Smita

Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

Smita wakes with a start on the station platform where she had dozed off, with Lalita curled tight against her. In the first light of dawn, hundreds of people are running, carrying everything with them, in the direction of a train that has just pulled in. Frantically, Smita wakes her small daughter.

Come!

The train is here!

Quickly!

Hurriedly, she gathers their things – she has slept on their bag to protect it from thieves – then clutches her daughter’s hand and hurries towards the third-class carriages. The crowd throngs the platform, a great wave of people, pushing, and elbowing and trampling on one another’s feet.

Shouts of Chalo, chalo! ring out everywhere.

Come on, come on!

Smita grabs the handle of the carriage door. The crowd presses hard all around them, she clings on tight. She tries to get Lalita on board before her, she’s afraid the little girl will suffocate in the crush of desperate passengers. Suddenly, she is seized with doubt, and turns to the gaunt man beside her. Is this the train to Chennai? she shouts over the din. No! he replies, this one’s going to Jaipur, you shouldn’t trust the signs, they are often wrong.

Smita pulls Lalita back and fights her way through the crowd, like a salmon swimming upriver.

After several journeys back and forth across the station, a wealth of contradictory information and one – vain – attempt to ask a station official, Smita and Lalita find the train to Chennai, at last. They climb into the blue sleeper-class carriage. The dilapidated interior has no air conditioning; cockroaches scuttle on the floor. Mother and daughter squirm their way into the packed carriage and find a tiny space on a bench seat. Twenty people have already piled into the space that measures barely a few square metres. Overhead, more men and women occupy the narrow upper bunks. Their legs dangle in mid-air. It will be a long journey: over 2,000 kilometres, crammed in like this. Theirs is a local service, cheaper than the express. It trundles along slowly and stops everywhere. A journey across India, what madness, thinks Smita. The whole of humanity is on the move, piled one on top of the other, suffocating, exhausted, in these third-class carriages. Everywhere there are families, babies, old people sitting on the floor or standing, packed so tight they can barely move.

The first hours of the journey pass without difficulty. Lalita is asleep; Smita dozes in a half-conscious, dream-like state. Suddenly, the little girl wakes, desperate to use the toilet. Smita tries to make her way through with her daughter to the end of the carriage. It’s a dangerous business, difficult not to trample the many passengers sitting on the floor. She takes care, but treads on someone by accident, and earns a furious, shouted tirade.