Yes, once again, I'm back focused on India. Maybe I do need to make it back there again soon - the sabbatical notion is starting to appeal to me. Right now I'm looking at Budapest and then Abu Dhabi, but spending another semester teaching in India sounds wonderful. It occurred to me that I had never posted anything on the trip that my father and I made to the Taj Mahal (he visited me for the first week and a half during the summer I spent in India). However, to get to the Taj Mahal story we first have to take a train trip, in completely the opposite direction. I've been fortunate enough to take train trips, including sometimes overnight sleeper trains, in Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Italy, Australia, China, Egypt and India - and I've enjoyed everyone of them, although often for completely different reasons. Maybe it's the romantic in me, but I love train travel - even at its most rustic. In July 2004 my father and I had determined to visit the Taj Mahal, which is in Agra, but first we were scheduled to visit Vellore in southern India. We were going there to visit a famous hospital that had been founded by a distant relative of ours, Ida Scudder (and that's another posting in and of itself). So, to make it to Agra, we embarked on a trip that started in Mumbai (our great friends John Neelankavil and Raj Nambiar made sure we made the right trains - we had made the arrangements in advance, so our names were on the outside of the compartments) and worked its way south to Vellore, and, after visiting the hospital, taking an absolutely crazy taxi ride to Chennai, catching a flight to Delhi, and then another taxi to Agra (but more on that later). The train trip from Mumbai to Vellore took around twenty-six hours and, all things considered, was very pleasant. The restroom facilties were just about what you would have expected them to be - there's nothing quite like sitting on the toilet, looking between your legs, and seeing the tracks below you. We were in a second class compartment, which meant that there were four fold-down beds - we only shared the space with one other person, which wouldn't have been a problem except for the fact that he wanted to go to bed around six p.m. (and in the process of folding down his bed he trapped my dad's camera against the wall, and we were quite relieved that it "reappeared" the next day when we pulled up the beds (we assumed it had been stolen). One of my fondest memories was waking up the next morning and seeing the expression on my dad's face as he stared out the window at the endless Deccan plateau. We would see these women walking with water pitchers on their heads, and you could see nothing in front of them and nothing behind them, and you had to wonder how many hours a day were devoted to something as seemingly simple as supplying water - it was one of those simple moments where it really hit home how difficult their lives were. My other memory is the soup guy who came by hour on the hour for over a day, chanting in this sing-song voice, "soup today, tomato soup, soup today, tomato soup, soup today, tomato soup . . ."
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