of anyone going out of their way to help seeming utterly absurd. I was beginning to fear that I was going to encounter this a lot in India. The man in the restaurant was clearly ripping me off, but I was beyond caring. In darkest moments at that airport, I thought to myself that the only difference between the people that take children under false pretenses and sell them into prostitution, and this man in the currency exchange booth, was that he wouldn’t have the courage todo it. This man in the restaurant, however, I felt was so purely nasty that he would be capable of anything. This could be him, serving me biryani, the very man, the big bad wolf who we have all been hiding from these past two weeks.

These and similar dark thoughts accompanied me throughout the evening. I finally got on my train, once again being given no reliable assurance that this was indeed my train and I was indeed going to Delhi. As for where the hell my bed was, the same bodies strewn across the train station ground were also strewn, just as haphazardly, inside the train itself. Floor, seat, bed, they would have slept on the walls if they could. Every carriage had my seat number 14, each one was occupied by an unconscious form, surrounded by semi-conscious people, glancing at me with a mixture of contempt and wariness. I feel sorry for the true gods if they ever come down to Earth, this is a raw deal. Finally I found someone important, who looked at my ticket, shooed someone off a nearby bed. The man dutifully got up and ambled off down the carriage into the throng of people

The cicadas hum, they cannot remember the words

Just now it is still. A kind of silence which I have not experienced for how long now? Five months? One minute past midnight, there are no barking dogs, no enterprising mosquitos, no car horns and no unfathomable lack of ease. There is a hum from my computer, and a hum from the cicadas, and that is all.

I am of course returning to Nepal in a month or so, to continue working with the circus project, but nonetheless it feels like I have reached some kind of conclusion. Today has been a bookend, a day full of reflected moments, a conclusion to the first Nepal experience. I walked that piece of road by Southbank station where I first had a phone interview for the Nepal job:
"I'm sorry but I have to ask, do you have any history of mental illness?" She asked with tangible displeasure.
"Ha! No, but I probably wouldn't tell you if I did, would I?"
Shit, I thought shortly afterward, I don't know this girl, she may not have a sense of humour. Just like that casting agent back in Melbourne, when I said that I loved kids, but couldn't eat a whole one. Both of these jokes are now filed away firmly under "jokes not to use in job interviews"

In the airport today, the internet kiosk spurned and tormented me, just as it did five months ago. This time I tempered my frustration. Maybe the constant car horns have galvanised my patience. Maybe I was just in a good mood.

Back then, I waited for a volcanic ash cloud to pass, so that planes would fly again. Nobody could say exactly how long the volcanic ash cloud would take to leave. The meanderings of clouds are unknown to the likes of us, they would tell me, in their own way. I had given up my room and so I slept on the couch at my own house. Now, here I am at the conclusion, sitting on a futon in that space where the couch lay. Not sleeping, I mean to savour this delicious silence for a bit longer yet.


Once upon a time I went to Nepal. I found a taxi to take me to Sanepa. My hands instinctively reached for the seatbelt and pulled, to no avail. The belt refused to move from its retractor (see A). Another taxi driver, seeing my continued attempts to unroll the seatbelt, laughed and said "Welcome to Nepal". It would take a long time before this, an immobile seatbelt as an analogy for Nepal, would make any sense. But now, if I were ever to see a foreigner in a taxi, attempting to use a seat belt only to find that it was in fact useless, I would say "welcome to Nepal". If they asked me why all of the taxis had some variety of broken seatbelts, I would explain that it would require needless effort to take them away.

Today at the train station, I thought about another metaphor which always sounded a bit odd. Many Nepali folk refer to their homeland as a "yam between two stones". The two stones are China and India, today's threatening new superpowers, and because of Nepal's location, it cannot grow. It is even, some claim, being kept poor by world powers in order to maintain a buffer zone between these two hungry, dangerous stones. I have understood this stuff for months now, only today did it occur to me that Nepal does actually resemble a yam.
 
 It was an exciting moment.