Movement

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From Chennai Central Station I went north for 27 hours to Howrah Station Calcutta (go look at a map; it's a long way). In between there were states and languages that I didn't recognize.

In the beginning of what was to become a definite pattern of my traveling I found that, in between, there were also friends easily made through Hindi. As the train hawkers did rounds through the cars yelling "Samosas garam" and "soup soup tomato soup" (each in their unique and much-practiced hawkers' voices) they lingered longer than necessary at my berth, asknig me twice if I wanted cold drinks just so that they could hear me say "nahi chahiye."

Eventually a few of them gave up the pretense of trying to sell me anything and decided to just sit themselves down on my berth to chat. This immediately earned me the disapproving looks of my fellow second class AC passengers, but I was more than willing to sacrifice my supposed higher standing just to have somebody friendly to practice my Hnidi with. It had been a long time since I had had a full conversation in Hnidi and there were times that I was truly ashamed of the tuti-phuti crap that was coming out of my mouth, but with the help of my own small army of plaid-vested pakora-hawking men my Hindi was functinoal by the time the Howrah Mail train crossed into Orissa.

I mostly slept, read and wrote my way up the east coast of the country until the train dumped me unceremoniously into the wet heat of Calcutta. There my day was spent wiping sweat off my face as I ran about town getting my travel permit to Sikkim, passport photos, bus tickets, and generally buying time before my overnight bus to Gangtok. Unwilling to pay the abusrd fares between stops (and un-burdened by luggage that I had left at the travel agency) I found myself wandering the back alleys of Calcutta and resolving that one day I would stop mis-treating this city as simply a point of transit. I think I might actually like Calcutta given the chance to properly explore it--a city with more personality than Delhi but enough of a big-city feel to make me feel capable of invisible and independent exploration.

That night at the bus stop I found myself in another Hindi-speaking friendship, this time with the two managers of DEY Bus Travels. This friendship turned out be functional beyond language practice as my new friend Mohammed took it upon himself to make me more than comfortable. Before our departure he bought me chai and, when I took my seat, he sent the bus-driver back to shuffle the window arrangement so that I would have my own open window. The bus left at 7:45 with my two friends waving me off on what was supposed to be a twelve hour journey.

Forty-five minutes later I opened my eyes to the oddly familiar sight of Mohammad and his friend standing at the bus station. Hadn't we just left here? There were confused murmurs among the passengers and mechanics were descending upon our back tires, but nobody was moving (perhaps out of the hope that this would be just a short delay). Mohammad waved at me to get of the bus, and I was thankful to have the inside information (and a reason to get off the sticky warm bus). While our brakes were being fixed by the on-demand mechanics of the bus terminal, Mohammad bought me coke, let me use his phone to call my mom and showed me pictures of his wife and children. I seem to have found the (for-the-time-being) profitable combination of being a Hindi-speaking American female who travels alone (although clearly there are also downsides to this profile, but at the time I was not yet suffering them).

By the time I was back on the bus Mohammad and his friend (whose name I can't for the life of me remember) had made me promise to come back to Calcutta and spend a day with their famlies. I told them I would return with my husband (a fictional character I had invented for the purposes of clarifying exactly where I stood vis-a-vis all of my new male friends) and settled back into my seat, where Mohammad again sent the driver to re-re-arrange the windows and reach across my lap to personally pull the lever that put my seat into recliner position. Having achieved the height of luxury that one can achieve on a bus that has questionably-fuctioning brakes (and with the awkwardness of all the other passengers wondering why I--the only foreigner on the bus--deserved such treatment), I settled into a rather unremarkable and unpleasant journey.

Three food stops and sixteen hours later (twelve isn't so different from sixteen, after all) we reached Siliguri, a hot transport hub on the West Bengal side of the Sikkim border. Luckily for my tired and luggage burdened body the jeeps waiting to go to Gangtok were no more than fifteen feet from where I had gotten off the bus. It wasn't long before I had found msyefl in another Hindi-forget friendship with Raju, my jeep driver. Although the bags under my eyes were probably heavier than my luggage Raju managed to keep me awake with American rock music (dug up somewhere from the reject pile of the 80s) and his views on humanity.

We left the heat of the West Bengal plains behind and climbed up switchbacks and across bridges into the fog of Sikkim. After one food stop (any journey by road seems to be marked by food stops in this country) during which Raju dragged me to the dark upstaris establishment patronized by thali-shoveling middle-aged men and staffed by wide-eyed children in dreary clothing, we finally arrived in Gangtok. It had been 55 hours since I had pulled away from Chennai Central and I don't think I've ever been happier simply to arrive somewhere.

One of Raju's friends took me in his taxi to teh Modern Central Lodge, the place wehre travelers in Gangtok stay to meet other travelers (I had decided that on this round of traveling alone in India I might actualyl make an effort to meet people, which turned out to be a wonderful decision that stimulated all kinds of schemes and plans).

My plans to shower and go to bed by seven were foiled by a two hour wait for hot water in my three-dollar-a-night room. After 55 hours, however, two hours seemed like nothing and by the end I had managed to make friends wiht the gaggle of 20-something (I limit my age-guessing here to the nearest decade) boys who staffed the guest house. They all claimed they had never before met a foreigner who spoke Hindi, and I was quickly beseiged with the usual questions that people didn't seem shy to ask in their own language: "Where did you learn Hindi?" "Why are you traveling alone?" "Are you married?" "Is there really a Hotel California?"

But there was another pattern of friendship-making on the horizon. While my Hindi-speaking friends allowed me to root myself in the language and pace of wherever I happened to be at the moment (on a train to North India, in a jeep connecting the plains of North India and the mountains or, finally, in the mountains where Hindi was only a second or third language) I was soon to start making traveller friends who would fill my head with notions of other countries and the idea that I would have to keep moving--because the world is such a big place to explore.

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