Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (23 page)

Studying the clue
Keeping Don Juans at bay,
I worked out
Bucking the pass,
and I was nudged by one of the drunken Uzbeks, who had followed me and was staring over my shoulder.
Central Asian language
was another clue, five letters. I inked in
Azeri.
The man was breathing hard, but what could I do? Just look busy.
Finishing off a dressy outfit.
Ah yes, clichés in the form of spoonerisms. I wrote
Knotting the tie.
The man was still breathing hard, his alcoholic halitosis like car fumes.
Azeri
was wrong. I wrote
Uzbek,
and had the solution.

"
Krussvort"
the Uzbek said, putting his face against the scrap of paper.

The same word in Russian, I later discovered.

At about ten o'clock I went back into the compartment. Now there were eight people, three of them sleeping stretched out, four of them jammed together on a lower berth (two were women), and one had
tucked himself on the shelf of the overhead luggage compartment above the door. One, the upper berth, was empty—mine.

This was obviously the compartment where the
provodnik
stuck the extra passengers who had bribed him. He entered as I lay down on my berth and, pointing, indicated that in a few stations I would have to trade places with the man crouched in the luggage hole.

The drunks were snoring, the lights blazing in their eyes. The women had removed their leather coats and were wrapped in quilts. Soon everyone was asleep, even me.

Samarkand was a jolting stop at two in the morning. I could have gotten out and looked for a man with a jalopy, but I was half asleep and cold. The drunks, still drunk, were dragging themselves out of the compartment. Two more women got on. I glanced at the man in the luggage hole, and he waved an
I'm all right
signal to me and ducked his head, so I did not have to change places after all.

Nine of us in a four-person compartment, but it was orderly and safe nonetheless. Dirty, though, and smelly too—everyone sleeping in their clothes, the windows shut, wet boots steaming under the seats, stinky luggage, old leather jackets piled in a corner, chicken grease and bread crumbs and grated carrot littering the table. Filthy compartment, gracious people, no hassle: the railway experience of the Eastern Star.

The women were up early making breakfast—boiled eggs, pickled cabbage, chunks of hard bread. Did I want some? Yes, I said, and there we sat, rolling past Chinaz and Yangiyol, still nine of us, friends after a long night, entering the big city.

Shimoly Station—North Station—was one of the largest railway stations I saw on my entire trip, possibly the grandest, lovely even, and swept clean by old women with straw brooms. A ribbon of Uzbek motifs in bright mosaics ran around the top-story façade of this palatial building, which the Soviets had built as a monument to their power and influence in this, the third-largest city in the Soviet Union, now the capital of independent Uzbekistan.

For me it was the end of the line, the first leg of my trip. From here to India or Pakistan, the only overland route crossed the most isolated mountain passes in the world and the antagonistic fastness of the Islamic valleys that produced Al Qaeda recruits and opium growers—perhaps a route to avoid, because it was off the map, beyond the reach of any government or any law but its own, a place of suspicious villages
where every woman was veiled and every man armed. It was possibly the most inaccessible area on earth: the Pamir Valley, Waziristan, the NorthWest Frontier, where the Wali of Swat held court. Osama bin Laden was last seen there, but how would any outsider know more than that? There was no road, only a network of mountain footpaths. The nearest railway was the line in Tajikistan that went nowhere except from Dushanbe to Termiz on the border of Afghanistan—nothing helpful to me between Tashkent and Amritsar, though there was a short direct flight.

Spring had come to Tashkent: daffodils in the city gardens, pale sunshine, cherry blossoms, and, as in Georgia and Azerbaijan, people gathered in the parks and gardens, the men to sell the family silver and hawk postcards, the women to prostitute themselves.

"Take me," a young woman said, and pursed her lips to make a kissing sound.

"Tomorrow," I said, so as not to be rude.

On the next corner: "Streep shaw, meester?"

"No, thank you."

"Dreenks?"

"No, thank you."

They were also selling old watches, chewing gum, bathroom fixtures, Soviet memorabilia, candelabra. A man from distant Chukchi offered me a walrus penis and some indigenous ivory carvings. Murat and Zahir specialized in Christian art; it seemed to be a niche market for enterprising Muslims. I bought another icon, for $100.

