I was sorting through some boxes and came across a piece I wrote for a creative writing class, probably fall of 1974. I had traveled across central Asia the previous year and this was a set of impressions of a trying train ride across northern India. I worked on it a bit yesterday, so it's kind of a collaboration between my 21 year old and my 64 year old selves. Benares, now Varanasi, is a holy city on the Ganges, a destination for Hindu pilgrims, and the oldest continually inhabited city in India.

NIGHT TRAIN TO BENARES

"Chai...chai...chai!" Vendor on the station platform reminds me of a barker at Yankee Stadium. "One rupee meestah American, one rupee". Tea to lips, parched, hot, mosquito bitten.

Train rocks through night heat. Dark fields roll under grating wheels. Stomach empty. Bookprint out of focus. In my overstuffed compartment someone smokes a chillum and prays to marijuana god.

In my dreamlike state I imagine Mahatma Gandhi in the batter's box and Mickey Mantle in a nirvanic trance.

Another station, another stop. A woman with nose-ring and flowing red sari sleeps on the platform, head resting on cloth-wrapped possessions, alone. A stray dog, emaciated, nearing death and most of his fur gone, finds rotting food in a dirty corner. Stench wafts through the window.

Endless heat. The lights in the train have dimmed, now the air is visible as well as tactile. The overhead fan is turning even more slowly than its usual ineffectual pace. The seat is hard wood, straight backed, bodies press together tightly, sweatily.

Mosquito descends slowly, almost floats, the heavy air buoyant. Lands on arm, searches, pierces skin, sucks blood. When he is full he takes off, heavier, flies out the open window. Eyes have watched this process but brain ignores it.

Invisible villages. Invisible gods. Invisible remembrances of family. Nighttime writes letters, lonely letters, confused letters, yearning letters, letters never sent.

I still haven’t slept when dawn arrives. The air is already too hot, slowing movement and parching skin. Dust blows through open windows, stinging and burning faces and eyes, but it’s too stifling to close the windows. Sweat is everywhere. A child has awakened crying and her mother is futilely trying to comfort her by fanning hot air in her direction.

We cross a river bathed in yellow light where people shit on the banks while an old steamboat chugs upstream. A man sits on a bullock cart on a dirt path next to thick weeds.

We pass a village of adobe huts astride the tracks and the villagers stop what they are doing and watch the train pass. The earth is brown, the people browner.