The journey to KanpurTravel by second-class train carriage

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

The journey to Kanpur is a long one, nearly six hours. There is rarely a dull moment. The carriage is as clogged with passengers as always and the usual chai and mumfali wallahs are working the line. A pretty young thing in a green and yellow-speckled sari comes by selling combs and various other cheap plastic goods. I try shut out the noise and read my book. I still haven't finished Kipling's Kim, although I am getting near the end now. It is a roisterous tale, full of energy, intrigue, rich with incident. The picture of India portrayed in the book is a vivid one and no less recognizable now, a hundred years after the novel was written. The scenes of railway life are especially telling. "The lama," Kipling wrote, "started as the 3.25 a.m. southbound roared in. The sleepers sprang to life, and the station filled with clamour and shoutings, cries of water and sweetmeat vendors, shouts of native policemen, and shrill yells of women gathering up their baskets, their families, and their husbands."

An inscrutable card game is being played in the carriage on the seats around me, a four-handed game, the object apparently being to discard triples until one player's hand is exhausted. Matches change hands after every round, keeping count of the score. I guess it is an arch way of gambling: tot up the matches at the end, and count out the money. Gambling, though heavily restricted by the government, is nonetheless a widely practised pastime.

I am invited to join in but cannot fathom the rules. One of the players, a large man with unruly hair and a big voice, tries to explain them to me.

"You this," he said cryptically. "See? Same, same. This, no same. See?"

"Yes," I say, "I see." But I now have even less idea of how to play the game. "Thanks anyway, but not now."

From one of the overhead bunks a leather bag is taken down. A plastic pouch of sweet-smelling alcoholic liquid is removed from the bag and opened, diluted, passed round. The game becomes very heated. The contestants almost come to blows. Hands flail in front of my face, punctuating arguments, missing my nose by a whisker, missing my whiskers by only half as much. Reading the last few pages of Kim is no easy matter.

I put the book away after I have finished it and doze for a time, dream of home. When I wake, the card game is still going on, and the landscape has acquired a very English tinge: the greens are earthier, more muted, the yellows are toned down, soft colours, sweet. Only the swatches of terracotta earth and the gaudy garb of the people working the land betray where I am. The air inside the carriage is stuffy with the smoke of cheap tobacco, from hand-rolled cigarettes, a grassy fragrance like crop stubble burning in autumn, mingling not unpleasantly with the dusty perfumes of the land gusting in through the windows. The tobacco is like the alcohol: one man has an exclusive supply, and when he partakes, so, after a little vociferous cajoling, does everyone else.

"You are going where?" one of the card players asks me after a time.

The game has finally broken up. The drinking has stopped; the cigarettes are still being smoked. I say I am going to Kanpur. Has he been there?

"You should go to Orai," he tells me. I have never heard of the place, can find no information on it in any of the books I have. "Very beautiful," he assures me. "Many famous sights in Orai." He and his fellows get off at the next stop, a flyspeck on the map, the unglamorous train station being its main feature. It is Orai.

The run-in to Kanpur is quieter, less cramped, and I get my first glimpse of an Indian sunset. Urban India doesn't seem to have any sunsets: at the end of the day the sun sinks in the sky, is choked by a low smoggy haze, then smothered completely by an ugly skyline of buildings. Here, it is different, with the scenery untroubled by traffic, devoid of haze, building-free. There isn't even any glass in the windows getting in the way, simply bars running across, allowing a constant supply of cool air to rush in and enabling us to forget that the fans overhead don't work. The sun, that has been punishing the land throughout the day, seems intent on doing so to the very last. Its dying light is shed over everything, consuming fields of wheat and sugarcane with flames of colour, a fiery yellow, a blaze of red, burning gently at first, like the molten rivers of gold threading their way through the fields, then burning less gently, fiercely, more fiercely, a raging fire, a conflagration, until finally the land can take no more and bleeds into the sky. An English landscape? It has long since given up all pretensions of home.