It was time to leave Rishikesh. It really is a charming place, all those wonderfully garish ashrams and tiny ramshackle retreats and thirteen-story high temples flush on the bank of the Ganges, their bells ringing constantly as pilgrims dutifully circumabulate one floor after another. For hardcore Hindu holiday grandeur it may not compare to its sister city Haridwar, home of the world’s coolest religiously motivated river bathing scene, but as I am not on a hard core Hindu holiday, I’ll take the laid back vibe anytime. Even the babas seem more relaxed in Rishikesh.

And yet, it was definitely time to go. I had thought to spend ten days here writing and doing yoga, but it was not working out. Just too many pilgrims; too many hawkers selling things to pilgrims; too much sticky, sweaty heat; too much paint flaking off the walls in my budget accommodations; too many scantily clad Israeli’s speaking a language that I once thought I loved but that now grates rapaciously on my ears (maybe it’s just the paucity of my vocabulary, but every sentence seems to start with ani rotzeh – I want). And the thought of searching out this or that yoga teacher in this or that ashram in order to do downward dog sandwiched between random Germans seeking enlightenment, Indian style. Not that I have anything against Germans, mind you, or enlightenment for that matter, but as they say in Hindi, nahin chilega, meaning, it was just not gonna fly. Maybe someday I’ll come back without my computer and a head full of unwritten words and find my guru. For the moment, all I wanted was to be back in Jaipur, where I could cook my own food, get broadband internet access and go to sleep to the hum of air conditioning.

And so I hiked up the hill, thinking to make my way to the Rishikesh train station, which unfortunately doesn’t really have any trains going through it, but maybe would sell me a ticket for a train leaving from Haridwar. Before I got that far, however, I spotted the inviting confines of a travel agent, at which point I remembered the way my former professor at Columbia, Jack Hawley (who I saw briefly in Pune) responded when I asked him if he was going to the Pune train station to get his ticket. Oh, those days are over for me. Meaning, let someone else push through the crowds, wait on the lines and negotiate the Byzantine system of concessions and reservations maintained by the Indian railway system. Don’t get me wrong, those days are definitely not over for me; I actually still get a thrill out of finding the proper window and cajoling some railway employee in broken Hindi to sell me a ticket – please, madam. . . .mei mazboor hu (I’m helpless). However, seeing as my whole purpose was to get the hell out of low-budget India, it seemed appropriate to take the I’m over it approach, which in any case only amounts to a 60 rupee ($1.50) processing fee.

Of course, in India as anywhere, you get what you paid for. After talking things over with the travel agent, who was predictably surly, and impressing upon him the fact that I absolutely needed to be on the one train that left in the morning from Haridwar to Jaipur (a rather convenient schedule, since generally one would need to transfer in Delhi), I allowed myself to be convinced that the ticket would be forthcoming – no problem; day journey only, so no problem – and agreed to pick it up later that night. Upon my return, having been presented with a sleeper class ticket that listed me as waitlist #421, I finally grasped the meaning of day journey, no problem, which, fully parsed, means - while there was no way in hell I would ever have gotten a seat on such a random train on such incredibly short notice, since I would not be on the train when it was time to go to sleep, my seatlessness was, in the grand scheme of things, no problem. Having been on overnight trains without a seat, I can definitely appreciate this logic. At the same time, I was hardly thrilled at the prospect of the following day’s journey.

The train was due to leave Haridwar at 7:30 AM, so to be safe I was up at 5:00 AM. Made good time on the thirty km journey from Rishikesh, so had plenty of time for some aloo paratha (fried potato bread) and chai – my last reasonable meal of the day. Thankfully, I was in enough of a rush to be able to duck out of a conversation in the restaurant with a very jolly man who started asking me in Hindi about how the absence of my “wife” affected my sexual prowess. What did Foucault say about the Orient’s tradition of ars erotica? Anyway, when I finally entered the Haridwar railway station, any illusions about my fate for the remainder of the day were summarily squashed. The platform was absolutely jammed packed with pilgrims who seemed anxious to set a record for most luggage per person on an Indian train. Not that I should have been surprised – why would this train, which only runs once a week, not be jam packed - but as is often the case here, the awesome physicality of the scene definitely had me reeling. For a moment I thought of searching out a ticket window and seeing whether my negotiating skills could get me a reserved seat, but I just couldn’t muster the energy and so sat down on my bag to read the Sunday paper. Still uneasy, I kept looking up from the eighteenth article I’ve read about the Bollywood starlet who committed suicide after breaking up with her boyfriend (suicide in India. . .there's a topic for another entry) to see if some friendly ticket taker was in the vicinity.

The train was late, which only gave me more time to ponder my woefully inadequate strategy, or lack thereof. As 8:00 PM approached, I threw my bag on my back and started wandering the platform, trying to scope a slightly less populated area, though without really knowing why. Finally, the familiar blue paneled cars came into view, at which point utter madness broke lose. I am used to traveling third tier AC, which is a decidedly middle class sort of scene. Not that things don’t get a bit wild and catty when people board the nicer class cars, but my point is that I was simply unprepared for the equivalent scene in sleeper class. Though its remains unclear why people board trains in India the way they do, in a massive no-holds barred shoving match, its obvious to even a casual student of crowd psychology that the frenzy is contagious. Somehow the train doors become sacred portals to another reality, and you are willing to undergo and ignominity and perpetrate any foul deed to gain entrance.

