Outside, the bearded monkeys frolic, stooping, by the dozen,
and fix their eyes on me like I’m some half-remembered cousin.
Bullocks scratch their heads with their hind hooves and scrawl their musings
on air with tail-end swooshings. Indian train.
Clad in ethnic stripes, I clutch an elephant who juggles
and some species of violin whose fingerboard befuddles.
The brown-faced boy with T-shirt, jeans and baseball cap for shelter
behind me, doesn’t swelter. Indian train.
Out on the street the vendors proffer tiger balm.
Up and down the train they cry “chai garam!”,
a mantra making everything feel halcyon.
I wonder if the chai is rich in calcium.
The men, in trainers, chewing paan, all stand out on the street
and urinate up bushes, walls, and sometimes on their feet,
so publicly that I can see from here which god they follow.
They spit instead of swallow. Indian train.
On the floor a lake surrounds the hole through which I glimpse
excrement on railway tracks. I creep, like one who limps,
over the facilities, aware that no-one vets them,
then adding to the jetsam. Indian train.
Out on the street the vendors proffer tiger balm.
Up and down the train they cry “chai garam!”
But the sun is so garam it borders on infernal
and I sit sweating like a viceroy’s favourite colonel.
Lying with a paperback, I can’t avoid the cluster
of children’s eyeballs locked on me. A wispy-bearded youngster
is begging me to come back to his parents’ house for dinner
as though I’m Ali Jinnah. Indian train.
“Come, sing to us!” they chime, so sing is what I try to do,
the Sex Pistols, the Beatles, Cockney songs from World War Two,
and, puzzling all of us, a Sanskrit rock song I admire,
that goes “Govinda Jaya!” Indian train.
Up and down the train they cry “chai garam!”
with the repetition of a fire alarm
and by now I can’t stop thinking of the Occident,
not for all the chai on the subcontinent.
