Forty hours on the Brahmaputra Mail: On a train through India.

“Ever since childhood…I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.”

– Paul Theroux

At eleven pm – forty minutes before we’re due to pull out of Old Delhi station – the power is switched on. White fluorescent light fills our carriage, the trio of ancient fans above each compartment whirring to life.

I’ve only just settled into my upper berth – bags stowed, keys out, little kit I prepared just for these journeys tucked into the mesh pocket on the wall – when my companions begin to arrive.

A tall man named Uttam Singh – who assures me he is “not going,” but is just here to see his brother off – stows his brother’s shoes on the top of a fan.

“Why?” I ask.

“Safety.”

But in his concern for the sneakers, he’s left their laces out and from my perch I can see them dangling dangerously close to the fan’s blades. Damn if they break our only source of cool air before we start moving. I take one shoe and tie the laces into a knot, tuck them below the tongue.

“Careful,” I cluck playfully.

“Thank you,” he says and does the same with the other one.

He hangs around for half an hour, and then says goodbye. Ten minutes later – right on time, amazingly – we pull out. As the lights are flicked off in each cabin, the train rocking us all side to side through the Indian night, I settle into what will be my home for the next forty hours: The Brahmaputra Mail.

Throughout the next two days, as the train carries us from Delhi through the state of Bihar and its acres of iridescent rice paddies, across the muddy rivers of West Bengal and finally into the tea-filled hills of Assam, I find myself remembering exactly why I’d loved traveling through India by train so much last year.

There are the vendors who pass through the carriage all day, filling the air with their rhythmically repetitive calls almost like a chant: “Kana, kana, kana” (kana being Hindi for food), or “Veg pilau, veg biryani, veg pilau, veg biryani,” or – my absolute favorite – “Chai, chai, chai,” which without fail has me reaching for my wallet every time I hear it like one of Pavlov’s dogs.

There are the landscapes I long to lose myself in – in the wind rustling the grass, the fields of ripe corn and rice paddies, the bright-leafed banana trees – and the people who fill them; a man riding his bicycle along a dusty street, a woman moving along a narrow, cattail-lined path, her black umbrella bobbing between the rushes like a toy boat in a bathtub.

And then there are the people I share this journey with, and the makeshift community we form as we all await our final destinations: Osman Aikhan, whose wispy white beard and big belly make him the perfect Indian Santa Claus, the cutest curly-haired baby I’ve ever seen, and an attractive soldier named Pappu Kumar, who buys our compartment cups of tea and shares a pack of moong dal snacks with me.

When I ask Pappu Kumar if the group of men he’s always chatting and laughing with are his friends, he says, “No.” A moment later, he changes his answer: “Travel friends.”

And that’s when it hits me, the answer to a question I’d been asking myself at least once an hour all forty hours:

Why am I on this train?

Why take a train through India when I could’ve easily hopped onto a two-hour flight from Delhi? After all, adding forty hours to my journey to save a mere fifty pounds sounds a bit mad, doesn’t it?

I knew there surely must be something else to it, but it’s Pappu Kumar who nails it for me – it’s about slipping into a world that could only happen on a train, not a plane, where strangers buy each other cups of tea and hold their children and by the end of the journey, can call themselves friends.

Or at least, to borrow Pappu Kumar’s most appropriate phrase, travel friends.