A Vande Bharat Odyssey Across India

Chapter OneAmb Andaura

Where the Shivaliks stop pretending to be plains

I booked the New Delhi to Amb Andaura Vande Bharat two weeks ahead, mostly out of habit, with nothing more specific in mind than reaching Chintpurni by evening. The train left New Delhi early enough that the platform lights were still on, and January fog sat over the plains for the first two hours, thick enough that the fields outside the window looked bleached of colour, lifting so slowly that the first proper hill I saw felt like a reward rather than scenery. A vendor came through with kesar milk in small paper cups somewhere past the halfway mark, and the man across the aisle, a wool trader heading home for his nephew's engagement, spent the rest of the ride explaining how winter weddings in these hill districts are timed around when the fields lie fallow, since a marriage feast cannot compete with an unfinished harvest for anyone's attention. He drew the shape of the coming ridge line on the fogged window glass with one finger, told me it meant we were close, and stepped off two stops before mine, leaving me to watch the land finish folding itself into view alone.

I stepped off at Amb Andaura by late morning, crossed the footbridge, and left the station behind almost immediately, since the town itself sits only a short walk from the platform. The land here does something I have not seen described properly anywhere. It does not rise into mountains the way Himachal is supposed to. It folds. Low green ridges come up out of the fields almost apologetically, as if the Shivaliks wanted to ease you into the idea of altitude rather than announce it. I had expected a transit point for Chintpurni and nothing more, a place to change onto a bus and forget. Instead an elderly man selling roasted makai from a cart outside the station told me, in the unhurried way of someone who has said the same sentence to a hundred travellers, that the real pilgrims of this route do not go straight up to the temple. They walk a longer forest path first, through pine stands that most tourist taxis skip entirely because the road version takes twenty minutes less.

He drew the route with a stick in the dust beside his cart. A trail through what he called the old timber section, used for generations by woodcutters and now mostly by goats and the occasional trekker who asked the right person, comes out just above the last bend before Chintpurni, giving you your first view of the temple roof through a gap in the pine cover rather than from the crowded courtyard. I took that path over the next two days, based out of a small guesthouse near the station rather than rushing back the same evening. I will not pretend the trail was well marked. Twice I had to backtrack because a fallen branch had reshaped what used to be a clear line through the trees, and once a woman collecting fodder simply pointed with her sickle without breaking her rhythm, the way people do when a question interrupts something they are good at.

The hills here do not perform for you. They simply continue, the way a conversation continues after the interesting part is technically over.

What stayed with me longest was not the temple, which I have written about before in other places and will not repeat here, but the quiet gateway feeling of the town itself. Amb Andaura does not try to be a destination. It behaves like a comma in a sentence, a brief pause before the real subject arrives. On the third morning I walked back down to the station and boarded the same Vande Bharat back toward New Delhi, changing there onto the New Delhi to Varanasi Vande Bharat, the next leg of the loop already ticketed before I had properly left the hills behind.

Chapter TwoChitrakoot Dham

A forest that keeps its own version of time

The New Delhi to Varanasi Vande Bharat got me into the city by early evening, and I spent one full day there simply resting and booking the next ticket properly, the Banaras to Khajuraho Vande Bharat, which happened to be the newest service on this entire loop, still carrying the smell of fresh upholstery. It left early the following morning, and this leg was short enough that the trolley never quite made it down the aisle before the first scheduled halt, but it was long enough for the schoolteacher beside me to finish an entire story about a marriage arranged between two families from villages on either side of these forests, settled decades ago, she said, over a disagreement about which family's version of a local folk song was the correct one. She sang two lines of it under her breath before laughing at herself and stopping, embarrassed, and the train was already slowing for Chitrakoot Dham station by the time she finished explaining who had won that argument.

I stepped off at the small station, left it behind on foot along a road lined with flower sellers, and reached the ghats before the light had fully turned gold. Chitrakoot sits across a state line that the forest itself seems to ignore. The Vindhya range here softens into something almost domestic, hills you could imagine walking every day of your life without tiring of them, and the Mandakini river running through the middle of it all like a thread someone forgot to knot off. I took the evening boat ride, and it was lovely in the expected way, lanterns on the water, the low chant carrying across from the ghats.

