Odds and Sods

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I am useless at early mornings unless I have been up all night. Many is the time that I have found my way home only to pass my parents on their way out. In a hot climate activity has to operate around the day - avoiding that middle bit where the earth seems to hold its breath and all is sleepy and subdued.

Calcutta in the early morning was at her most enchanting. Never empty, for how could a city so large be empty, but still in the brief time after the sun had risen she had sparceness that allowed her well wrought bone structure to show. The maidan, that green space that makes us exiles sigh for the city, in the early morning would have a veil of mist through which would come boys herding goats to prime positions for the days' grazing, horses going to the track for exercise and the rumble of the city around as it awoke.

To ride the tram at that time was to see all this a slower pace than in a car and would give one the glorious sense of  being the first to see this unexpected beauty. All too quickly the traffic would start its daily intricate  dance: snarling and unsnarling, tooting and hooting, engines idling spilling out their fumes. But in the hour just after dawn all this was a vague memory and it seemed impossible that these open roads could be anything other than highways of delight.

Travelling in India was, for me. always a series of images: snapshots of passing villages, paddy fields and a life far removed from that of the city. As I think about it I realise that most of those images are framed by the windows of trains as we chugged through on our way to somewhere else. Those journeys are memories of delight at the passing landscape,  the excitement of each new stop and the thrill of reaching somewhere new and unexplored.

My longest journey was from Calcutta to Jammu - seemed to take a week but I think it was three days and two nights. for this was how the journey was counted - by the days and nights on the train. I went with my dearest friend Dubby, who you haven;t met yet but will learn to love as I do. We were going to his sister's wedding - her father the General of the North West Frontier - what a title to conjure with that was.  The concept of a simple backpack and maybe a foldaway sleeping bag was utterly alien. Instead we had suitcases, bedrolls, food and drink and changes of clothes.

Living on a train, even for a short time, requires an adjustment in attitude and mind set. You are enclosed and held hostage. The only way to survive is to let go - let the rhythm of the journey dictate the pace of the days. It almost becomes unbearable when you finally do leave to lose that sense of surrender.

That journey, across India from one side to the other allowed a vision of a country so disparate yet  linked, populous with acres of seeming space - in short the eternal dichotomy that is India. From Bengal's green fields of rice - through Bihar - the river beginning to be seen at ever closer quarters and then the realisation that our Hooghly, although superb, was but a tributary of this mighty artery of India the Ganges. Varanasi seen at sunrise, the sun huge, rising from the river like a god at the start of the day . Lucknow and chicken curry - the best ever. And on. And on.

Early morning in some unnamed station- the raucous call of, "Chai, garum chai!" and the sweet warmth of the clay cup, the ultimate recyclable container, and faint taste of cinnamon and sweet milk mingling with the tea to provide an early morning miracle of awakening. Again that pall of mist rising to reveal villages where chidlren stood to wave at the train as it passed and pi dogs and cows grazed anxiously for remnants.  It seemed like a whole world was passed by - lives we would never touch - stories we would never hear but for that brief second of waving as we passed through.

So many journeys are about arriving - my Indian journeys taught me to travel well - the destination having ultimately less impact than getting to it. Perhaps a lesson I should remember more often when the dark days come - the journey is everything and the early morning, whether found through lack of sleep or desire for solitude, often the best time to travel.