ABSTRACT
The rail journey from Abbottabad to Bangalore took five days, not simply because there were no expresses on that route, nor even because it covers 1,550 miles (London-Sofia) as the crow flies, but because we again stopped at station restaurants for our main meals. It was tedious; the countryside was rarely varied enough to hold the interest, though my eye was caught somewhere near Nagpur where wagons were being shunted, one at a time, by three men who pushed them. Our meal stops marked the passage of time. The further south we went, the stickier it became, and even the punkah-boys had scarcely enough energy to swing the large punkah fan, hung from the ceiling and swung by a string pulled by hand or toe, enough to produce the semblance of a breeze. I was lucky to reach Madras, a notoriously sweltering city, at night, and to catch an early train next morning for the remaining 400 miles to Bangalore - a far more interesting trip, with small hillside stations showing their polysyllabic names in Tamil as well as Roman script.
