India as a Train Station

The train stations of India act as a microcosm for the entire country. “Chai chai” lanky men hum as they carry around their pot of boiling tea. Women clothed in brightly colored saris struggle with their luggage, some carrying it on their heads, while others drag it along on the ground. Couples seem to be arguing with one another, endearingly showing their strength of love. Clearly, the love is strong in this country.

And the beggars. A teenage girl in rags carrying a sleeping body. Or a dead one. Boys in grey tatters, as if they are straight from a 1930s Depression photo stumble up to you, point to their stomach, and hold out their hand. They don’t say a word.

A family lies on the floor in the corner. In fact, many families. Babies, kids, teenagers, all lying, with transparent smiles. Joking with one another as flies buzz on their faces. They do not flinch. A baby boy in nothing but underwear climbs all over his mother, who is lying down soothing her other child. They must do this everyday.

All of a sudden a cow strolls onto the middle of the platform, casually walking and sniffing the ground. Only Vishnu knows how it got there.

In the corner a man twitches on a bench, clearly fucked up on brown sugar (the heroin version of crack cocaine that is popular in India). A cop walks over to him and yells at him to move; its past eight o’clock and he must move on. He doesn’t go anywhere, and the cop walks away.

Nicole walks over to make a phone call. A man with no eyes tells her that it is 2 rupees. He then watches her the whole time she is on the phone. Eyeless.

A young boy drags his mother through the station, as she continually falls over on him. A six year old keeping his mother up as she is fucked up on something. Perhaps she’s a prostitute. Perhaps mentally ill. She flashes her cell phone. As her six year old son begs for her. She laughs when she grabs a cracker from his hands and eats it. Is she stealing food from her son? Or life?

A middle class family enters the station with shopping bags and lots of luggage. Old school suitcases, the heavy ones that don’t have the easy-to-drag luxuries that are the standards back home. The three kids in their Western dress, jeans and a Quiksilver t-shirt, the mother in her beautifully bright sari and radiant shawl, and the father carrying a briefcase and a look of sureness. He is in a silent state of control.

“What are you staring at,” hisses Nicole to a group of twenty-something men, clearly bored of their surroundings. A beautiful Indian, American, or both walking with an American male with a backpack is clearly strange to them. They get the message after Nicole’s sneer.

The post office worker wheels out the mail, which is bundled together in label-less sacks. No uniform nor labels. Can barely tell its official mail. Maybe its not.

And the stench. The flavor of Indian food and spices mixed with the aroma of thousands of sweaty bodies, bodies that have been rolling around dirty floors, hustling through the overly polluted cities, and have rested little in recent memory.

It is go time. Time to move on to the next location, the next adventure, the next place. But moving on to the next sameness.

To another train station; but the same India.