What surprised me more, on the second of the three days I stayed, was the Gupt Godavari caves a short distance away, two narrow limestone tunnels you enter almost bent double, water running ankle deep along the floor, the ceiling low enough that you feel the forest pressing down rather than simply surrounding you. A caretaker who has managed the lamps at the cave entrance for over a decade told me that the local understanding of the space has nothing to do with grandeur. It is meant to be uncomfortable, he said, because ease was never the point of visiting a cave named after a hidden river.

Some places give you a view. Chitrakoot gives you the quiet you did not know you needed until the forest closed in around it.

A retired schoolteacher I met on that walk told me, without any prompting, that Chitrakoot's real gift to a visitor is not any single landmark but the way the forest resets your sense of urgency within a single afternoon. I did not fully believe him until I noticed, an hour later, that I had stopped checking my phone. On the third morning I walked back to the small station and boarded the same Banaras to Khajuraho Vande Bharat as it continued onward, since Mahoba sat only two stops further down the same line and needed no separate booking at all.

Chapter ThreeMahoba

Granite hills holding a Chandela memory

The train dropped altitude and colour at almost the same rate on this short continuing leg, green giving way to a dry, reddish country that a farmer sharing my berth called stubborn land, the kind that gives you a harvest only if you argue with it every season. He had a tin box of homemade bedai and a jar of pickled mango that he shared before I had even asked what was in it, and somewhere over a lunch that neither of us had paid for, he told me a folk story about a local king who was said to have hidden treasure in a lake bed rather than let it fall into a rival's hands. I heard a second, slightly different version of that same story from a shopkeeper near the fort a few hours later, which is usually how you know a folk story has lived long enough in a place to be true in more than one way.

I got down at Mahoba station, left the platform through a gate manned by a single sleepy constable, and walked the short distance into town before the heat properly set in. Mahoba does not look like a place that once mattered this much. The Chandela dynasty built lakes and forts here that now sit half forgotten beside a modest town, granite hills rising abruptly out of otherwise flat Bundelkhand terrain, and I spent a full morning at one of the old stepped lakes without seeing another visitor, only a group of boys swimming in water that has held roughly the same shape for close to a thousand years.

The brass smithing tradition here gets a fraction of the attention paid to bigger craft centres elsewhere in the country, yet a workshop I visited near the old fort approach was still producing utensils using techniques a craftsman named Ompal described as unchanged since his grandfather's time, the metal heated and shaped by hand rather than cast in a mould, each piece slightly different from the last in a way factory production could never replicate.

Ompal told me, while cooling a freshly shaped brass bowl in a bucket of water, that Mahoba's real inheritance is not any single fort but the granite itself, stubborn rock that refused to erode into forgettability even as the empire that carved it slowly did. I stayed two nights in total, and on the morning I left I walked back to the station and boarded the same Vande Bharat in its return direction toward Varanasi, since the line I had arrived on ran both ways and the next leg of the loop started from there.

Chapter FourNabadwip Dham

A birthplace across the water from a temple town

Back in Varanasi I changed onto the Varanasi to Patna Vande Bharat, a short brisk run that barely gave the trolley time to circulate, and from Patna I picked up the Patna to Howrah Vande Bharat the same evening, watching Bihar give way to the flatter, wetter country of Bengal through the window as the light faded. From Howrah, after a short overnight halt, I boarded the Howrah to Kamakhya Vande Bharat Sleeper, the newest sleeper service on the entire network, for the first short overnight hop out to Nabadwip Dham, its very first scheduled stop. I spent most of that brief run listening to a college student in the next berth explain a folk tale about the river changing course overnight to save a devotee from a flood, a story her grandmother told her so often as a child that she said she still checks the riverbank out of habit whenever she crosses it, half expecting to see where the water supposedly turned.

