Delhi to Pune, Sleeper Class

Walking boots are not sensible footwear for a subtropical train journey. As you enviously survey the flip-flops of your fellow passengers, the rivulet of sweat trickling down your leg dissolves any remaining smugness at being the only Westerner not to alight at Agra.
The carriage has settled, resigned to the 30-hour journey ahead. Large, gabbling families pass homemade snacks between themselves. A work-worn young woman, her gaunt figure shrouded in a synthetic sari, silently watches your every move. Single men of all ages – the bread-and-butter of the railways – doze, chat and clip their toenails.
The spicy aroma of the lunch service lingers on, but you haven’t eaten. The last time you entrusted your bowels to an Indian Railways chana masala, you were quaffing rehydration salts all the way into the Transhimalaya. Today you’ll be dining on bruised bananas and whatever junk food you can extract from hawkers plying the carriages.
The compartment’s one small window broadcasts the Gangetic Plain. Trance-like, for hours you watch hotchpotch villages whizz by, stations emerge from nowhere and grotesque heaps of rubbish festering along the embankment. Then, somewhere in Gujurat, the train passes into the malaria belt, and fear of the sultry evening air forces you prematurely to your bunk.
Lying flat, your skull vibrates to the shudder of the rails. Suddenly every sound grates on your consciousness, from the constant hum of the ceiling fans, to women in the next compartment singing Sanskrit prayers, to the nasal warble of the chai-walla. The only escape is fitful sleep, with your valuables as a pillow.
Waking up in near blackness you come to the dreaded realisation that you need to use the toilet. The corridor, however, is littered with sleeping male bodies. As the train rattles into oblivion you tiptoe through the mire, the blasted walking boots slung over one shoulder until you reach the other side – that’s if you aren’t assaulted before you get there. It’s the stuff of black-and-white horror movies. Crouching precariously in the cubicle, and knowing you have to get all the way back, you finally ask yourself, ‘why’? ‘Why do I put myself through this?’
But, as the sun’s rays pierce the morning fug of the compartment, the trials of the previous night are replaced by simmering excitement. You may be ravenous, tired and sweat-stained, but another epic passage is almost at an end. The verdant, blue-green stalagmites of the Western Ghats are in sight. And Pune beckons.