Second Class Ticket, First Class Ride

This weekend we took the train from Ankleshwar to Ahmedabad, a four hour journey. Second class chair car – no AC – the only way to travel! Actually, it is the only way to travel when you don’t book your ticket far in advance for a holiday (Republic Day) weekend. But the truth is, the scenery from the train blows me away and the ride is a lot more fun than going by car.

Our train car has pairs of padded bench seats facing each other. The leg room is only enough so that if you sat up perfectly like you were taught in second grade, maybe your knees wouldn’t touch your neighbors’. However, with the number of bags that were stuffed half-under most of the seats, this isn’t possible…nor does it really seem to matter. In India, your concept of personal space changes. The poor old lady across from me has her bare feet up on the bit of seat space that she found next to me, and this is an upgraded situation for me – she originally propped her feet up on the seat space between my legs until I offered her some space beside me instead.

Space in the perpendicular direction is quite a bit worse. Each bench is ostensibly for three people small (based on the fact that there are three seat numbers on the seatbacks), but there are four people sitting on our bench and four on the bench across from us. That’s actually a bit better than average for our train car, as far as I can tell. At the moment, Dixie is on one side of me (the tickets we reserved weren’t together, but we arranged a 3-way trade that would make Brian Cashman proud). On the other side is a mother and her child who didn’t have tickets for the seat but were gifted it by a kindhearted guy who now has four inches of a seat corner to call his own. Across from me is an older gentleman, who (like most of us) also has given up some of his properly-reserved space to the aforementioned old lady and her two relatives. He has the typical look of the well-educated older generation. Lastly, there’s the family of three – two old women and their granddaughter/niece – who are headed to Rajkot. Their extremely calloused feet (for which I have a front row seat), and their presence on this car despite the age of the two women, suggest that they are less than well off. They’ve got a lot of luggage with them and they’re wearing gold jewelry in the form of bangles and earrings (often a form of savings for the un-banked poor), so I tell Dixie that perhaps they are moving house.

Despite the fact that we’re all jostling passive-aggressively for space, the Rajkot-bound family offers us some of their fruit: first bohr at the beginning of the trip and then some grapes towards the middle of our journey. They’re also quite intrigued by the hair claw that Dixie clipped to her purse and the book she’s reading. They discuss each of the objects amongst themselves before leaning forward to take a closer look at the claw (it’s nothing special, and I think they eventually conclude the same), and then take the book out of Dixie’s hands to leaf through it together. I’m taken aback by both their forwardness and their generosity and I’m thinking three months will hardly be enough to get to know India.