Rauf, at his stall of pirated videos, was studying English. Like Murat and Zahir and most other Uzbeks I met, he was eager to emigrate to the United States; like them, he hated the war in Iraq. Becoming an American did not interest Rauf much; he seemed to dislike America, but he wanted badly to go to America.

"Business very bad here, but worse in Samarkand," he said.

He was filling in the blanks in an exercise book.

Beside
Can you swim?
he wrote slowly,
No, I cannot swim.

I picked it up. I read the next question: "Do you like to watch TV?"

"Yes, I like."

"Like what?"

"Watch TV."

"Yes, I like to watch TV."

"Yes, I like to watch TV."

I sat down. I read another one: "What did you do last night?"

"With my friends, we listen the music," he said.

"Do you own a car?"

"No, I am not have car?"

I pretended to read a question, saying, "Do you like George Bush?"

"I am not," he said, and stammered with fury, "I am not like Meester Bush President."

Rauf had a sister in Miami who had a green card. He lusted after one himself, and though he was hustling cheap videos and CDs at a stall, he wanted to get out of Uzbekistan and work in America. This eagerness to emigrate to the West seemed to soften people's attitudes towards me—I was never the object of personal hostility, except from the occasional customs official.

It seemed I was the only foreign traveler in Tashkent. I was the only guest in my huge hotel. I never saw another tourist in this vast city. And when at last I went to Tashkent Airport for the flight to the Punjab, I was the only person checking in, the only passenger boarding the plane. It was the plane's one stop, the Uzbek Airways flight from Birmingham to Amritsar, every male passenger a turbaned Sikh, every woman in a sari.

I left Tashkent feeling lucky that I had gotten here unscathed from London, that my close encounters had been with good people. The hassles and delays were part of all travel. The revelation was that the old world still existed. The airport had been empty; but the marshaling yards of Shimoly Station were busy with shunting trains, and the station itself was crowded with people going all over the country, and they were taking the train because they were poor.

As for me, here as elsewhere, I felt I was the fortunate traveler.

B
ECAUSE IT WAS A SACRED CITY
, a howling but deaf and discontinuous mob, mostly pilgrims, kicked along the streets and lanes of Amritsar. These sun-baked streets were thick with stinging dust and smelly traffic, and the traffic included sacred cows, three-legged dogs, old cars, twisted bikes, scooter rickshaws, pedicabs, the usual trotting two-wheeled pony carts—tongas and gharries—and rusted buses. There were heaps of sorted and pawed-through garbage; the sidewalk overspill of fix-it men and their antique tools—spoke-shaves, chisels, cobbling awls, soldering irons, treadle-powered sewing machines; blue exhaust fumes, oily dirt, fresh dung, the fountain in the middle of the miserable road with its sign,
Amritsar Improvement Trust,
the temples so attractive to beggars because holy precincts encouraged the giving of alms; and loud noise trumpeting the simple but firmly held Indian delusion that honking horns sped the flow of traffic.

The point about the crowds of excited pilgrims in a sacred place is that they are giddy just from physically being there. Or more than giddy—chattering, skipping, giggling, goggle-eyed with rapture in this, the center of Sikhdom, all of these turbaned men and fluttering women hurrying to the Golden Temple...

Welcome to India and the proof that, as Borges once wrote, "India is larger than the world." On the surface, nothing had changed in Amritsar. From what I could gather, the country was no different from what I had seen three decades before. This prospect delighted me. It was a relief, the mildly orchestrated free-for-all of India—something of a madhouse with a touch of anarchy, yes, but an asylum in which strangers are wel
come, even inquisitorial ones like me; where anything is possible, the weather is often pleasant, and the spicy food clears your sinuses. Most of India embodies Blake's dictum that "energy is eternal delight." All you need is a strong stomach, a little money, and a tolerance for crowds. And a way of lifting your gaze upward and moving on, so that you don't see the foreground—in India the foreground is generally horrific. The reality was that Amritsar, like all Indian cities, looked as though it had been made by human hands, skinny ones, and so the result had a look of improvisation, faulty and fragile and somehow incomplete.

