From ‘Strangers in my Sleeper. Rail journeys and encounters on the Indian subcontinent’ by Peter Riordan

 

 

Indians have a penchant for bureaucratic obfuscation and flowery titles, and at Chennai Central Station, as at all the country’s main stations, this bent is given full expression.

 

‘How do you like Sri Lanka?’ I was repeatedly asked and I found myself saying, ‘The people are friendly.’ I did like Sri Lanka, but something about it left me feeling faintly irritated. An apathy clung in the air, and a trace of anger. Perhaps the twenty-year civil war had left them spent and lethargic and resentful. Or perhaps nature was too bountiful for their own good: fruit fell from the trees and any seed tossed on the ground soon sprouted and flourished…………..Villagers seemed to move without purpose or industry. In fact, I’d seen no one really exerting themselves. The most industrious worker seemed to be nature itself, which was forever germinating and regenerating and leaping upwards and outwards.

 

First-class train travel suggests sumptuous comfort, but in Sri Lanka it means no such thing…..upholstery that is not tattered, a passable toilet……a compartment that is not grubby and ceiling fans that work. But nothing more. No porters dancing at your attendance, no plush compartments, no catering service, just the rudiments of train travel, the absence of unpleasantness.

 

For some unaccountable reason, trains in Sri Lanka did not dilly-dally at stations, pausing only long enough to provoke a mad push-and-shove contest between those disembarking and those hastening aboard.

 

Trivandrum is, for India, an oddity; an unspoilt capital city. ‘This is the loveliest city in India,’ I said…….