The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  Santosh led me out of the room, to a tiny antechamber with a corroded steel door with a refrigerator-like handle. He pulled it open. The smell of death made me gag. I almost vomited. A dark room. Bodies lay on shelves. A crumpled, bent, contorted figure lay in a pool of liquid on the floor. Meat. Human meat caught in the mad wheels of the daily grind. A commute that chewed you up and spit you out, so mammoth an assembly line of human movement going so fast that not everyone could keep up.

  The crows cawed. Santosh shrugged. “One of them, a man, his whole right side is gone; his liver is gone.”

  A call came; a doctor was heading over from the hospital to watch Santosh perform the postmortem on Balkishan Kakoram. He threw on a plastic apron and some rubber gloves and we went outside. He finished quickly. Fifteen minutes later he came out and we squatted in the alley and drank tea, and father and son smoked another bowl of hash. Three small boys played a game of cricket with a chipped bat against the mortuary wall. “He went for his job and didn’t reach his office. The train came into VT station at nine-thirty this morning and he jumped off but he jumped the wrong way and his ankle got caught and he broke it and fell and hit his head.” Father and son were close; they leaned on each other, bumped bodies, held hands, draped their arms around each other. And they lived next door to the gruesome place. “He fell hard; his brain was full of blood.” Sanjay was twenty-five and would take over from his father, who’d been conducting this grim business for twenty-eight years. “I can do ten a day,” Sanjay said, taking a long draw off the pipe. “But some bodies come in decomposed and there are many maggots and gangrene and my father has to do it. I can’t. The bodies smell so bad I faint.”

  Another round of the pipe; Nasirbhai knew his stuff, knew how to make people talk. “But it is hard, you can’t bear it,” said Santosh. “Any normal person would faint within minutes.”

  “We drink together,” said Sanjay.

  “I must eat after a postmortem,” said Santosh. “Meat. Lots of meat and drink!” They jostled each other, laughed loudly. But it was a mask. “Without drink,” said Santosh, “you cannot do this job.”

  “When I travel on the train,” Sanjay said, taking a long hit off the pipe, “I am very cautious.”

  IT WAS TIME FOR ME to leave Mumbai; I wanted more crowds and decided I’d push on to Bangladesh via a train to Kolkata. Nasirbhai said he’d get my ticket, and late that afternoon I hopped on the back of his motorcycle and we ripped through the streets of Colaba. Every streetcorner had groups of men and boys lounging, sitting on cars and motorcycles and curbs, and Nasirbhai roared from corner to corner, pausing, talking, introducing me. There was an army here, just sitting and waiting and watching, and soon Nasirbhai had them getting me a ticket. I paid in advance, and he said my ticket would appear at my hotel that evening. “Don’t worry,” Nasirbhai said. “You will get your ticket. They wouldn’t dare not come through.”

  Which they did, and at five the next morning I threaded past rows of bodies wrapped in blankets and scarves lying on the sidewalk, to VT. The waiting room was a mass, a formless huddle of color and sleeping bodies. There were hundreds, all packed close into a square, touching; since Indonesia I had this increasing picture of the world as a place with masses and masses of people huddled together, touching, always touching each other. Nobody seemed to mind; they expected it, felt comfortable with it—craved it, in fact. I had asked for fourth class, but it turned out my ticket was in third, technically known as non-air-conditioned three tier, which was an open space of eight bunks. The train was battered, dented, scraped, with bars on the windows and swept clean, as all things in India are. I showed my ticket to people and they pointed me onward, until I found the right place, which was soon filled with five of us, as men chained and padlocked their bags to steel wire rings beneath the bottom benches. We pulled out at six on the dot and fifteen minutes later hit another station, where more people piled on, three women in yellow and purple saris, with a small barefoot girl, squeezed onto the bench next to me. A man asked to see my ticket; suddenly he started yelling at another man sitting on a bench with his legs extended. He yelled back; an explosion erupted; the man grabbed the seated guy’s knapsack and threw it to the ground, grabbed the guy’s lapels, pushed him violently. They both sat, fuming, and the young one said to me, in English, “This is ridiculous!” We passed fields, the shiny brown backsides of people relieving themselves, some of the 600 million Indians without toilets. Cattails. The sky white. Rice fields between dikes. A searing, dusty wind blew in through the window.

