I am mostly naked on a train

On the evening of the 3rd, we left Hyderabad via train. Our trip to the train station proved that although I was wearing a borrowed churidar – or Punjabi outfit as some of you may know it – it wasn’t enough camouflage; bhendi, clothing and hair style can’t make up for pasty pale skin apparently. Stares followed me through the train station and onto the platform.
We were in a sleeper car. The trains are set up so that there are eight cots in each section, three on either wall of the section and two across the aisle. I’ll try to get better pictures so the set up is a little more clear. There’s really no privacy; the entire car is open and the aisle stays a walkway all night long. The car we were in was not air conditioned and we had other people in our area, so we quickly turned out our section of lights and tried to sleep. It was alarmingly hot and fairly humid so sleep was difficult. I was also in strange clothing so I tossed and turned as much as possible on my little cot. For awhile, I switched directions and stuck my feet next to the open window of the train car, thinking that if I could at least cool them off, I’d be fine. Random visions of coming back to America minus a foot made me switch back though. Finally, around three in the morning, I realized I had to go to the bathroom. Ganga had warned me that the bathrooms on a train weren’t very nice, so I had tried to hold off as long as I could. Unfortunately, we wouldn’t be arriving in Vijayawada for several more hours and there was no way I was going to make it.
Apparently, there had recently been some issues with what the State Department calls “Eve teasing” and the rest of us call “sexual harassment,” so Ganga walked me to the bathroom. He pointed at a door, looking much like a door for an airplane bathroom and said, “Sorry.”
In hindsight, I should have just held it.
The bathroom was all stainless steel, down to the floor. There was no toilet, only a hole in the bottom of the train. Yes, you read that right. The whole of Indian rail lines are a trail of human excrement. Rail workers there should make millions. There were also some raised foot marks, as in “put your feet here so you can squat over the hole, moron.” The floor was wet. This is the whole problem with the “washing” versus “wiping” thing. I never know why the floor is wet.
I deliberated a few moments and realized the knee-length shirt I was wearing was going to have to come off. Imagine wind whipping from the hole in the bottom of the train while… well, you know. Luckily, there was a handy hook on the back of the door that seemed clean. Further deliberation and calculation showed that if I dropped my pants, they were going to get wet, so they had to come off. I managed this feat without once stepping on the ground or getting any items of body or clothing wet. I think I should join some sort of Olympic team.
I mentioned earlier that I had gone out and bought new undies and bras – well, there first moments of exposure were in an empty train bathroom. So, there I was, purple and white polka-dotted matching undies set squatting over a hole in a train, trying to make sure the draft of wind from the hole in the ground wasn’t powerful enough to blow urine back on me.
When I got out of the bathroom, Ganga looked at me and said, “sorry” again.
“Yeah, me too” I answered.