Down And Out In Chandigarh

As I trudged out of the Chandigarh train station into another foggy North Indian night, I was struck by an array of bizarre sculptures erected outside. Long, stick-like limbs and understated faces, they were obviously the creation of Nek Chand, the man responsible for Chandigarh's most famous attraction, the Rock Garden. Clutching an address, I started doing the rounds of the autorickshaws, trying to find one who seemed to offer a reasonable chance of getting me where I wanted to be.

An hour later, life seemed much more difficult. I had travelled well into the suburbs of Chandigarh, but the guy whose couch I had arranged to surf on was nowhere to be found - his apartment was locked tight and no-one seemed to know where he was. After trying in vain to contact him, I wandered around looking for an autorickshaw or a taxi, wondering where I might be able to get a hotel for the night. The answer turned out to be, Almost nowhere. I spent well over an hour tooling around in the fog, getting increasingly concerned as each successive hotel told me, "Sorry sir, fully booked." The idea of spending a night curled up in a corner on the street seemed more and more inevitable. Eventually, well after midnight, I found a small, rat-infested room in Sector-45, and shelled out over a thousand rupees for the privilege. Although I was in a bad mood, I resolved to give Chandigarh another chance in the daytime.

It didn't score too well then, either. First, some background about the city. Chandigarh is in a so-called Union Territory, and is both the capital city of the Punjab and Haryana at once. It is a totally planned city, (re)constructed from the ground up after Indian independence to fit the schemes of a mad Frenchman known as Le Corbusier. The roads and suburbs are laid out in neat geometric patterns, areas are carefully designated for purpose, and the overall impression is one of deliberate design rather than the chaotic evolution that seems to have shaped all the other Indian cities.

Sounds familiar? Basically, Chandigarh is the Indian version of Canberra. This sounded interesting on paper, but in reality I found it to be deeply depressing. The roads are straight and wide, and the areas neatly divided, but it doesn't manage to escape the standard Indian realities of poverty, pollution, and overpopulation. Everything is resolutely constructed from concrete, augmented frequently by small lean-tos. I didn't take any photos because the fog was so thick (which, admittedly, may have contributed to my opinion of the place), but imagine a third-world version of Canberra and you have a pretty close analogue. The final straw was the names - Chandigarh is divided into numbered sectors, so an address might be given as: Hotel Green, Sector-17, Chandigarh. The overall impression is that of an Eastern Bloc city before the fall, and I didn't like it one bit.

It's important to understand that this was on New Year's Eve. Although I considered finding another hotel and maybe a party, I stumbled across a cheap train ticket overnight to Jaipur, and made the executive decision to get the hell out before the city sucked out all my will for travelling, even if it meant ringing in the New Year in a sleeper carriage. So, to pass time before I left, I went to check out the aforementioned Rock Garden.

I have to say, this place almost restored Chandigarh in my eyes. It's amazing - twelve acres of gullies and tunnels, all filled with the surreal sculptures of Nek Chand. The man was working as a labourer during the construction of Chandigarh, and appalled by the waste, started assembling small collections of roughly-made sculptures in the woods behind the city. When his by-then huge assortment was discovered some fifteen years later(!), it was recognised as the work of eccentric genius that it was, and was converted into a national monument (and monumental tourist attraction, if the number of screaming Indian sightseers is anything to go by).









Before leaving, I visited the other Famous Thing in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier's massive Open Hand statue. Although this appears in every tourist brochure for the city, it is remarkably difficult to access. I had to deal with two different sets of armed guards, and eventually located the sculpture sprouting from a pit behind some deserted soccer fields.





Apparently the sculpture is symbolic (of what, I'm not entirely sure). I thought, well, two can play at that game, so I took a symbolic piss at the base of the sculpture, went back for my bag, and bailed for the train station. After watching an apparently suicidal kid hauled off the tracks by his shouting friends, I boarded my train and settled in for the trip. The following is a direct extract from my diary, as written that evening:

The Chandigarh-Jaipur Special

31st December 2008, 10:10PM IST

The khaana- and chai-wallahs are traversing the train. We've pulled into Ambala Cantt. Junction, after a quick journey south from Chandigarh.

I'm sitting writing this in an upper berth, two compartments into the carriage, pausing to take the occasional nip from a small bottle of McDowell's Celebration No. 1 XXX Rum. Two shawl-wrapped labourers are playing cards and smoking beedies below me, and a pair of young, poor-looking guys are sandwiched into two of the three berths across the aisle.

This train is reasonably well-maintained, and the carriage is clean (at least, by 2nd Class Sleeper standards). I haven't seen a single cockroach yet, and only evidence of mice. It's full to the brim, too, but that won't be a problem until after the lights-out consensus is reached. My guess is ten to fifteen adenoidal snorers in this half of the carriage alone.

The whistle sounds somewhere up ahead of me, and the atmosphere suddenly changes. The wallahs scramble to complete their transactions and get back onto the platform, colliding with the latecomers who are sprinting down the platform and jumping frantically for the footboards. Within a few moments the turbulence subsides, and we sway onwards into the night.

The blue vinyl of the seats glares beneath the harsh fluorescent lights. Somewhere, a mobile phone shrills loudly. I close my eyes and wonder where my friends are, so many miles away and so much nearer the dawn. I take another swig of the rum; it is spicy, sickly sweet, and brazenly potent. It tastes like adventure; it tastes like loneliness. It tastes like India.

I clamber down and gently ease my sleeping bag from under the head of one of the young men. He grunts and curls up against the wall, pulling his shawl tighter against the cold. I lay the bag out in the berth, and lock my daypack to the steel mesh separating me from the next compartment. It's awkward to sleep curled around it, but it would be more awkward to have it disappear into the night.

I curl up in the bag as the train slows for another station. I mime a lights-out? to one of the labourers. He grins at me, showing teeth stained red by paan, and says something like "One more game, brother," in rapid-fire Hindi. I don't mind; the lights will go out soon enough. The rum I've drunk guarantees that I'll have no problems sleeping, even though the snoring has already begun. In ten hours, on the other side of darkness, I'll be in Jaipur.