  Someone shook my shoulder. I woke with a start, lost for a minute, unsure of where I was. The conductor, in a black blazer and white pants. “Ticket,” he said. I handed it to him. He studied it. “Your ticket is not right!” He pointed to the man who’d had the violent outburst. “I will reaffirm and return,” he said, marching off. Fifteen minutes later he came back. “Your ticket is affirmed,” he said, “but it is not for here. You must move.”

  I pulled my bags from under the bench. People stared, as I squeezed and bumped through crowded aisles down six cars.

  “Are you Washington?” said a man with a gray mustache, glasses, and gray pinstriped slacks, his bare feet wiggling in the air.

  My ticket said where I lived instead of my name.

  “You are late, but you are welcome!”

  I squeezed in. Directly across from me sat a young couple, she in gauzy saffron sari and shawl that covered her hair, with a gold nose ring; he with a small beard and thick, heavy lips. They eyed me suspiciously, four brown eyes burrowing into me. The train rattled and shook, the noise roaring, wind pouring in, sometimes thick with the smoke of burning trash and burning fields. Goats munched on stubble. Cotton fields and bullock carts, a now blue sky, the endless fields and villages of mud brick of the motherland passing by hour after hour. A stream of beggars slid, skidded, and shuffled by. A man with no legs. A boy with no toes, his foot just a formless round ball. A man with no eyes in a soiled dhoti, led by a withered-looking woman singing a haunting melody. When the man with the mustache gave a coin, so did I. Chai sellers. Sellers of newspapers and magazines. I quickly became covered in dust and grime. At noon a man in a uniform came by and rattled away in fast Hindi. “Do you want lunch,” asked Mustache.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He returned a few minutes later with paper plates of dal and naan and a vegetable curry, but there wasn’t enough to go around. Mustache insisted I take his. I tried to refuse, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I tucked into Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, even though reading on trains or buses often felt unnerving. Books sweep you up, take you away, transport you. I read Philip Marlowe’s gritty tromp through 1930s Los Angeles and stopped and looked up and felt totally lost. I wasn’t in 1930s Los Angeles or my living room or on my front porch. I was on a train hurtling through India. Suddenly I felt the dirt and heat and wind, and an utter aloneness, strangers crowded against me. It was one thing to be in it constantly, to be focused and present, another to forget it and myself for a few minutes, and then to be suddenly conscious of where I actually was—the puddles on the bathroom floor, so many eyes staring at me, all alone rattling through India. Which sent me into overwhelming feelings of alienation and disconnect, feelings that had been slowly growing with every mile, especially since Indonesia. Desperate to talk to someone, to touch, to feel love and human warmth—that was the flipside of my wandering. No matter whom I talked to in my travels, whether it was Moussa on the train in Mali or Fechnor in Mombasa or Daud on the Siguntang, I couldn’t kid myself. They were fleeting connections, shallow and temporary and no substitute for the real thing. As the steel train clacked and shook and rattled and a man with a leg twisted at some impossible angle hobbled by on wooden crutches, I wondered what I was doing there. For the first time I wondered if I’d been fleeing from human connection itself. If that’s why I felt happy on muddy dirt roads in the farthest Amazon—not the escape from bills and deadlines, the mundane details of everyda
y life—but from the emotional tentacles of human intimacy. Out here I could miss my family, my crazy parents and my friends. I could fantasize that I was a whole person who was just away for a job. There must be a reason, I had to admit, that I couldn’t stay home, that I always sought another adventure, that the idea of spending five months away from home on the world’s worst conveyances felt so good, that escape was so much part of my life. It was a stark realization. It hit me hard. It crashed down on me, swallowed me up. I scribbled in my notepad: I wanted to be known, not just for a few days by strangers passing me on conveyances. The truth was, I had a fear that if people really did know me, they’d flee, and I hadn’t felt known or understood by anybody for a long time because I’d hidden myself from them, kept them away. I looked around. Poor old Fechnor in Africa, still sad over the charcoal seller with trading in her blood; he and I, we were both hiding in places where no one could ever really know us.

