Sunday: Heading homeward, plus a savage crop

Name and shame - Howrah Station rogues gallery

I sleep fitfully and wake with the alarm to hurry out for a tuk-tuk to the station. Mine is a second class "AC chair car" ticket. It looks a bit down-at-heel. but is comfortable enough. It's also a bargain. For less than a fiver, I travel 507 kms. (distance always shown on Indian rail tickets), with bottled water, newspaper, breakfast and lunch included. Serving 1200 warmish IR meals to passengers from the confines of a railway carriage kitchen is an impresive organisational feat. The landscape slips by: more long viaducts over estuaries, more flat and fertile fields, no oxen. This must be the mechanised grain basket of the Bay of Bengal. The gent in the next seat does not speak; he's reading a Bengali book, and I suspect that he doesn't speak English. However, about half an hour before we hit Howrah, he suddenly opens up, says he is a manager with State Bank of India, and engages me in an earnest discussion on Keynsian economics, the Imperial antecedents of Sino-Indian conflict, the self-deception of America, industrialisation in the developing world, and how fortunate we are in Britain to have so much uncrowded space.

My horoscope (Taurus) in the Calcutta Sunday Telegraph magazine says of the week ahead, "It will be a great opportunity to catch up with paperwork and other tedious chores." I'm not sure it will be so great. The front page is given over to colour adverts for up -market apartments in Calcutta's new satellite towns. So the rich will lock themselves in gated developments (with pool, fitness clinic, play facilities and nearby shopping mall) while the rest go rot. Haven't we seen that somewhere before?

Boarding the ferry - space for one more? (yes)

I arrive back in Calcutta with time to kill, so seek out the ferry pontoons opposite Howrah Station and take a boat trip to the furthest ferry point upriver. I'd assumed that the Ganges/Hooghly always flowed "downhill", but of course it's tidal here, and the tide is coming in fast, so it's a speedy trip under the bridgeand beyond. The bathing and (gas-powered) burning ghats are busy; as we pass by, a huddle of mourners gently place someone's ashen remains in the river to float off to eternity (with a brief detour upstream.) At my disembarcation point I stop to watch people bathing and scrubbing laundry on the steps, though the colour of the water, like weak mock turtle soup,  may explain why poorer Calcuttans' shirts are rarely Persil white. 

Washing in the Hooghly

From the ghat, I venture up a suburban street, dragging my little trolley case behind me, but I am hounded by taxi drivers who want to know where I want to go. They have no English, and call in an interpreter, but even he cannot seem to comprehend that I just want to take a walk for its own sake. Walking is what you do to get somewhere, not for pleasure or curiosity. I insist, and continue, photographing people asleep and snoring on a temple floor, in a handcart and at home under a makeshift shelter. It is Sunday afternoon, after all. 

Temple sleepers, Sunday afternoon

But some shops are open for business, and I decide to get my hair cut. The "holiday souvenir haircut" is a tradition of my travels (like buying local toothpaste), a must-have for the return trip. The barber is a suave-looking fellow, bearing some resemblance to Sweeney Todd in the film. He orders me rather abruptly to sit and wait while he finishes shaving himself in front of the mirror. This is a time-consuming process involving twice lathering his face then scraping it off with a steel cutthroat razor. I decide to stick to a simple cut at Rs. 30  (35p.) and not go for the shave (Rs. 20) or other extras on offer like face/head/arm massage, creamed face or scented hair oil. As I have found to my cost before  (see 2 November 2011), engage a barber who has no English at your peril. I hold out some of my longer locks and make scissor actions with my fingers to suggest what length he should cut off, but become more and more anxious as the operation proceeds and the heap of white hair on the floor grows deeper. At one point I gesticulate and call out "No more!", but he shows no mercy, says "No, no!" and knocks my head sideways (his manner is somewhat rough and unsympathetic) to continue the trim. When finished (I give him a big thumbs up to dissuade him from further depredations), he tries to persuade me to let him trim the beard, oil the hair and massage my face with some yellow ointment. Enough. Some 24 hours later, I arrive home in Wymondham. Almost Sara's first words are, "Ooh, I like the haircut!"

I return home via Kuwait and Gatwick. To paraphrase Amitav Ghosh, places don't merely exist, they have to be invented in your imagination. Indians often ask "Do you like my India?" Thus what you've been reading, if you have been, is "my" India. I hope you like it too.