The world outside the window changes quickly and often: farmers labouring in the fields, office workers making the daily commute, kids playing cricket wherever there’s enough space for a game. I’m on the Suvidha Special, a sleeper train from the southern city of Bangalore to Kolkata, 1,200 miles to the north-east.
A man in a uniform hovers above my seat, asking a question so often heard in India: “Veg or non-veg?” The pantry car, from where my meal will be prepared before being brought to and served at my seat, is an Indian institution.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, sees high-speed trains as crucial to the country’s development. He does not feel the same way about the iconic pantry car. Indian Railways will soon phase them out and replace them with “e-catering” and takeaways, “because people want different types of food,” says a railway spokesman. “This way we can offer pizza, burgers or continental [European] food.”
On the Suvidha, meals are included in the price of the ticket (about £6 for the meal package, whichever class you’re in), and the attendant comes around, giving out bedding. Then comes the food – served to your berth, eaten off your lap.
For breakfast, staff dish out omelettes, bread and butter on the side. Lunch comes packed in aluminium foil containers: there’s dal, rice and roti, a flavoursome yellow gravy masking a couple of overcooked eggs, a pot of curd to aid digestion, and vanilla ice-cream for dessert. In between, waiters pour countless rounds of slightly spicy, very sweet chai, served in an espresso-sized paper cups.
The Suvidha trundles up the east coast of India, alongside the Bay of Bengal, continues on towards the lower Ganges Delta. The journey takes 30 hours – but I’m sure it will feel much longer without the pantry car staff doing the rounds, without the question they pose to passengers three times a day: “Veg or non-veg?”
