Tale of a wagon tragedy

One of the ways of reaching Coimbatore from Bangalore is by train. You could also go by air, or by road. But if you'd rather sleep by night and reach your destination just as the dawn broke -a crack in a blueblack shell-fresh and full of cheer, the thing to do would be to hop on to the Kurla-Coimbatore Express. which clangs into Bangalore at 10.20 pm.
For long you may not have travelled by train, certainly not by sleeper class. You recall the days of childhood-that mythical time when fathers were perpetually enveloped in blue smoke from Panama cigarettes and mothers squeezed buns under their hair so their heads looked monstrously crowned-when half of the summer vacation was spent on train journeys to and from your village. You got off the steep steps of the soot-laden train, visibly darker and older for the trip. As you crossed the tracks, you looked back at the black, massive steam engine breathing out plumes white and hard in the night air like a mutant-horse and the compartments behind awash and floating in a dim, dirty yellow light.
Well, the fact is nothing much has changed, except that a diesel engine has replaced the steam one. You can have that grimy, wretched romance again at a reasonable price. The Bangalore - Coimbatore fare, for instance, is a little over 300 rupees. But minus the nostalgia, the trip is a nightmare.
The compartment is a map of chaos. A cartographic catastrophe . There are people standing and sleeping, sitting and sleeping, lying and sleeping. There is the inevitable fat man sprawled out on the top berth, snoring like a cathedral organ in pain, half of him out of place, a mass of flesh miraculously hovering in the air over a bunch of brittle children sleeping on the floor. As ever, there are more passengers than berths, most of whose numbers are missing. The few that are numbered are written in a childish hand and erratically, as if the man has slipped in and out of consciousness in the process.
Really, inside it is a familiar country. Some fans work compulsively; some fans don't work at all. Some windows don't close. Some don't open. There is no water, but there are puddles in the corridor sloshing with the movement of the train, which means once, long ago, there was water on this part of the planet.
There are four toilets in the compartment, but Dante's purgatorial signage is strangely missing, Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here. If you braved the dread rising in you like a wave and ventured forth, you will see the cracked floorboards caked over with crap. The plumbing is wrapped up in wires so it doesn't fall apart. But it is really caution bordering on hope, because there is no water, not a drop. This particular train is coming in from Bombay. So, clearly, the natives have done without basic facilities for over a day.
As for you, you return, your bladder unrelieved, to your berth and wonder why an emerging superpower can't have vacuum toilets on its trains, which apparently are running at a profit. You do more. You admire the genius of the Indian State that turns railway travel into a scatological circus. The State as crap-artist .
You are an optimist. You see no reason why trains in India can't be cleaner, why the Common Man-even if he is genetically programmed to prefer a LCD TV to a clean toilet-can't travel like he belonged to a society that can send a rocket to the moon whenever there is money to spare.
You lie there and think, staring in the dark at the berth above, that even as you thought, 1.5 crore people crisscrossing the holy, Vedic land in 900 trains daily are spraying crap at over 100 kilometres per hour across the length and breath of the nation. The nation through which Ganges flows! The nation of pure vegetarian food! And purer ghee! The nation of Brahmins who bathed thrice a day! The nation of perpetual hand washers!
Overhead, the sturdy black beetles of fans whir unstoppably through the pestilential air. You want fresh air. You tug at the glass window. It doesn't open. Ah, never engage with recalcitrance. You give up and look out. There is a full moon rising through the trees like a frisbee. It looks clean, white, beautiful. Another country. And you know for sure the train you are on is not going anywhere near it, no matter how fast it moves.