After dark we made a stop at Mathura Junction. I got out, and in the glare of the station platform was the now familiar (but no less horrifying) sight of the railway villagers. They were not locals: they were very black, thin, with small sharp teeth and narrow noses and thick glossy hair; they wore sarongs and camped on the platform with that air of proprietary completeness that suggested permanence. There were rows of charpoys, and at the unsheltered end of the platform greasy tarpaulins had been pitched like tents. They were spitting, eating, pissing, and strolling with such self-possession that they might have been in a remote village in the deepest Madrasi jungle (I took them to be Tamils) instead of under the gaze of the travellers on the Bombay express. One woman snatched up a child and helped him comb for lice in her scalp, and another woman, who I thought was crouching in despair, I saw after a moment to be playing peekaboo with an infant half-hidden in an orange crate.
I had passed these encampments too many times without looking closely at them. I found a man on the train and asked him if he would translate my questions. He agreed, and we found a willing interviewee. This was a fox-faced man with glittering white eyes and buck teeth, wearing a white sarong. He stood with his arms folded and stroked his biceps with slender fingers.
'He says they come from Kerala.'
'But why have they come so far? Are they looking for work?'
'Not looking for work. This is a yatra.'
So it was another pilgrimage.
'Where are they headed?'
'Here, Mathura,' the translator said, pronouncing it Muttra. The fox-faced man spoke again. The translator continued, 'He is asking that do you know this is a holy place?'
'The railway station?'
'The town. Lord Krishna was born here.'
And not only that, I read later. It was in Mathura that the Divine Cowherd was exchanged with the infant daughter of Jasoda in order to save him from being murdered by the giant Kans, a parallel of the Herod story. The town is also the scene of Krishna's youth, where he sported with the milkmaids and played his flute. The legends were pretty; the place itself seemed a grim contradiction.
'How long will the yatris stay?'
'For some days.'
'Why are they at the station instead of in town?'
'There is water and light here, and it is safe. There are robbers in town and some people get chased by rogues.'
'What do they do for food?'
'He says they have brought some, and some they get in town. The people on the train also give some.' The translator added, 'He is asking where are you from?'
I told him. In a corner of the platform, I saw the silhouette of a pot-bellied child with spindly legs, naked and clinging to a waterspout. It was alone, holding on, waiting for nothing; the sight of this futile patience cracked my heart.
'He is asking for money.'
'I will give him one rupee if he says a prayer for me at the Mathura temple.'
This was translated. The man from Kerala laughed and said something.
'He would have said a prayer for you even if you had given him nothing.'
The whistle blew and I boarded. Mr Radia had stopped singing. He was sitting in the compartment reading Blitz. Blitz is a noisy, irresponsible weekly paper in English that retails scandals in a semiliterate but bouncy style of which the following, from the film page, is a fair example:
Star-producer-director of JUHU, one of four bhais, hotted up his birthday like nobody's business.
The guest control order was out of bounds there! There were booze and broads and brawls by the host himself! He was high and headstrong, lording it over all. Hurled abuse at some and then fisted a guest. That's the time few walked out. Some hospitality that! What does he think himself to be? GODFATHER?…
Mr Radia continued to read, scowling with appreciation. Then our dinner trays were brought, and I noticed his was non-vegetarian. His hamburger came apart under his knife and he poked at it disgustedly. But he ate it. 'The first time I took meat I was violently sick,' he said. 'But that happens when you do anything for the first time, isn't it?'
With this bewildering epigraph he told me about his work. He had worked for Shell for twenty years, but discovered he loathed the English so much that he finally quit. His sense of grievance was strong and his memory for the humiliations he had been subjected to amounted to total recall. The English were domineering and exclusive, he said, but he was quick to add, 'Mind you, we Indians can be the same. But the English had their chance If only,' he said, and prodded his hamburger, 'if only the English had become Indians.'
'Was that ever on the cards?'
'Yes, they could have done it. No trouble at all. I went to a T-group session in Darjeeling. Debates and discussions. Very interesting. The wife of the director had just arrived from the States, and the second day she was there that lady was wearing a sari.'
I was sceptical about this proving anything and asked him how long the lady would stay in her sari.
'That's a point,' said Mr Radia.
Now he was the Deputy General Manager for a joint Japanese-Indian effort, making dry-cell batteries in Gujarat. He had had several run-ins with the Japanese -'Head-on-collisions – I had no choice!' I asked him how he found the Japanese. He said, 'Loyal, yes! Clean and hard-working, yes! But intelligent, not at allV It turned out that they were getting under his skin, though he preferred them to the English. The company was run on Japanese lines: uniforms, no sweepers or bearers, morning assembly, a joint staff-worker canteen, and common toilets ('That was a shock'). What nettled Mr Radia was that the Japanese insisted on dating the factory girls.
'That's the best way I know to demoralize the others,' he said, 'but when I asked them about it they said it would make the workers friendlier if the bosses took the girls out on dates. And they smiled at me. Have you ever seen a Japanese smile? I wasn't going to have it. "Nothing doing!" I said. "You want to argue? Okay, we'll argue. Let's take it to the manager!" Now I will be quite frank with you. I think these Japanese were going in twos and threes and having group sex.'
'Especially in twos,' I said. But Mr Radia was too worked up to hear me.
'I told them it was just not on! Prostitutes – okay, it happens all over the world! Girls from town – all right! Clean, healthy fun – fine! Picnics – count me in! I'll bring my wife, I'll bring my children, we'll all have a good time. But workers? Never!'
Mr Radia grew increasingly peevish about the Japanese. I complained of a headache and went to bed.
The conductor brought tea at half-past six and said we were in Gujarat. Bullocks and cows cropped grass at the edge of the line, and at one station a goat skittered on the platform. Gujarat, Gandhi's birthplace, is a hot, flat, but apparently very fertile state. There were guava orchards and fields of lentils, cotton, papaya, and tobacco stretching to the tilted palm trees at the horizon, and the irrigation ditches were cut like chevrons in these sleeves of landscape. Occasionally, a marquee of trees identified a village and dusty people could be seen washing in brown streams where the mud banks were covered with footprints like the tracks of stray birds.
'And here we are at Baroda,' said Mr Radia, turning to the window.