Train from Agra to Varanasi

My first overnight ride on Indian Railways, and it only confirmed my initial impressions of the system: organized chaos. Chaos: people of all walks of life swarming the station, sleeping on the floors, attending to their splintering suitcases and boxes, forming huge masses at the ticket window that can only charitably be called "queues." Organized: well, they've got their act together. The network covers the entire county, the trains to each place are numerous (one or more per day in most cases), and the personnel are highly competent and very professional. For a county with such grossly underdeveloped infrastructure - I've got plenty to say about what passes for a "road" around here - the rail network seems almost out of place. What it does is allow India to have, from what I can tell, a fairly mobile population (good for a country in which religious pilgrimage is important) but not a particularly mobile economy. Good luck getting anything anywhere quickly on a truck. And my condolences to any business person who has to travel anywhere besides major cities on the rail (and now low-cost airline) network.

Anyway, I had a feeling I wouldn't have the most straightforward journey when I was issued a "waitlist" ticket for my Agra to Varanasi journey. I suppose a quick primer on Indian trains (to the extent I have them figured out) is in order. Most long-distance trains are divided into a number of classes, but the two big distinctions are reserved and unreserved. Don't go on unreserved. I don't think any foreigners do, and I'm not even sure they're allowed to. They're like cattle cars, and it would take the hardiest of travelers to deal with it for anything more than a couple of hours. Reserved is divided into a number of classes, in ascending order of niceness: sleeper (6 berths per open cabin - stacked three high - plus two more across the aisle, un-airconditioned, less comfortable berths), 3AC (6 berths, airconditioning, more comfy, they give you sheets and a pillow - this is what I have been riding), 2AC (4 berths - stacked two high - with curtains to separate the cabins), 1AC (never seen it - sounds divine). At bigger, more popular stations, foreigners make their reservations at a special room or window - in smaller stations they join the general queue. When you buy your ticket, you fill out this arcane, gritty little form that the ticket agent then types into an ancient computer interface (black background with soulless green text - remember that?) to produce a list of trains between your desired locations, and then prints out a ticket. With this ticket, you either get a confirmed cabin and berth right then, or you get put on the waitlist. With the waitlist, you still buy your ticket and wait for enough others, hopefully, to cancel - the tickets are refundable on a sliding scale that is pretty generous - and get issued a berth later on. Usually there a fair number of cancellations, and when I booked my ticket the day before and was WL/6 (6th on the waitlist), I was told "very good chance."

So, I'm prepared to show up early at the train station to see if my waitlist ticket has come through, when one of the very helpful folks at the Tourist Rest House clued me in to this site, where you can enter your ticket number and see if you've been assigned your berth. Lo and behold, it worked! That silly little form and that ancient computer linked me into a network where I can get live ticket updates! Glory be! Except for the fact that I am still on the waitlist - up to WL/3, but still no berth. (This was starting to feel eerily like certain graduate school applications experiences.) Go to the station at the usual time (30 minutes before departure), I was told, and talk to the staff on the platform. On the way there, I play alternate scenarios in my head: head straight to Jaipur that night? The next morning? Wait it out in Agra, that dump I'm ready to be rid of?

At the station, I find the men (no female employees, at least that I've seen) manning the information table on the platform and show them my ticket. "You'll have to consult the conductor," they tell me. "Where is the conductor?" I ask. Apparently when the train arrives he'll be up by the A/C-class cars. So, I have a challenge: find the conductor in the 10 minutes the train is stopped before it heads out again.

The challenge will wait until the train arrives, which, as it turns out, isn't for another hour past its scheduled arrival time. On the platform I make some friends (so nice to be talking to people who aren't trying to sell me something, hassle me, or otherwise misinform me!). First, three brothers from Lucknow who are in Agra for the holiday weekend and run a tailor shop back home. Second, a seventeen-year-old boy, also from Lucknow, who is attending school in Agra and loves it there (who knows, maybe there something good in Agra besides the sighs, but it sure ain't there for us foreigners). Both sets of friends ask for my "email ID," which I give (the next day I get a somewhat cryptic message from the seventeen-year-old with the subject "urgent" and signed "I love you dude" - not sure what to make of it, I write back to see if everything is OK, but no response as yet). And I take my leave when I see the train coming to find my potential savior, the conductor.

