In the 1960s questing souls flocked to India to seek enlightenment at the feet of gurus. A faster track to wisdom might have been a week on Indian trains.
"Travel teaches tolerance", says the sign in Indian government tourist offices. This is not surprising: in India, 11 million people of all classes are travelling on trains at any given moment of night or day. We recently travelled 6,000 miles among them. We enjoyed the Indians we met and they enjoyed us. We learned tolerance but better still, we learned resignation. If wisdom is learning to resign oneself to what cannot be changed, then we returned to Ireland, man, woman and children, a highly enlightened lot.
With two sons - one aged 20, the other 11, we travel from Agra, city of the Taj Mahal, to Goa, the one-time Portuguese colony on the Arabian Sea. We are on the Goa Express, 2nd class sleeper carriage. My wife and I have been in India before, 21 years ago, and we are "experienced" - we think.
Teeming stations
Indian trains are marvellous but information is hard to come by. Stations teem with travellers; ticket windows are small, surrounded by unruly queues. Forms naming the train, its number, the passengers' names, age and sex must be filled in. According to the tourist office, the trip will take 24 hours. The first night has passed.
Mid-morning, we discuss our arrival time, 5 p.m. at Vasco de Gama. Maybe a swim before the sun sets! Hearing this, a man opposite rolls his head in a way that tells us there is bad news coming. We have been misinformed. Although the train is called the Goa Express, it does not go to Goa; and also, sadly, it is not an express. Our arrival time is not 5 p.m. today in Goa, but 4 a.m. tomorrow in Londa. Londa is 100 miles east of Goa. We have been enjoying the leisurely progress, sitting in the sun in the open door of our carriage and, like it or not, we will now have another 16 hours to enjoy. A fast taxi is out of the question and there are no trackside airports. "Goa" and the "Express" are both illusions. Our destiny has overtaken our destination. We look at it this way: "The reward is not in the arrival, but in the journey. . ." (as the guru said).
India's random tapestry unfurls outside and inside the train. We have no promises to keep, no deadlines, nowhere to go but back to conversation with fellow passengers or back to the footplate to watch India pass by. On the Londa mystery slow-train, there is no hurry. Welcome to resignation, that transforming virtue; good-bye stress and our preoccupation with time.
What will happen in Londa at 4 a.m. is obscure. Nobody has a map on which Londa appears. The ticket collector, the sole authority, has no idea; it is not in his "competence", he says. The huge, tank-like locomotive plunges on. Back again at the open door, we enjoy the warm sun as it falls over the Deccan, the landscape resigning itself to night. Later, oil lamps twinkle in the trackside villages. We order dinner, a curry affair, the vegetable better than the meat.
Another night on the train. Fresh sheets and pillows arrive. Junior son does his Irish schoolwork. We bed down early. A train-wallah will give us an early call.
Sipping chai
Londa is encountered in darkness, a small station with a single bulb identifying a tea stall and shrouded persons asleep on the platform. We sip chai (tea brewed with milk, sugar, and spices - delicious stuff) as we negotiate ongoing transport with blanketed figures. The usual commission-seeking middlemen intervene.
Having negotiated for the 100-mile journey, we move to a jeep, with doors unhinged, and climb aboard for a four-hour drive to Benaulim, in Goa, over the Western Ghats. On the front bench-seat, I sit knee-locked with the driver, who has warned me to stay back from the door. He dodges unlit farm-carts, bicycles and buffaloes, and takes hair-raising risks passing trucks. In the darkness behind me, the family is silent but sanguine, bundled together against the airflow through the sprung doors. Then, joy of joys, I find, during a tea stop on the Karnataka-Goa state border, two tiny booze shops, open at 6 a.m. Karnataka, devoutly Hindu, does not allow the sale of alcohol; Goa, Catholic as Ireland, certainly does. With great gusto I pour a stirrup cup into my chai "masala". It brightens the breaking day.
Sunbirds and coconuts
We ride on, adults internally warmed, to Benaulim, where, at 9 a.m., we re-rent our pleasant rooms among the gardens and the hovering sunbirds, with balconies and en-suite bathrooms. Benaulim, a village in the coconuts alongside pristine miles of sand, is a place we know, having been there two weeks before. The beaches we lived on in north Goa 21 years back are utterly changed, lined with beachside shack-restaurants, crowded with package tourists, infested with traders that arrive with their ragged bundles from the hinterland of unspoiled India to swarm on them like flies.
Our eldest son, who was carried over those sands in his mother's womb, makes a pilgrimage by motorbike. He informs us that there are few "jungle raves" and that the relict hippie population is super-paranoid, intimidated by the overweening "hippie-cleansing" police. Calingut, Anjuna and Bhaga sound unpleasant, even dangerous, as they undergo sterilisation into package holiday venues. We are glad we are 30 miles south.
A power cut means the quaint water heaters in our bathrooms fail to work on this morning when we especially need a shower. But "travel teaches tolerance." We set out for the beach, crossing the paddy fields, with the paddy birds and the chestnut-breasted kingfishers, and the lines of brightly clothed women planting rice. Tall coconut palms and white sands beckon. Better than a shower, to soak in the warm, bath-salt sea.