  By nine that night I was rattled. I had been sitting bolt upright on a hard bench by the open window for fifteen hours. Every muscle and bone in my body ached. I was hungry. The woman across from me winced, rubbed her stomach in distress, picked her nose. Her husband spat out the window, a tiny drop hitting my face, showed her his gums. And I was cold now and covered with a layer of black dust, my hair stiff and gritty.

  I thought of Santoso holding my hand on Buru and how good that had felt. Maybe it was all starker in places like India and Indonesia or Africa, where family was everything, where there was no personal space, where there was no being alone, where everyone felt deeply connected to their home. Could I reconnect?

  Couples rarely publicly embraced in India; there was no such thing as a public kiss even in Bollywood. But the staring couple across from me sat close; her head lolled on his shoulder as she fell asleep to the shaking train and the heat.

  Mustache peeled an orange, broke it in two, and handed me half.

  Emergency crews scoured a turbulent river today for more than 500 passengers missing and feared dead after an overcrowded ferry capsized in southern Bangladesh. Strong currents hampered the search for the triple-deck ferry, which sank Tuesday night with about 750 people on board, where three rivers—the Padma, Meghna and Dakatia—meet. The ferry capsized as it approached a terminal at Chandpur, 40 miles south of the capital, Dhaka.

  —New York Times, Thursday, July 10, 2003

  EIGHT

  I Can Only Cry My Eyes

  “OH MY GOD! This plane is so old!”

  “It smells like sweat!”

  “I’ve got some perfume.”

  This plane was a Biman Airways Fokker F-28 headed from Kolkata to Dhaka, Bangladesh, and I was boarding in the midst of the Chennai American International School’s girls’ soccer team, a pod of energetic seventeen-year-olds in sweatpants en route to a soccer tournament in Dhaka. The plane didn’t look too bad, I thought. The carpet was worn thin, my seatback didn’t recline, the upholstery was horrid orange and green flowers, but it appeared as airworthy as any other. Sitting next to me was a young Bangladeshi with a bouffant, pointy black shoes, long sideburns, and an embroidered shirt with white snaps, who worked for Iran Air in Dubai and was going back home to see his family. His wife, as it turned out, worked for Biman.

  I asked him how many planes Biman had. He had to think. “Working? Six right now. They have many others, but corruption is the problem. But these Fokkers are good.”

  “Is it safe?”

  He threw up his hands, tilted his head toward the sky. “God knows!”

  I can’t say I’d ever had much of a desire to go to Bangladesh, but its ferries were the stuff of legend. There were a lot of them and they sank. All the time. The statistics were horrific, some 20,000 ferries plying 24,000 kilometers of inland waters, only 8,000 of which were registered, and of those, only 20 percent were officially “fit to operate.” More people died on ferries in Bangladesh than on ferries anywhere else—some 1,000 a year (between 1904 and 2003 there were exactly zero passenger fatalities on U.S. ferries). Between 1995 and 2005 a ferry sank nearly once a month, the vast majority from overloading and collision. On April 20, 1986, 200 died when the Atlas Star sank in the Sitalakya River. A month later 600 drowned when the Samia overturned in the Meghna River. The grim list went on and on, and often the actual death toll wasn’t even known, since no one ever knew how many people were on the ships in the first place. Five hundred when the Salahuddin-2 went down in the Meghna in 2003. Four hundred dead in the Meghna near Chandpur. The situation was so bad the minister of shipping had thrown up his hands and said, “Ultimately it’s up to passengers to decide not to board ferries that are too crowded.”