Where is the conductor? I can't find him. I don't even know what he would look like. Rushing up and down the track, I peer around to look at any man who appears vaguely official, but no luck. I ask some other people on the platform where I'd find the conductor and they tell me to get in a certain car. I get in, and don't see him. The train is about to leave. I ask another - he has on a name badge which makes me think he might work on the train, but I'm really not sure. He tells me to get in another car, and gets on with me. He points to an old man sitting with a big stack of dot matrix printouts - the updated seating chart - with a short line of people waiting to talk to him. The train starts moving; I'm told to say on, that it will be fine, but I still, as far as I know, don't have a seat on the train. I start to see myself unceremoniously booted off the train at the next stop, in some unknown town in the middle of the night.

I get my turn with the conductor, who seems like a stately old fellow, and I take off my hat, docilely hand him my ticket, and politely ask him whether I have a place on the train. He tells me to take a seat next to him, looks through his charts, and finds my name: WL/3. No dice. He tells me to stay there (well, more indicates I should stay there, since he doesn't particularly speak English), and I sit, like a guilty child waiting for his punishment. I keep waiting. The conductor comes and goes, looking stern, but says nothing. I make friends (so many friends on the train!) with a pudgy little 9-year-old boy from Kampur who says delightful little British-y things like "Not I!" His sister and two others come join the conversation. We are talking far too loud for a 2AC car at 11:30 at night.

Two hours pass - fairly quickly, with the help of my friends - and I don't think the mixed amused/bemused left my face. The conductor returns and tells me I have a berth. How he found it I don't know - did he check every other berth on the train? Wait for someone to disembark at an intermediate station? Who knows, but at least I'm not getting kicked of the train or (worse?) relegated to unreserved. I'm not entirely sure if I've done something wrong or have just been done some extraordinary favor - the conductor and his assistant both seemed rather stern when they announced my seat assignment - but I mosey on back to my berth, pull out my sheet/sarong (which I bought in Thailand 2 years ago and now take on every trip - no sheets and blankets were given to this waitlist straggler), and spend a rather comfortable night. The only obstacles to a good night's sleep was the tremendous snoring of the man sleeping across from me (bring earplugs when you come to this country. Bring them! Do not forget them! I did, and I continually regret it) and the shuffling and turning on of lights when passengers leave and board at stations along the way. But, hey, pretty comfy overall, and I'm going to be in Varanasi in the morning!

Well, morning turned out to be optimistic. Our scheduled 9:30am arrival morphed in to 3:00pm. But, no worries. It gave me a chance to read, mostly the Lonely Planet, and in the process I feverishly rejiggered my itinerary: no more looping back to Delhi and going to Rajasthan. Too touristy, too cold, too hazy, too standard. Too easy. Of course, I'll complicate things, and do something that feels a little more creative. The new plan: Eastern India. From Varanasi to Calcutta to Andhra Pradesh on the central eastern coast, where my friend Tem (from high school, college, and California) is visiting his Indian cousins.

But first: Varanasi. Aka Banaras. Aka Kashi. Ancient city on the Ganges. Holy city. City of Light.

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Postscript: I spoke later on with a Kiwi/Brit who had traveled extensively in India (and who, by his estimation had spent the last 13 of his 40 years traveling almost constantly, with occasional interludes to replenish funds in the UK). According to him, you can always board the train with a waitlist ticket. You won't get kicked off (or at least he never has), because at some point the booking system stops issuing tickets if the waitlist is too long too close to the journey. But even though you're on the train, you may not get a berth if none becomes available, and you'll have to sit in the seats in the bathroom area between cars for the duration of the journey. His record for sitting: 48 hours.