I stepped off at Nabadwip in the small hours, left the small station behind on foot once the light came up, and reached the ghat road within minutes, the town close enough to the platform that no other transport was really needed. Nabadwip carries its history the way old river towns do, quietly, in the texture of its lanes rather than in any single monument. This is where Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is believed to have been born, and the town's spiritual gravity has never fully transferred across the river to Mayapur, even though Mayapur's ISKCON temple complex now draws far larger crowds. A short ferry ride connects the two, and I found myself preferring the Nabadwip side of that crossing every single evening across the two days I stayed, returning to watch potters work rather than crossing back for the temple's evening programme.

The clay idol workshops here operate on a scale that surprised me. An artisan named Debu, who supplies idols to household worshippers across several districts, let me watch the layering process for almost two hours, straw skeleton first, then successive coats of river clay left to dry between applications, a rhythm dictated entirely by humidity rather than any fixed schedule. He mentioned, almost in passing, that the best clay for this work comes from a specific bend in the river that shifts slightly every few years as the water reshapes its own banks, so the workshops quietly adjust their sourcing without ever making an announcement of it.

Debu's workshop closed for the day exactly when the light did, no clock involved, and I understood that in a town built around devotion, even craft keeps devotional hours. On the second morning I walked back to the station and boarded the next day's Howrah to Kamakhya Vande Bharat Sleeper as it passed through, since Katwa was the very next stop on the same line.

Chapter FiveKatwa

The point where two rivers stop arguing

The land flattened out into water country on this short continuing leg, ponds and paddy and thin canals running alongside the tracks, and an older couple across the aisle spent most of the ride arguing gently about whose village made better mustard oil, a disagreement they had clearly been having for decades and seemed to enjoy purely for its own sake. Somewhere in the middle of it, the wife pulled out a tin of homemade narkel naru and handed pieces to everyone nearby, the way people do here when a journey has gone on long enough that strangers stop being strangers.

I got off at Katwa early enough that the mist had not fully lifted, left the station along a lane of closed shutters, and found the ghat by following the smell of the river rather than any signpost. Every river town claims its confluence is special. Katwa earns the claim in a way I did not expect. The Ajay meets the Hooghly here without drama, no visible churn, no obvious line where one water becomes another, and a boatman named Nikhil, who ferries handloom traders across most mornings before the heat sets in, told me the local belief that the confluence is calm precisely because both rivers have already done their fighting further upstream. By the time they reach Katwa they have nothing left to argue about.

Katwa's other identity is as a working handloom belt where entire lanes still smell of dye vats before dawn. I was taken, almost by accident, into a house where three generations of one family were preparing thread for a Jamdani style weave that Nikhil insisted has a name locally, distinct from the more famous Bengal varieties sold under one broad label elsewhere, though the family themselves shrugged when I asked what made it different, saying only that their grandmother's version used a tighter twist in the border thread and that was reason enough.

Vaishnavite history runs under this town like groundwater. Katwa is where Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is said to have taken formal renunciation, a fact that shapes the rhythm of at least one neighbourhood quietly, without signage or tour buses. I found the relevant courtyard by asking the wrong question to the right person, and stood there while an old priest swept fallen leaves without once looking up, as though sweeping and remembering were the same motion for him. After two nights I walked back to the station and boarded the next Howrah to Kamakhya Vande Bharat Sleeper through, Azimganj being the following stop.

Chapter SixAzimganj

Nawabi ghosts on a working riverfront

The short continuing stretch ran past brick kilns and jute fields turning gold in the late afternoon light, and a brass trader heading home from a supply run spent the ride telling me how his own wedding decades ago had been arranged through a matchmaker who worked almost entirely along this railway line, moving between towns to find matches for families who trusted the trains more than the roads. He laughed telling it, said the matchmaker probably knew this stretch of track better than any railway employee ever did.

I got down at Azimganj, left the platform through a station building that looked older than most of the town around it, and walked the short distance to the riverfront before the shops had properly opened. Azimganj does not advertise what it holds. You have to already know that this stretch of the Bhagirathi was once wealthy enough to build palaces that now lean quietly into disrepair, their plaster the colour of old tea, their gates guarded by families who inherited the caretaking along with the debt. I walked past three such gateways before a shopkeeper stopped me to ask, not unkindly, whether I actually knew what I was looking at. When I admitted I did not, he closed his shutter halfway and walked me two lanes over to a terracotta temple gate so weathered that the carved figures have softened into suggestion rather than detail, faces you complete with your own imagination rather than read directly off the brick.