  It was one thing to read about Bangladesh and those ferries, another to see it and experience it firsthand. After checking into my hotel, I persuaded the bellman, named Taz, to hit the docks with me—I had no guidebook for Bangladesh, no map, no idea of anything beyond the macabre numbers. Dhaka, though, was like the human equivalent of those National Geographic specials in which a camera is inserted into a beehive or termite nest to reveal a teeming sea of bodies, so many you can’t fit them in your mind. I had never seen so many people—154 million in a landmass the size of Iowa, a population density of more than one thousand people per square kilometer. It was 15 kilometers to Sadar Ghat, the port, and it took us an hour and a half by taxi. “In a few years,” said Taz, “we’ll only be able to walk again; there are just too many cars.” We sat parked in traffic without moving for ten minutes at a stretch. “Look at this building,” he said, pointing to a hulk of demolished concrete. “It used to be twenty-four stories. But it was illegal, built too close to the road. The government said it had to be torn down, but the builder was a famous man and the prime minister said, ‘If you pay me it can stay.’ That’s how things work here. But he wouldn’t pay; I don’t know why. So the army came and broke it. Fifteen people died in the breaking.” We squeezed into and through the streets of Old Dhaka. A man, stark naked, walked by. Hand-painted wooden carts piled twenty feet high with barrels and boxes, PVC pipe. Tens of thousands of bicycle rickshaws, each a work of folk art, painted with elaborate peacocks, rockets blasting to space, Dollywood film stars with big beating hearts and enormous eyes, and plastered with old CDs and mirrors. Buses that looked like they’d been taken through a car wash that used sledgehammers, steel claws, and mud instead of buffers and water. Ancient wooden carriages drawn by two ponies and piled with people.

  But the river. The Burganga River fulfilled my image of a romantic eastern port like nowhere I’d ever seen. You could almost walk across it on the thousands of wooden pinnaces powered by a single scull. Boats are form and function, their vernacular—if untainted by fiberglass, as these weren’t—are design perfection borne of local water knowledge. Seventy-foot bulk carriers with high bows and waists nearly at the waterline puttered past equally graceful small wooden water taxis packed with women in blue and gold and red saris. Crumbling slums elbowed hard against the banks, 500,000 souls, our boatmen said, in the immediate area. Heat and smoke. Laundry drying on the concrete banks. Incomprehensible numbers of people. The streets had been choking and close and acrid with exhaust; the river was flowing with life, open, a breeze riffling silver-brown water. And, of course, big white steel ferries, human freighters really, that lined the banks by the hundreds. They were battered and dented and carried thousands. Three thousand in the smaller ones, 5,000 in the larger ones. They plied short passage routes and I wanted to go as far south as I could, so Taz and the boatmen directed us up the river, and we bumped against the most fantastic craft I’d ever seen.

  The PS Ostrich carried an odd nickname—the Rocket. She was 235 feet long, thirty feet wide, a double paddle-wheeled ship weighing 638 tons and built by the British Raj in Calcutta in 1929. It was two stories of rusting, dented steel hung with burlap and an official capacity of 150 tons of cargo and 900 passengers, which regularly swelled to 3,000. A tall Bangladeshi wearing a plaid madras lunghi and a white muscle T-shirt showed us around.
Long and low-slung, it had first-class cabins opening off an ornately carved wood-paneled dining area and lounge; second class was in the stern, each cabin with a small sink and two bunks; the masses slept on broad but shaded decks. We wound around a labyrinth of stairways and over rooftops to a concrete room in which sat five serious-looking men with betel-stained teeth, who discussed my passage to a place called Khulna, twenty-eight hours downriver.

  “What food do you eat?”

  “Any food,” I said. “Bangladeshi is good.” They nodded.

  “Do you need a special room, or can a Bangladesh man share a room with you?”

  “No problem,” I said.

  “OK,” they said, “you are most welcome to come. We had a foreigner once who needed special food and his own special place. That is a problem.”