THOUGHT PATTERNS: Ticket To Ride

In his book,"The Bone Man of Benares" (St. Martin's Press), my husband Terry wrote about his experiences traveling on (or trying to get on) the trains in India.

I always suspected he exaggerated at least a little bit in his description. :)

Here's a short excerpt from his book:

"Standing along Track 32, I heard a whistle blow and the click-clacking of metal against metal. Then, appearing through great bursts of white steam, a train roared straight out of the annals of railroad history. The engine was a big, black monster of moving parts--the turbines were pumping, the furnace was belching, the wheels were screeching, the headlight was shaking, and the hulking steel body was pulsating like an overworked heart. As the engine crawled into the terminal, the steam cleared and I saw dozens of passenger cars, each with enough people to fill a small town. There were people in the seats and in the aisles, in the luggage compartments and in the bathrooms, hanging out the windows and jammed between the doors. Outside, there were whole contingents on the roof, as well as a few brave souls who rode the couplings between the cars or squeezed into little crawl spaces beneath the carriage.

When the train came to a halt, there was an absolutely mad rush of humanity. It was unclear to me who was getting on and who was getting off, but before I knew what happened, the car in front of me had been emptied, filled, and sealed tight. I hurried down to the next car, the next, and the next one still, but each of them, all the way down the track, was bursting at the seams. By the time I reached the end of the train, the engine was blowing its whistle, and, in a great cloud of steam, it began to pull away. Thousands of people were crammed into every possible square inch, and a few inches that weren't possible. Not only had I missed my train, I hadn't even come close to getting on. I was left standing there, holding a puff of steam in my hands."

But then, a couple of days ago our friend Brian (a long time friend of Terry's from his travels in India and Nepal) sent us an email with some photos, saying - remember these...