India Part 5 : Lucknow

Cannonball hole inside the British Residency.

Perhaps predictably, I don't manage to catch the 5:50am train from Agra... but in fact, not down to any failing of my own but rather because it is cancelled.  OK, this is not great, I have a hotel booked and paid for in Lucknow, and I know that pretty much every train in India seems to sell out at least a week or so before departure.  Still, I ask at enquiries anyway, the guy there says a train will go from Agra Fort at 7am, and he thinks I will be able to get a ticket.  OK, a quick tuktuk over there, best not to get too annoyed over this, or the way my moving to a crummy hotel near the main station, 'Agra Cantonment', was completely pointless.  But I confess, when the guy at Agra Fort enquiries tells me there is no train I get a little upset.  Fortunately after a few minutes of me wondering what the hell to do, he comes out of the office to tell me that yes, there is a train at 8:30.  OK... off to the ticket office, the guy there denies knowledge of any train... he starts telling me how I can get a fifteen kilometre tuktuk ride to a bus station, then a bus that will take eight hours, but then remembers that in fact, yes there is a train.  The ticket costs a hundred and ten rupees.  Of course, it is a little over an hour late, so really my getting up at the crack of dawn was entirely unnecessary, but it does arrive, and depart with me on it.  Not sure what class these carriages are, I sure don't have a reserved seat, there are four people crammed on each bench, and more are sitting or lying in the luggage racks, though none on the roof that I'm aware of.  Still room for me to stand in a corner, it's only two hundred miles or so to Lucknow, how long can it take?

Substantial ruins of the main residency building.

Well we take our time getting out of Agra... the train keeps stopping, often for fifteen or twenty
minutes, and when it does move it often seems to be little better than walking pace.  My position by the door is not ideal, a bit too close to the toilet, and also people keep wanting to get through the door, despite us not being at a station - hawkers, wanting to sell their chai, samosae or whatever.  I am beckoned to squeeze onto one of the benches, well fair enough, I hug my bag to me and worry about losing my wallet or phone but what can you do.  Everybody seems friendly enough, for all that they have about one word of English ('slow'), between them.  I watch the scenery go past... slowly, endless vistas of fields, small towns, the occasional concrete flyover crossing the railway.  I check my watch, three hours have passed and we've moved, hum, judging from the GPS on my phone, around fifty miles.  Well, my fellow passengers don't seem at all peturbed by this... they pass the time sleeping, chatting, eating peanuts - one passes a few handfuls to me which I happily consume, that and the samosae I had earlier should keep me going.  I can't bring myself just to drop the shells on the floor the way they want me to, they go out the window in the end.  There seems to be some sort of drug ritual going on too, various plastic sachets, bags and cartons are opened to reveal what looks like tobacco, dried mushrooms maybe, a white soapy looking thing, some green leaves, all sorts of stuff, it all gets wadded up and chewed.  I pass, no idea how long this journey is going to take and I'd rather not take any chances.  We do speed up, a little, and the train actually rattles along for fifty more miles in less than two hours, but then we hit the area around Kanpur and it's back to long periods stopped, and the rest of the time trundling along at maybe five miles per hour.  Seems every time another train comes near, going either way, we have to stop - maybe there isn't enough capacity in the overhead electric cables to run more than one engine?  It is excruciating anyway, the hours go by with very little progress, darkness falls and there's no longer even scenery to look at, I wonder if I will ever leave this train.  But it has to end eventually of course... I think I actually fall asleep for a while which helps, and at last, after a journey taking some twelve hours, we arrive at Lucknow - an average speed of less than seventeen miles per hour then.  I can cycle faster than that.  My hotel is of course nowhere near where the map supplied by the booking agency claims, nobody here speaks any English, but I find it somehow - and even a bar...

Tilewali Masjid.

Lucknow then... booking.com says about the place, 'reasons to visit : cleanliness' - well, yes, there are a few hundred square metres in the historic centre where it isn't too bad, there's an amphitheatre, looks like the bottom can be flooded in the style of the Colosseum, next to it an impressive clock tower, it is all quite grand and spacious, and ringed by an array of minarets and onion domes belonging to various temple complexes.  I sit and enjoy a chai, poured into a freshly handmade porcelain cup, it's all rather relaxing, I even seem to have escaped people trying to sell me things, guide me, or just beg from me for the time being.  The rest of the city though?  Yeah, like everywhere else in India I have been, the ground is a morass of rotting garbage and bodily waste, over which throngs of people shuffle along while a chaos of bikes, rickshaws and tuktuks swirl around them, somehow managing to avoid hitting the pedestrians, or indeed the cows that stand here and there, nuzzling through the heaps of detritus.  So, anything else worth seeing here?  Sure - I make my way over to the British Residency complex for a bit of colonial history.  This was once a substantial set of palatial houses, walled off from the city on a small hill by the river, where various British and European military officers, traders and so forth lived back in the day, as the Empire consolidated its control over this part of the world.  Then the residency was attacked and besieged during the mutiny of 1857 - or the First War of Independence as the modern signs have it, many buildings were destroyed and all badly damaged, and nowadays it is preserved as a kind of archaeological park.  Fascinating to walk around the ruins, the marks of bullets and cannonballs still visible on many of the walls.  I'm picturing a Carry On style party of aristocrats keeping their upper lips stiff while the cannons roar, but a visit to the more or less levelled church and its cemetery brings home the grim reality.  Seems quite small, but many of the monuments are very substantial, then I read a few inscriptions and realise each marks the grave of a few officers and several hundred men, apparently the dead came so fast they had time only to dig pits and throw them in.  Goodness knows how many of the 'mutineers' were killed.  Being here, and being a Brit, I can't help but think about the history my country shares with this part of the world.  Did my forbears make things worse, or better?  Honestly, I find myself imagining the feted British Raj as something like a bird, perched on one of the elephants they have here - on top for a while perhaps, but hardly affecting the course of the juggernaut below...

A selection of Lucknow landmarks.

Photos to go with this post can be found here.