Considering my advanced level of anxiety, I was especially to the frenzied contagion. After gently shouldering aside a few women old enough to be my grandmother. I finally found my way into a sleeper car chosen at random. Needless to say, I was the only white face, and my presence sparked many a generic Indian stare, along with the wonderful advice of a middle aged woman who advised me in the pulsing throng to take care of yourself. As my large bag was an obvious disadvantage, I found the first unoccupied seat and shoved it underneath. Indian train cars generally follow a similar floor plan, with a large compartment on one side of the aisle that sits/sleeps six, and then a small compartment on the other side that sits/sleeps two. I was in the small compartment, sitting cross-legged and watching the mad rush all around me as I wondered when the people who actually had rights to these seats would show up. One soon did, a lovely woman who appreciated my garbled Hindi and proceeded to mock the outlandish behavior of the Gujarati passengers (it tuned out that the train was eventually headed to Ahmedabad) who have a reputation for being, um, outlandish. That she was also Gujarati didn’t seem to dampen her enthusiasm for the joke. I laughed appreciatively.

My new seat partner asked me where my seat was and I explained weakly that I needed to talk to the conductor about that. She sympathized and we seemed to have reached a détente. But where was her husband? Because there had to be a husband. And indeed there was. By the time he showed up, however, I had apparently exerted some sort of riparian rights to his seat, and he seemed unconcerned about my presence, not even letting me finish my best Hindi obsequity – agr aapko koi itaraz nahin. . .(If you don’t have any objection. . . ) as he sat down next to me, the seats being constructed in such a way as to allow three people to sit where only two ought to be. Things seemed rather swell at this point, especially because he didn’t seem too interested in his seat and kept leaving for long periods of time. I made friends across the aisle with more Gujaratis, including a dashing youngster who spoke some english. My motherly seatmate, who was a 3AC type (so she told me) who could only get a reservation in sleeper, pulled out a book and I closed my eyes and did my best to sleep sitting up.

It was all a little too good to be true. The husband returned and by 11:00 AM it seemed clear to me that I was overstaying my welcome. In retrospect, I probably could have milked the arrangement for much longer, but a sense of propriety and fairness that is in some ways out of place here compelled me to move. And so I did, thinking that the vestibules between cars would surely have plenty of space, an assumption which turned out to be exceedingly misguided. Not being an experienced rider of sleeper class, I can’t say whether this is typical, but the vestibules were absolutely socked with people – families, lone men, little children – you name it. After investigating a few cars I was feeling a bit stunned, and so decided to amuse myself my searching out a ticket taker. Showing him my rather useless ticket, I received a blast of Hindi too fast for me to understand but that semmed to imply the obvious, namely, that I was not destined to get a seat.

(Note: the problem with knowing some Hindi, especially knowing certain catchy phrases like Mein aapse ek savaal puchu? – might I ask you a question? is that people will hit you with an unintelligible full fluent blast, which leaves you with the choice of 1. Switching to English, thus admitting complete defeat 2. Giving a noncommittal hah-ji which is sort of like come again, and will only earn you a repeat of the original bewildering phrase or 3. Offering up the pitiful sounding samajhme nahin atti, which means I don’t understand and is really a quick way of informing someone that you don’t really speak Hindi, since no one actual says I don’t understand in such a formulaic way.)

Having exhausted my meager resources, I was actually more at peace, as I now accepted my fate. Returning to my original car, I met up with the dashing Gujarati student, who also turned out to be seatless (he was just squeezing in with his grandmother). Back to the vestibule we went, where a little patience resulted in the clearing out of one of the doorways to the outside, a perect sitting spot that with a little squeezing can fit two people. Legs dangling out of the car, we watched the scenery pass by and talked about this and that, switching from Hindi to English in a pleasurably mindless exchange of cultural ephemera. The first student I have met who isn’t studying business or engineering, he told me he wants to learn about fashion design (hence the dashing apparel) and asked me typical young Indian boy questions about sex, while I told him I studied religion and asked him typical American tourist questions about the different kinds of train engines.

Though younger than me, my new friend, good name Jai (victory), house name Raj (king)  (many Indians have two names, one used by their family and one for everything else) took a protective sort of attitude towards me, insisting that I kept track of my belongings, worrying about the fact that I wasn’t eating the exceedingly dangerous looking food available on the train and making sure that I didn’t wander off when the train stopped at stations. It was really swee, and not unappreciated as I was feeling a bit dazed and definitely undernourished.. Eventually we moved to a new vestibule where I answered a new crowd’s typical questions - Toh, Hindustan keisei lagta hei, aap (So how do you like India) - with my by now rehearsed answers, designed to simultaneoulsly satisfy and bewilder – Mei kya kahu. . .agr mujhe Hindustan na pasand, to mein yha pei na rahu (What can I say. . . If I didn’t like India, I wouldn’t be here). We passed around my copy of Naagraj, an Indian comic book about a hero who shoots snakes out of his arms, and smiled at each other when conversation failed.

With my ass getting extremely sore and my eyelids demanding rest, I decided to scope the scene for a place to lie down. Three cars down I found it, sort of – two trunks that had been placed unceremoniously in a vestibule blocking traffic. I squeezed between the trunk and the outside door and laid newspaper on the ground to minimize the grime factor, catching an hours sleep or so. Returning to the previous vestibule after some time, I earned Jai’s rebuke for wandering off (he was worried) and exchanged addresses with like every guy in the car, all of who wanted me to come visit them in Ahemdabad. An hour later, and the train, which had amazingly made up considerable time after running late at the beginning of the journey, finally arrived in Jaipur. Thirty minutes after that I smiled gratefully as hot water from my shower washed away the day's grime.