The Indian Railway is the only national institution that still believes in the soul. It is not efficient, and this is the proof. Efficiency is for countries that have given up on coincidence; we still allow strangers to share a berth, a meal, and forty-six minutes of opinion about Sachin Tendulkar.
I took the 6:42 to Pune for thirty-one years. The samosas at Lonavala were never very good, and I bought them anyway, because the buying was the point. A man who has not bought a bad samosa from a moving train has not yet, I think, become Indian.
There is a particular quality to the light in the Western Ghats when the train descends from the pass. It arrives all at once, as if someone had opened a window onto a room that had always existed but never been entered. I have tried to describe this to my students. They nod politely and look at their phones.
The train does not go where you want to go. It goes where it goes, and you go with it. This is not a complaint. This is a philosophy.
I retired from the Pune line in 2009, when the department moved and the commute no longer made sense. I still wake, sometimes, at 6:15. Old habits are punctual even when the reasons for them have long since retired.