This article was published in 2007 by the India University School of Journalism while on a travel writing grant in India.

The boy pulls himself along the train’s aisle on his hands, his good leg propelling him as his limp one drags behind, his bare feet sliding silently along the vinyl floor. He uses a small broom, stiff, bristly reeds lashed together, to poke under the seats, fetching a surprising amount of dirt and trash. Old ticket stubs and empty betel nut wrappers, plastered with a thin film of grease and dirt, are pulled from the locomotive’s crevices and added to the growing pile that is pushed along in front of his thin frame. And then I wonder if his leg really is limp or if his gesture, the humbling act of lowering himself to the floor, is simply a way of lowering his own status in the society of the train’s compartment, putting people more at ease and more willing to pay him a rupee since he is doing the job “his people were meant to do.”

I lean my head back against my part of the bench seat right next to the bars in the window. You always hear trains approaching from the other direction about 10 seconds before they’re on you, their moaning whistles sounding so far away at first and then deafening as the column of air they have been pushing meets your face like a hot, ending slap. The force of both trains moving towards each other uncomfortably pops your ears and leaves you with a ringing like someone unloaded a 12 gauge right next to your head.

We depart the train in the early morning at a small, mostly lifeless station. I make my way over to the restroom which is “pay to use” as are most public facilities. The woman sitting outside collecting money holds out her hand before I enter and I fish a crumpled five rupee bill out of my pocket. She gives me back three rupee coins and I stand with my hand still out, waiting for one more. She looks down at my hand, then back up at my face before holding up one bony finger in question form. I nod my head, realizing she’s asking the American equivalent of “you’re going number one, then?” It’s odd for me, as I’m not much accustomed to explaining the plans for my restroom visits to old women, but this is normal here and she presses the remaining rupee into my palm, satisfied that I will not be using two rupees worth of toilet services.

And that’s the funny thing about India. I’ve heard before that it is a place of contradictions, and I’m finding that in some respects to be very true. It’s a place where marriages are arranged and if someone has an attraction or, heaven forbid, a boyfriend or girlfriend, it’s something you simply don’t speak of. There are no billboards or advertisements showing women wearing anything less than the standard sari. But it’s also a place where other basics of human nature that are more repressed in the West are laid brutally out in the open. It’s perfectly normal, for example, to be walking to dinner in the center of town and pass a few men on the way taking a leak on a wall.

The other night, I was sitting in a restaurant and there happened to be a scale sitting next to my table, the kind you might be used to seeing in dirty Chevron station bathrooms back home. But this one was right there in the middle of the place, between my table and another where a family of four was happily chomping on their dosa and curry. And then suddenly a woman in her late 20s had hopped onto the machine and plunked a coin into the slot before yelling the results to her husband across the room. I couldn’t imagine something like this happening at home and still don’t really know what to think about it.

Any time we’re in a larger city there will be people sprawled out on any free piece of concrete, filthy and exhausted beyond belief, at least they must be to sleep as soundly as they do with their limbs hanging out onto the blacktop, just inches from traffic. For me it all just seems so vivid or gritty, textured, real. And it’s not that we don’t have humanity like this where I come from. We do, but it gets hidden somehow. In India that humanity is accentuated. Here, the humanity is in your face.