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Traveling Through India on the Himsagar Express

This was not a luxury train, but even here, as in Indian society as a whole, the distinctions between the haves and the have-nots were clear.

He had arrived there the previous day after a long journey by another train from his home in Jharkhand, in eastern India, and was now on his way south to Vijayawada, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, about eight hundred miles away, to find work in construction. Today, news reports from the country of my birth cover everything from its scientists landing a spacecraft on the moon and victories in cricket to cow vigilantes lynching Muslim men on suspicion of eating beef and horrific accounts of violence to women. But even on ordinary trains like the Himsagar, as in Indian society as a whole, the distinctions between the haves and the have-nots were clear: I was in an air-conditioned car, with an assigned sleeping berth, suffering only from filthy toilets and close intimacy with loud passengers; travellers like Ganesh Rajwar and Pankaj Kumar were in the unreserved compartment, packed in like people fleeing some devastating catastrophe.

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