Hindi, Chini bhai, bhai? A view from China’s train to Tibet

I was a member of an editors’ group that travelled in China for about two weeks in 2006. I represented Deccan Herald, and there were five other editors from other parts of the country. We were invited by the Chinese government to spend some days in Shanghai and Beijing, but the trip was mainly intended to give us an experience of travelling in the Qinghai-Lhasa train, which had been commissioned two months earlier.

This was the train that ran on the world’s highest railway track. The rail line was built on the most difficult and inhospitable terrain through mountain passes, gorges, permafrost and other natural barriers, and it was an engineering feat.

We had a briefing at the Chinese embassy in Delhi before we departed. The ambassador explained the history of the railway line and its importance. The train had become very popular within days of its first journey. We were told by the embassy officials that tickets for the train had been fully booked for the next one year. When the embassy tried to book our tickets with the railways, they could not get them, and it had to get them through the foreign ministry in Beijing.

We boarded the train in Lanzhou in North-West China. It was a mechanical marvel and a beauty. It swept through the Gobi desert and started climbing to the ‘roof of the world’, along the steepest ascents, through treacherous mountain passes and the longest tunnels, and on bridges on rivers with sparkling water. As it reached the higher altitudes, it almost became an airplane, with oxygen masks dropping down from above.

Outside the windows, the exotic Tibetan plateau unrolled to the horizon. It was a surreal experience, with the bleak landscape unfolding outside the train, and with the occasional sighting of nomadic groups or wild animals. Mountains rose in meditation in the distance, with the snow for matted hair.

The clouds shifted shapes like phantoms in Buddhist tales. Villages sped past like sorrows in the cycle of birth and death. Prayer flags fluttered in the timeless air. I wondered whether this train from the future would corrupt this pristine world, much of which is frozen in time.

I took a stroll in the train to talk to some passengers about their experience of it. It was packed to the full. The passengers were all Chinese, and no conversation was possible. But in one compartment, there was a young couple from Europe who spoke English. They had come to China some days ago. When they came to know that there was a train going to Tibet, they were excited, and reached Lanzhou the previous day and boarded the train there. Suddenly, I remembered the embassy officials’ comment about the tickets, and I asked them how they got the tickets.

The young man said they went to the ticket counter but were told that no tickets were available. No tickets for any day in the near future, either. Disappointed, they turned away and were preparing to leave. Just then, someone approached them and asked the couple what they wanted. Tickets for Lhasa. How many? Two. For which day? Tomorrow. Can you pay 50 dollars more? Yes. Then wait here. After half an hour, the man returned with two tickets, took the money and left. And here they were now.

I, like most Indians, knew that situation too well, as the scene gets enacted too frequently in our railway stations. Corruption in China had not received as much public attention then as it has now. My idea of China had been shaped by historical narratives, accounts of pre-revolution and modern China by writers like Edgar Snow, Han Suyin and others, and even by descriptions like the odd one about Shanghai as the Orient’s most wicked and cruellest city.

Reports about the opening up of China, and a sense of the dialectics between the socialist ethic and the capitalistic spirit had not prepared me for this new idea. It was not unreal, but it was made more human by the picture of a black marketeer in the railway station. I was also comforted by the thought that he may not have been an exception because in a society where the government had a lot of interest in what the citizens were doing, he would not have survived if he were a lone player.

Getting back to my coupe, I told the senior embassy official who accompanied us about the young couple’s experience. You had to get our tickets from the foreign ministry, but here there was a tout selling tickets to your most prestigious train openly in the black market. It is like in India. He laughed and said: Anything that happens in India happens in China, too. That is why we are bhai, bhai!

Outside, the far Himalayan peaks sprawled across the two countries, uniting or dividing them, as the case may be. Though the countries have not yet decided where one ends and the other begins in the mountains, there sure must be a unity of thought and action in the stations of mind from where trains may still start for the future.