It’s getting colder. And quieter.
Before long, the primary sound enveloping my hearing is the hollow metal clanging of the sleeper train as it rumbles along its familiar tracks, ringing out into the dark Rajasthani night.
I am squished along one of the side berths of an SL Sleeper coach. I’m sharing a lightly-cushioned teal-coloured collapsible bench, with a young fair-skinned Indian man. He has a light beard.
My guess is he’s in his early thirties. He has this amusing tendency to crack into a smile at the smallest thing. In fact, his lips look like they are permanently on the verge of breaking into a smile- the edges of his mouth poised and waiting for the signal to curve upwards.
My legs are packed closely together at the distant end of the bench, next to his shoulders. His feet are beside me. Apparently this is how aisle passengers sleep in these trains. Hm.
What is a Rajasthani night?
I don’t know, I’m not quite sure.
But looking out through the window right now, into the vast expanse of densely-occupied buildings now only vaguely visible in the dimming evening light,
I can imagine the people indoors- with their flowing saris and Sikh turbans and marigold necklaces and the countless numinous Hindu statuettes decorating their homes,
moving about in their rooms, wading through the piquant vapours of burning incense, speaking to one another in Hindi or possibly whatever Rajasthani dialect is spoken in the region currently whizzing by the train window,
and it’s obvious to me that this is not just any night.
At least not for me who is having this specific experience for the first time, No.
This is a Rajasthani night.
Whatever that means.
I’ve got some snacks in my backpack.
I have no idea what they’re called. I was on my way to the train station earlier this evening, chiding myself about the Mumbai flight I missed a few days ago, and emphasising that I needed to get to the train station on time and not miss another booked trip.
I was walking by this shop that had a bunch of Indian men frying some stuff in oil, next to show-glasses displaying a number of different pastries and snacks. The snack names were all in indecipherable Hindi, next to their prices in Indian Rupees – a currency that had begun to make some quantitative meaning to me over the past couple of days being here.
I recognized one of the snacks from a few days earlier: Small smooth roundish brown balls of whatever- I had no idea. Some mysterious Indian flour? Very sweet and juicy and sticky. Like they were soaked in some sort of transparent syrup.
I tried it for the first time a few days ago, and I loved it. A classmate from college saw my story on Instagram and expressed excitement about Indian snacks. He mentioned “jalebis” and “gulab jamuns” and described the experience of biting into one, as being “heavenly”. I googled the names and – “gulab jamun” – that’s the sweet round brown ball that’s soaked in sticky syrup. That’s the thing I liked a lot.
I bought a number of gulab jamuns, along with other stuff- some sweet cakes which had been cut up into small cuboids – all good stuff. Some were more brittle- like cake. Some others were more chewy – like gum, but not so much.
I paid for the snacks, stuffed them into a transparent food storage bowl I had in my backpack, and continued on my urgent expedition to the Udaipur train station.
The storage bowl has proven very useful so far. Earlier this week I was attending an expense-paid conference at Radisson Blu in Udaipur. At some point it occurred to me that I could stash a bunch of snacks from the breakfast buffet, to nibble on later. It seemed like a pretty sensible thing to do.
So at breakfast I took a bunch of small cakes and other sweet stuff, put them in a ceramic plate and took them up to my hotel room. There would still be some snacks at lunch and dinner, but the breakfast snacks were special and weren’t repeated later in the day. So it was good to have my personal stash I could access at a later time.
After the conference I still had a bunch of snacks squished into my bowl from the last day, and so while I went around the city of Udaipur, hopping between backpacker hostels and meeting people and generally exploring the city, I would snack on items from my stash and re-immerse myself in the gustatory experience of the just-concluded conference.
Plus, it took a while before I figured out what Indian bank ATMs worked with my Nigerian debit card, so it was helpful to have something to chew on while I tried to access the money in my account.
The train experience has been fine so far. The people seem chill. I’ve generally found Indians very friendly, since I got here.
From the young airport official guy trying to chat me up in Hindi during my arrival at the Mumbai airport, to random people helping out with directions and generally engaging in friendly conversation, to some random guy in a festival crowd gesticulating and yelling “Hip Hop” to me (apparently black skin has the tendency to be associated with Hip Hop culture), to a group of shisha-smoking friends at a restaurant welcoming me into their circle as they rolled and passed around a glowing stick of hashish.
They also stare a lot. It seems there were very few black people in Udaipur, and so I really stood out. I wonder how different Mumbai is going to be.
I expect it to be more multicultural- being a major Indian city, and so maybe people will stare less given that it’s possibly more racially heterogenous, but I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.
Like yesterday or so, I was in a conversation with Kunal – the manager at “Raahi”, a backpacker hostel where I spent a few days. One of the things he was telling me about, was how skin complexion varied with latitude in India. So in the northernmost parts of India- like Kashmir, people were very light-skinned. Practically Caucasian. But further down in the country, the people got darker due to being located closer to the equator. I looked on the map, and Mumbai is significantly lower in latitude than Udaipur. So I expect the people there to be somewhat darker. I guess we’ll see.
Kunal also mentioned that there’s this inside joke among Indians where the lighter-skinned Indians tease the darker-skinned ones about them being more “fried”. Haha. That’s interesting to hear. He says some people will have a teaseful reaction to me- especially the darker ones – possibly in Mumbai, because with me they’ll be encountering someone who is “even more fried” than they are.
Hahaha. I wonder what that is going to be like.
The train makes a stop. Some new people come on board. This coach was pretty scanty when we left Udaipur. It’s gradually been filling up as new people come on board at various stops.
End of Part 1.
Feel free to share your thoughts! 🙂🙂🙂🙂
Header Image: Picture out of my seat window. Somewhere along the trip.
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