The train starts moving again.
Damn! It’s going back the way it came! I am trapped by the new crush of people and can’t get off until the next village when I have managed to force my way close enough to the door to jump from the slowly moving train car.
An English-speaking young man greets me in the road as I walk into a village near the train tracks. He is a bureaucrat, an employee of the Department of Agriculture. He escorts me to a breezy teashop. Prints of blue-faced Krishna, wearing a crescent in his hair and with a snake necklace, take the place of pinup girls on the walls.
We talk of peace and war, crops, poverty and so on as a crowd of farmers gathers to see the white phenomenon visiting their village. My host is surprised that a simple teacher like me can afford to travel the world—even third class! Teachers here earn less than thirty dollars a month, so they stay at home, he says.
The first train going my way which stops near the village is a freight with no passenger coaches. Never mind, I climb aboard on the front of the engine with a dozen other freeloaders and so fulfill another boyhood dream by riding on a choo-choo engine!
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