From Gaur to Ambala Cantonment

July 1, notes from my journal: A couple hours out of Delhi, the land gets as flat as Kansas. Mostly, I can see rice fields, with piles of shanties near the tracks. There's no shortage of open land, but the huts are just as on top of each other as they are in Mumbai. The train is at its top speed, about 60 mph, so I just get brief images: a crow riding a pig; a group of farmers manually hoeing a field -- one pauses to wave manically at the train, even though the windows are tinted and he can't see us waving back. In another town, a prepubescent boy hurls rock against the train as hard as he can. He doesn't look angry; I think he's just doing it for sport, the way I've seen other boys flinging rocks at what are here aptly called pariah dogs (they're the same all over Asia: medium-sized, short-haired yellow coats, whippy tails; the lowest common denominator of all possible dog phenotypes. And they know it).

Mostly, the land is just enormous and underpopulated. There's an LCD screen at the front of the carriage which is not just informative, but downright chatty: "We are now 20 km from Ambala. Ambala is known for its scientific instruments and laboratory equipment." We pass through another city that I've never heard of, of over a million people.

It sounds a bit silly, but I really find myself thinking about how large the world is. India does "scale" very well. It would be wrong to call it "vast," though, because "vast" implies grandeur, or something writ large. India is writ small, but unending.