Herein, I think, is the chief attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the body is being borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations…
The romance associated with the sleeping car derives from its extreme privacy, combining the best features of a cupboard with forward movement. Whatever drama is being enacted in this moving bedroom is heightened by the landscape passing the window: a swell of hills, the surprise of mountains, the loud metal bridge, or the melancholy sight of people standing under yellow lamps. And the notion of travel as a continuous vision, a grand tour's succession of memorable images across a curved earth – with none of the distorting emptiness of air or sea – is possible only on a train. A train is a vehicle that allows residence: dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer.
'What time does the Khyber Mail get to Karachi?'
'Timetable says seven-fifteen in the night,' said Rashid. 'But we will be five and a half hours late.'
'Why?' I asked.
'We are always five and a half hours late. It is the case.'
I slept well on my Dean's Hotel bedding and was awakened at six the following morning by a Sikh with a steel badge pinned to his turban that read Pakistan Western Railways. His right eye was milky with trachoma.
'You wanting breakfast?'
I said yes.
'I coming seven o'clock.'
He brought an omelette, tea, and toast, and for the next half-hour I sprawled, reading Chekhov's wonderful story 'Ariadne' and finishing my tea. Then I snapped up the shade and flooded the compartment with light. In brilliant sunshine we were passing rice fields and stagnant pools full of white lotuses and standing herons. Farther on, at a small tree, we startled a pair of pistachio-green parrots; they flew up, getting greener as they rose. Looking out a train window in Asia is like watching an unedited travelogue without the obnoxious soundtrack: I had to guess at the purpose of activities – people patting pie-shaped turds and slapping them on to the side of a mud hut to dry; men with bullocks and submerged ploughs, preparing a rice field for planting; and at Badami Bagh, just outside Lahore, a town of grass huts, cardboard shelters, pup tents, and hovels of paper, twigs, and cloth, everyone was in motion – sorting fruit, folding clothes, fanning the fire, shooing a dog away, mending a roof. It is the industry of the poor in the morning, so busy they look hopeful, but it is deceptive. The position of their settlement gives them away; this is the extreme of poverty, the shantytown by the railway tracks.
The shantytown had another witness: a tall thin Indian of about twenty, with long hair, stood at the corridor window. He asked me the time; his London accent was unmistakable. I asked him where he was headed.
'India. I was born in Bombay, but I left when I was three or four. Still, I'm an Indian right the way through.'
'But you were brought up in England.'
'Yeah. I've got a British passport too. I didn't want to get one, after all they did to me. But an Indian passport is too much trouble. See, I want to go to Germany eventually – they're in the Common Market. It's easy with a British passport.'
'Why not stay in London?'
'You can stay in London if you like. They're all racialists. It starts when you're about ten years old, and that's all you hear – wog, nigger, blackie. There's nothing you can do about it. At school it's really terrible – ever hear about Paki-bashing? And I'm not even a Pakistani. They don't know the difference. But they're cowards. When I'm with me mate no one comes up and says nothing, but lots of times about ten blokes would start trouble with me. I hate them. I'm glad to be here.'
'This is Pakistan.'
'Same thing. Everyone's the same colour.'
'Not really,' I said.
'More or less,' he said. 'I can relax here – I'm free.'
'Won't you feel rather anonymous?'
'The first thing I'm going to do in India is get a haircut; then no one will know.'
It seemed a cruel fate. He spoke no Indian language, his parents were dead, and he was not quite sure how to get to Bombay, where he had some distant relatives who seldom replied to letters unless he enclosed money. He was one of those colonial anomalies, more English than he cared to admit, but uneasy in the only country he understood.
'In England they were always staring at me. I hated it.'
'I get stared at here,' I said.
'How do you like it?' I could see he was reproaching me with my colour; after all, he was almost home.
I said, 'I rather enjoy it.'
'Sahib.' It was Rashid, with my suitcase. 'We are approaching.'
'He calls you sahib,' said the Indian. He looked disgusted. 'He's afraid of you, that's why.'
'Sahib,' said Rashid. But he was speaking to the Indian. 'Now, please show me your ticket.'
The Indian was travelling second class. Rashid evicted him from first as the train drew in.
At Lahore Junction I stepped out (Rashid was at my side apologizing for the train's being late) into a city that was familiar: it matched a stereotype in my memory. My image of the Indian city derives from Kipling, and it was in Lahore that Kipling came of age as a writer. Exaggerating the mobs, the vicious bazaar, the colour and confusion, the Kipling of the early stories and Kim is really describing Lahore today, that side of it beyond the Mall where processions of rickshaws, pony carts, hawkers, and veiled women fill the narrow lanes and sweep you in their direction. The Anarkali Bazaar and the walled city, with its fort and mosques, have retained the distracted exoticism Kipling mentions, though now, with a hundred years of repetition, it is touched with horror.
'Bad girls here,' said the tonga driver when he dropped me in a seedy district of the old city; but I saw none, and nothing resembling a Lahore house. The absence of women in Pakistan, all those cruising males, had an odd effect on me. I found myself staring, with other similarly idle men, at garish pictures of film stars, and I began to think that the strictures of Islam would quickly make me a fancier of the margins of anatomy, thrilling at especially trim ankles, seeking a wink behind a veil, or watching for a response in the shoulders of one of those shrouded forms. Islam's denials seemed capable of turning the most normal soul into a foot fetishist, and as if to combat this the movie posters lampooned the erotic: fat girls in boots struggling helplessly with hairy, leering men; tormented women clutching their breasts; Anglo-Indians (regarded as 'fast') swinging their bums and crooning into microphones. The men in Lahore stroll with their eyes upturned to these cartoon fantasies.
'They invite you out to eat,' an American told me. This was at the spectacular fort, and we were both admiring the small marble pavilion, called Naulakha (Kipling named his house outside Brattleboro, Vermont, after it, because it was so expensive to build: 'naulakha' means 900,000). The American was agitated. He said, 'You finish eating and they start eye-balling your chick. It's always your chick they're after. The chick's strung out. "Gee, Mohammed, why don't you have any pockets in your dhoti?" "We are not having any pockets, miss" -that kind of crap. One guy – this really pissed me off-he takes me aside and says, "Five minutes! Five minutes! That's all I want with her!" But would he let me have his chick for five minutes? You've gotta be joking.'
The order in Lahore is in the architecture, the moghul and colonial splendour. All around it are crowds of people and vehicles, and their dereliction makes the grandeur emphatic, as the cooking fat and cow-dung makes the smells of perfume and joss-sticks keener. To get to the Shalimar Gardens I had to pass through miles of congested streets of jostling people with the starved look of predators. I shouldered my way through the venereal township of Begampura; but inside the gardens it is peaceful, and though it has been stripped of its marble, and the reflecting pools are dark brown, the gardens have the order and shade – a sense of delicious refuge – that could not be very different from that imagined by Shah Jahan, when he laid them out in 1637. The pleasures of Lahore are old, and though one sees attempts everywhere, the Pakistanis have not yet succeeded in turning this beautiful city into a ruin.