Jaipur: Just getting there

Few journeys feel more victorious than the autorickshaw ride from the Old Delhi railway station to one's hotel, having returned from a solo trip to Jaipur. Sitting in the back seat, bouncing around on the half-paved roads, gazing out at the clogged and sunset-golden city in rush hour, let me tell you: the Red Fort has never looked redder, the sari-clad ladies on the backs of motorcycles have never looked more beautiful, the age-lined faces of shoe shiners on the street have never looked more delicate. It was kind of a miracle that I got to Jaipur and back, given that I've never travelled in this country alone and don't speak a lick of Hindi. (Okay, that's an exaggeration: it wasn't *really* a miracle, and I do speak five words of Hindi.)

I wish I had had the courage to take a picture of the scene at the Old Delhi railway station, where I arrived on Friday afternoon scathing from the insulting, but all too understandable, experience of being wildly ripped off by an autorickshaw driver. The double fare that he charged me and the lies about the "closed roads" I wouldn't have minded so much if he hadn't snapped a few pictures of me with his cell phone as I got out of the back seat. He was so young and eager, and I hate to look permanently pissed off (as I have on so many trips here) -- not to mention that five dollars is nothing to pay, even when it should be two -- so I tried to smile and be nice. I only wish there were a kind, respectful way to let the driver know that while I don't mind paying a little bit more because I'm a foreigner, lying to me and taking pictures of me makes me feel uncomfortable and unsafe. Suggestions are welcome.

Anyway, it all kind of melted away when I walked into the railway station. It's this amazing place. "Tons of people" doesn't even begin to describe it. It's more like tons of everything, everywhere: whole families sleeping on the floor of the main hall and on the platforms, people pushing and shoving in ticket lines a mile long, chaos in the parking lot with taxis and rickshaws driving every which way, animals scrounging for food, vast piles of luggage (all calmly balanced on the heads of coolies), fuzzy announcements over the loudspeaker in an indecipherable mix of English and Hindi, chai-wallahs and samosa-wallahs and cutlet-wallahs and special-coffee-wallahs and Mountain-Dew-wallahs hawking their goods, bright saris and jeweled salwar kameez and tight jeans (faded in all the wrong places) abundant, and one old woman inadvertently exposing a breast as she stuggled to balance a load of vegetables on her head while descending the staircase on the wrong side. The best part of all is that no one -- not a single person -- harrassed, bothered, or even noticed the little white girl who was totally lost and confused looking for her train to Jaipur.

Finally I found the giant board that listed all of the departing trains and their platforms. Thank goodness I can read Devanagiri script (thank you, Sanskrit!) because the electronic chart kept on switching from English to Hindi. Platform 16, however, turned out to be more elusive than expected. I scoured the station for a sign to Platform 16, but all the signs and overpasses only led to Platforms 1-15. I felt like Harry Potter in King's Cross, looking for Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.

"Bhai sahib," I said to one chai seller, "ek question hain. Platform sixteen kahan hain?" (Brother-sir, there is one question. Platform 16 where is?)

"Aage, aage, beti," (Over there, over there, little girl) he said, and pointed to an entirely different branch of the railway station -- one I hadn't even noticed before. So I walked down the street and into Old Delhi railway station, Part II.

Finally I saw a sign for my beloved Platform 16. The train, the Delhi-Ahmedabad Ashram Express, was waiting right there. The next challenge was finding my coach, A1, before the train left the station. This I did, after walking the length of the train and growing progressively more worried that my coach didn't exist. Thankfully it was at the very end of the train. I grabbed a three-rupee cup of tea from the chai man on the platform, boarded the train, and found my berth. Since the Ashram Express is a sleeper train, each berth has two levels of cushioned lengths on which to lie. Until people actually go to bed, though, all four people in the berth just sit on the two lower "beds". It's really comfortable. They give you pillows and blankets.

I shared my compartment with an older couple -- he a Muslim in traditional garb, she a Hindu reading a biography of the popular guru-saint Sai Baba. (One of those "only in India" sights.) There was also a younger, rounder man who alternately read film gossip magazines and yelled in English at coworkers over his cell phone for calling meetings without his permission. I fell asleep as soon as the train started to move. A little while later, the young guy poked me and used his good English to tell me that the old man had bad knees, and would I agree to take the upper bed so that he could use the bottom one? Of course. So I climbed up there and fell asleep again. First, however, I set the alarm on my cell phone so that my worst India nightmare wouldn't come true: missing my stop on the train. I shouldn't have worried -- it was so freezing in there with the air conditioning blasting right in my face that I woke up every twenty minutes on the dot.

When I got to Jaipur, my friend S was there to meet me at the station. Bless her, this tiny American woman wearing a traditional salwar kameez with gigantic purple patiala pants (otherwise known as Aladdin pants). She spewed Hindi at the autorickshaw drivers until they agreed to charge us the regular, non-foreigner-inflated price. And then we rode through the streets of Jaipur in the night until we arrived at her apartment, a spacious place with high ceilings in a quiet, upper-middle class neighborhood. We ate her delicious home-cooked Indian food, watched an episode of "Friends" on her laptop screen, and passed out, exhausted.

I know this isn't really much of an accomplishment, this whole thing, but it sure felt like one to me. More to follow soon, complete with photos this time, about the rest of the weekend.