The horror is possibly true, or perhaps all illusion, as some Indians believe, smiling and saying, "True and not true, sar.
Anekantavada,
sar. The many-sidedness of reality, sar."

The austere torpor of the Stans had been wearing me down—the humorlessness and paranoia of a police state, no outward indication of struggle, a kind of beaten-down acceptance. Acceptance is not an Indian trait. In India, no one takes no for an answer: policemen are jeered at, authority exists to be defied, walls are erected to be defaced, and everyone is talking, often in English. Shoeshine boys, rickshaw wallahs, taxi drivers, beggars, businessmen, shopkeepers, and Surinder ("I am agent, sar") Singh with his gimpy leg and his practiced patter, all of them demanding attention. Surinder had assured me of a ticket to Delhi, though the train was full. He had connections, though his ragged clothes did not inspire confidence.

When I remarked that Amritsar hadn't changed, Indians clicked their tongues or sucked their teeth in annoyance. They insisted it had been modernized. I never saw where or how. It is a border city, only a few miles from the Pakistan frontier, and consequently not a place for investment. Besides, being a holy city in India is plenty, since Indians are instinctive pilgrims, liking the ritual, the spiritual boost, and the companionship of a pilgrimage, which always involves a great number of people, a long train ride, loud music, and platters of food.

I was at the main railway station with Surinder.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Guess."

"Please tell me, sar."

"Go ahead, guess. What do you think?"

"No, this is very serious, sar," he said, snapping at me for my facetiousness. "You must tell me now."

I told him.

"You are lucky," he said, sounding resentful. "Very lucky today."

"Why would that be?"

"You qualify for Old Age Exception."

This meant 100 rupees off the 400-rupee fare to Delhi, $7.50 instead of $10, because I was over sixty. And a 25-rupee supplement for a seat, which required a large form to be filled out in triplicate—sticky blue copies and perforations. In the age of computers, which Indians excelled at—so I was told—many government forms were still filled out by hand in triplicate, on thick sewn-together pads, with flimsy sheets separated by carbon paper, using blunt pencils, following the printed direction
Press Hard.

I searched for social changes. Joginder's greasy café and pastry shop was now Joginder's greasy Internet café and pastry shop and looked two hundred years old. And the brick prewar railway station, which I'd last seen in 1973, was seriously defaced by foot-high graffiti in Hindi and English. I recognized the word
Zindabad
—strike, a commonly heard term in India—and was told the entire building had been scribbled on during the strike that had taken place a month before, but painted so professionally the angry slogans looked like advertising—which they were, promoting a mass sit-down. That had passed.

"But they will repeat it. So the writing will stay."

***

IN A WORLD OF CHANGE
, India is exceptional. Everyone talks about India's great leap, Indian modernity, Indian millionaires, and "You must see the transformation of Bangalore." "The Indian miracle" was a boasting rant in every Western newspaper and magazine, but on the evidence of Amritsar this assertion was a crock, not just a joke in bad taste but the cruelest satire. It seemed to me that little had changed except the size of the population, an unfeedable, unhousable, uncontainable 1.3 billion people, not many of them saying "We are modern now" because more than a third of them were working for a dollar a day. Indians boast of the miracle, but when I mentioned to entrepreneurs the 400 million people living below the poverty line, they just bobbled their heads and hummed or else went silent, darkening in resentment that I raised the question and refusing to tell me what they paid their employees.

Yet the country still ran, in its clunky fashion, all its mends and
patches showing, and what looked like chaos in India was actually a kind of order, like furious atoms spinning. Surinder Singh merely appeared to be a tout and an opportunist. In fact he was part of the complex system of Indian ticket buying. As I was congratulating myself on having secured a $10 seat on the express to Delhi, he showed up again, demanding the equivalent of an additional $10.

"What's that for?"

"
Baksheesh,
sar." A bribe.

But he had kept his word.

No one succeeds in India without exploiting someone else, defrauding him, sitting on his head, twisting his arm, getting him to work for 12 cents an hour. The news is all about the winners—big business, call centers, manufacturing, textiles, all the rest of it. But for there to be big winners in India, there have to be bigger losers. It is the system.