Long Train to Goa

Part I: Transit

I crunch and munch on my masala dinner, a strange mixture of puffed serials and dried vegetables. Squeezed, all five feet & eleven inches of me into a bed which can barely accommodate five feet and six. I didn't expect anymore that's for sure. I am beginning to feel at home in a bed that might see me as a challenge. This particular bed is headed northwest at a rapid rate. I'm on a train for Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka. I'm in the “A/C Sleeper,” a car which I foresee will be too much of the first and not enough of the second. Like most places in South India the attitude towards air-conditioning seems to be to get it while the getting is good, and get as much as possible. Walking into an A/C dining room at a fancy restaurant you will notice goosebumps on everyone's arms as their body temperature drops dangerously low. Blue lips are soon to come, followed by numbness in their extremities. The train is quite like The Dharjeeling Limited complete with subtle snips at co-passengers. Thankfully, no cobra has been purchased, though we haven't had the oppurtunity.

All my old standards of cleanlinees have changed. Things like wearing the same shirt five times doesn't bother me as long as it has had a day of rest, or a few hours in the sun. I still brush my teeth every morning. I wash my hands before meals, actually with more attention to detail than before, but that's because I use the left hand and a mug of water to finish off the less sanitary of human duties. The towel I brought from home, once somewhat white is now a faint orange, but the red dirt is impossible to be rid of.

I eat with my hands (just the right one). In fact Indian meals seem to have been designed for the express purpose of not needing utensils. The best way to explain a normal South Indian is that you get rice, something to soggy that rice, and something to scoop that soggy rice with. Normally the rice is spiced with clove and bay leaves, the soggy stuff is dahl and curd, and the scooping item is a few freshly cooked chappathi. The meals we have eaten never stray from this regimen far. At breakfast often you will get dosa--which is much like a very thin crispy pancake--which mostly scoops Sambar—a soupy yellow substance which to me is indistinguishable from dahl. Of course there are many other types of breakfast foods, but they all must scoop Sambar in the end. Lunch is the biggest meal of the day, and on Pulicat Lake almost always included very freshly caught crab, or prawn. Which makes more sense to me than the Big American Dinner because I assume it doesn't take that much food just to sleep until breakfast. Tonight my dinner on the train to Goa was vegetable biryani which, not surprisingly, is mostly just rice, as well as a small package of rice soaked with curd. Both contain “pickle” which is not pickled cucumber. This pickle still contains vinegar but the object of this pickling is usually a piece of lime or mango and a bunch of chili pepper.

Now I didn't think it would bother me, but here I sit a little disgusted and hesitant to swallow. I have found myself chewing mushy rice, in no dire need for any mastication whatsoever, for minutes at a time always hoping that it might turn into something more nutritious through some unseen magic between my molars. Then the substance which you worked so hard to eat until you were satiated, despite all the protest of the smooth muscle in your esophagous, seems to evaporate out of your stomach in a matter of minutes like you had actually just been eating the dreams of a steak dinner. However to complain about rice in Southeast Asia is as futile as counting grains of sand. Most cultures here have a whole deity appointed to rice, and apparently the prayers to them are very fruitful. One particular goddess, whose name and origin escapes me, was said in times of deep famine to squeeze her breast to feed mankind, the white rain filled up rice grains, even showing the passion to squeeze until she bled accounting for red and brown rice. Rice is quite a precious thing over here, and I'm sure has been welcome food for starving poor more times than a corn/wheat eater like myself could understand.

Without the satiation of divine lactate only an hour after eating dinner I am hungry again. But the only food I have is Richard Dawkins most recent book The Greatest Show On Earth. While about as nutritious as the rice-cake I snacked on earlier, it is a bit more expensive and more valuable to me still bound and legible. I find it quite enjoyable. And I read it far too long tonight because I must wake up at 5:15 to get off the train in Goa.