The great railway chronicler

Choo-choo or chuk-chuk, or the Joycean frseeeeeeeefronnnng. Whatever your preferred onomatopoeia, these sounds, suggestive of a train darting across topographies — the familiar swiftly blurring into the unfamiliar — trigger instant recall. We have journeyed towards, and away from; we have slithered through towns and villages, lurching forward on moonlit tracks. We have crisscrossed gorges, slid through tunnels, click-clacked across bridges. We have halted or jolted to a halt at railway stations cacophonous or silent, swirling with brisk warmth or shrouded in intrigue.

Trains are our psyches in locomotion, introducing us to ourselves, allowing us (quite literally) to distance ourselves from the intimacies and aggravations of our past, so that we may examine them, if we wish, as we lie awake in our berth or look out of the window. “The train can reassure you in awful places…” declares Paul Theroux, at the outset of his 1975 travelogue, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia. He embarks on this journey from Victoria Station in London, and travels through Europe to West Asia and onwards to Asia via trains that are either glamorous, romanticised visions, or crowded oddities. Amongst them is The Orient Express, which, “…has also been hallowed by fiction: restless Lady Chatterley took it; so did Hercule Poirot and James Bond; Graham Greene sent some of his prowling unbelievers on it, even before he took it himself…” 

The Great Railway Bazaar is inflected with literary ideas and references to fictional worlds. Lahore, to Theroux, is Kipling’s hectic city in Kim; Calcutta is Dickensian to a much greater degree than London. He reads as he glides towards a new destination — Dickens’ Little Dorrit on the Van Gölü Express, Chekhov’s short story “Ariadne” on the Khyber Mail. He is on a lecture trip; at one conference in Istanbul, he meets Yashar Kemal, who claims that Graham Greene is “My frint”, and calls James Baldwin “Jimmy”. 
 

The Great Railway Bazaar reads more like a novel strewn with escapades and animated conversations, than an exposition of Theroux’s railway journeys. But it is the real-life characters that inhabit the compartments, the dining cars, the corridors and platforms that offer a flamboyant microcosm of the world outside, which flashes by in smidgens of colour through the train windows. There are Turks who sleep with their mouths open, moustached Italian nuns, German marathon runners addicted to yogurt and oranges, lunatics, hippies, Chinese dentists, or more accurately, tooth mechanics. Theroux observes his co-passengers with bemusement, his remarks flecked with disdain, a white man’s incurable astonishment at the sights and sounds and smells of louder cultures: “Watch a Tamil going over his teeth with an eight-inch twig and you begin to wonder if he isn’t trying to yank a branch out of his stomach.” 

Theroux’s disparagement is reminiscent of the writings of Mark Twain and V S Naipaul, both of whom trickle into his impressions. The Great Railway Bazaar bristles with problematic utterances. It is easy to be riled by generalities like “…in India all symbols are crude: the homeless people sleeping in the doorway of the mansion, the commuter running to his train accidentally trampling a station sleeper, the thin rickshaw-wallah hauling his plump passengers.” Theroux, crotchety Orientalist, is often perversely puffed-up, revelling in racial smugness. And to read The Great Railway Bazaar is to grapple with indignation and even outrage at being reduced to a caricature for the purpose of a hilarious anecdote or an aside. 

But hilarious, he is. His wit is a redemptive force; it extinguishes outrage. He is also attuned to the beauty of fading landscapes, to the molecular details of the ending of a dinner party framed by an illuminated Parisian window, or chairs with swing-out extensions in the verandahs of Peshawar. He is aware of the transience of the moment, the brevity of his encounters. This awareness heightens his experiences, amplifies his exchanges. He notices little things: Vases of red gladioli in the dining car of the Tehran Express, a steel badge pinned to the turban of a Sikh man on the Khyber Mail that states Pakistan Western Railways, the yellow cravat of a bearded Eurasian, pistachio-green parrots in flight. It is this compelling need to magnify every pulsing atom, that should be commended, as he turns eighty-one on April 10. Perhaps his attentiveness is a bid to freeze the frame, like a photographer eager to capture multiple focal points. The moment is ephemeral; it will fly past; it will be replaced by another. “The train passes on — that’s the beauty of a train — this heedless movement— but it passes on to more of the same,” Theroux philosophises, giving in to the inevitability of moving on, but recreating the moment so memorably. 
 

The writer is the author of Stillborn Season, a novel set amidst the anti-Sikh riots of 1984