Action stations
On 22 August, a late monsoon storm thrashed Bombay. A weighty 31cm of rain fell. Railway lines into the city vanished under water. Central Station closed. Stranded commuters and travellers dossed wherever they could find shelter. Next day, the sky cleared. The floods drained away as through an invisible giant plughole, and passengers crowded the ticket office to reconfirm their bookings for the Rajdhani Express.
India's premier train lacks the svelte lines of France's TGV or even an InterCity 125, but it has ploughed the same furrow to Delhi and back for 25 years. The 16-hour journey covers 1,070 miles. It's always booked solid. On board, a crew of 56 inspectors, cooks, waiters and cleaners, sometimes hustling, sometimes cat-napping, but always on duty, administers to 750 passengers.
Nasi Bay is a maharaj, the head chef of one of two pantry coaches dishing out food and drink. At the start of the journey he wears his official uniform, a loose blue jacket and cap. By Boroda, roughly halfway, he will have shed this outer skin for the more practical string vest underneath it. And who can blame him? Everyone aboard travels in relative air-conditioned comfort, except for the cooks.
Aged 50, Bay has been a chef for 10 years and a senior cook for 22 years before that. He receives 10,000 rupees (£150) a month. In eight years, he will retire with a pension and a free railway pass. In the meantime, he works his passage - on the Bombay to Delhi leg, he will sleep for two hours between 2am and 4am. With luck, he may snatch a couple of hours more on the journey back.
The Raj Express departs Bombay at 22:30, five hours late. That afternoon, in the central kitchens, assistant catering manager Ashwani Sharma was supervising the preparation of the evening meal. His team, supervisory cooks (grade 3) and assistants (grade 4), is divided into two units: vegetarian and non-vegetarian. "People," he said, "are more vegetarian on Tuesdays." No one can say why.
Privileged first-class veggie-voyagers have a choice of stuffed capsicums or tomatoes, mattar paneer, macaroni, dahls, vegetable curries, patties, tomato or minestrone soup, rice, papads and chappatis. The second-class meat-eater's dinner menu includes shami kebab, chicken masala, chicken curry, buttered chicken, dahl, gobi masala, pullao, pickles, salad, roti and ice-cream.
Every week, the menus are prepared afresh. Every day, cooking starts from scratch. In the kitchens, there's little storage and less refrigeration. Raw materials arrive, are processed and dispatched. Half-an-hour before the train is due to leave, 10 steamy vats of curry are manhandled on to a pair of trailers, covered and hauled by coolies through booking halls and on to the platform for loading.
The train, an all-sleeper, has three classes. In "Air-conditioned 1", passengers have separate compartments. "A/C2s" sleep on bunk beds, 45 to a coach. "A/C3s" have the same facilities, but the bunks are triple-deckers. Tea, water, snacks and meals, delivered by plum-coated waiters in black caps (when they remember to put them on), fuel the non-stop tattle, endemic in any Indian journey. Head office allows 200 rupees (£3), built into the ticket price, for feeding first-class passengers and 120 rupees (£2) for the others.
When the 24 coaches creak out of Central Station into the endless Bombay suburbs, Bay is peeling boiled potatoes with a steady, relaxed rhythm. The bulk of the dinner has been taken care of by the base kitchen. His immediate role is pampering the 18 top-notch customers in A/C1. What they want, to accompany their smuggled bootleg whisky, are chunky chips. Bay fries them in a blackened wok, perched precariously on an electric burner. Working conditions are primitive - he uses bricks to wedge the aluminium containers of soup in place. An order for a mixed salad arrives. He slices a red onion, half a ridge cucumber and a tomato and splits two green chillies. They are plated and dished up with a quartered, yellow lime.
A sign above the coach door announces: "It is dangerous to entrain, detrain or to open doors or to lean out of the window when the train is in motion." Obviously, the message doesn't apply to the crew, because assistant cooks remove Bay's peelings and throw them into the blackness.
On a pair of convenient seats at one end of the pantry car, waiters have been spooning curries into foil containers for the A/C2s and A/C3s. It's approaching midnight before everyone has been fed. To wash the 50-gallon pans, a cook (grade 4) empties water into one, swills it around by hand, empties it into the second and so on. After the final rinse, the sludge goes the way of the peelings.
My dinner, eaten with catering inspector Joshi Bharat, is good: tomato soup similar to Heinz's, stewed cheese, curried eggs, chana masala (chickpeas in a mild sauce tasting of ginger and cumin), mung dahl, rice, rotis, chef's salad and a brilliant orange, chocolate and vanilla cassata. If he's lucky, Bharat says, he may manage four hours' sleep: "I do three return trips to Delhi, then I have four days off followed by two days' paperwork."
Wake-up call with tea is at 6.30am, but Bay has already spent the past two hours preparing breakfast for 380. A/C1s have their eggs prepared to order; the rest of the train must make do with omelettes or hard-boiled eggs.
Bay's specialité du train is a vegetable cutlet made with gram flour, onion, carrot, cabbage and spinach. He seasons it almost furtively with ginger and fenugreek powders, which he hides in his pocket in a plastic bag. The pattie is rolled in fine rusk then fried, and is rather better than the average fast-food veggie burger.
Although the hierarchy is strict, and although there's little chat between staff, everybody mucks in at moments of pressure. When the chefs are busy with the teas, a waiter will strip down to his Versace T-shirt and deal with an unexpected salad order.
Throughout the 16-hour trip, somebody, somewhere, is stuffing. More food is loaded on to the train during five-minute halts in Boroda, Kota and Baragwan: cakes, biscuits, more bread and even cheese pizza.
The best snacks en route are the badaam barfis. Delivered in neat boxes, this Indian fudge is made by boiling ground almonds, milk, sugar and ghee. Pails of yoghurt are the final consignment. Waiters ladle it into plastic cups and disappear down corridors at speed.
Meanwhile, Bay busies himself with the staff dinner. It's the first and only official meal which the waiters and cleaners receive, though they probably scavenge enough to keep hungerat bay. He makes them a thin mung dahl - asoup, really. At the last moment, he fries plentyof kalonji, curry leaves, green chilli and garlicin ghee. He pours it into the gruel along with chopped tomato. It's eaten ad lib with rice and has as much flavour as anything the paying customers have eaten.
The Raj Express isn't a "palace on wheels", it's too expensive for the back-packers, it's too slow for club class travellers, and it's not sufficiently Westernised for the more cosseted American, European or Japanese tourists. But, as a sample of the lifestyle of mobile middle-class India, it has no equal. The manager of a photographic laboratory, the silk exporter, the entrepreneur with an office in Geneva, the sitar player - all use the train as their Bombay-Delhi highway.
On the walls of the pantry are posters of Hindu gods, a Sikh guru and the Virgin Mary. To feed every passenger regardless of caste or creed, Bay needs all the divine intervention he can get.