The brassware here does not shine for cameras. It shines because someone is still using it every single day.

The brassware markets of Azimganj get a mention in a handful of heritage circuit brochures, but nobody had explained to me that the real trade now survives mostly through repair work rather than new casting. An artisan named Rafiq, whose family has worked this metal for four generations by his count, spent forty minutes reshaping a dented lamp base for a customer while explaining, almost as an aside, that most of his income now comes from restoring old pieces families bring back from Kolkata after realising the new factory made items do not hold their shape the way the old hand beaten ones do.

I stayed two nights in Azimganj, and on the evening I left, watching the river go the colour of the brass Rafiq had just polished, I walked back to the station and boarded the same Vande Bharat Sleeper continuing north, since New Alipurduar sat several stops further up the same line, well past New Farakka and Malda Town.

Chapter SevenNew Alipurduar

The last flat land before the forest takes over

That longer continuing stretch on the Sleeper ran through the night, and I woke to the window already turning a deep, wet green, tea rows running in tidy lines almost right up to the tracks in places. A forest department employee heading back from leave, sharing the same berth compartment, spent the morning describing how the tea garden calendar shapes everything in this belt, marriages included, since plucking season leaves almost no free hands for a wedding feast and families plan around it the way farmers elsewhere plan around a harvest. He offered me a piece of jaggery he said his mother had sent him, insisting the local variety here tastes different because of the soil, a claim I had no way to test since I had never eaten enough jaggery in enough places to judge whether it was true or simply something every mother believes about her own kitchen.

I stepped off the platform at New Alipurduar, left the station forecourt behind, and found a jeep willing to take me toward the reserve boundary before I had even finished asking directions. New Alipurduar smells different the moment you step off the platform, a mix of diesel, wet grass and something faintly resinous that comes from the tea gardens ringing the town on almost every side. This is Dooars country, the gateway into forests most travellers associate only with Buxa Tiger Reserve, and while Buxa deserves every bit of its reputation, the town itself holds a smaller, quieter pleasure of its own.

The same forest department employee, once we had shared a jeep out toward the reserve boundary, pointed out that tea garden workers here have their own informal network of trails connecting one garden to the next, paths cut generations ago for daily movement rather than tourism, and walking even a short stretch of one puts you closer to the forest edge, and occasionally closer to langurs moving through the canopy, than any official safari route manages in a full morning.

I did not see a tiger. I did not expect to. What I saw instead was a landscape that manages the rare trick of being both cultivated and wild in the same glance, tea rows giving way to forest edge without any visible seam, and a town that has learned to live comfortably in that overlap. After two nights I walked back to the station, and since a different Vande Bharat, the one running between New Jalpaiguri and Guwahati, called here too, I simply boarded it for the short final hop to Kokrajhar rather than backtracking to book anything new.

A workbench somewhere between a repair job and a small history lesson I had not asked for but was glad to receive.

Chapter EightKokrajhar

Green country and a langur with golden fur

The season had turned by the time I made this last short hop, monsoon cloud sitting low over paddy fields that stayed green for what felt like an entire afternoon without a break. A young woman travelling to her own wedding, three coaches down from her mother and aunts who had the sweets, sent a plate of narkel naru and a box of homemade jhal muri down the aisle to anyone who looked like they had been travelling too long alone. That is how I ended up eating a stranger's wedding sweets somewhere near the Assam border while she explained, over the noise of the wheels, exactly which of her relatives she was dreading seeing again, and exactly which one she hoped would finally approve of the match.

I got down at Kokrajhar in the late afternoon, left the station on a shared auto with two other passengers heading the same direction, and reached the edge of town while the light was still good for walking. Kokrajhar closes this half of the notebook the way it should, with green stretching in every direction and a quiet that felt earned after seven other stops. Bodoland's landscape here is gentler than the popular image of Assam suggests, rolling and cultivated in patches, forest reappearing at the edges the moment cultivation gives up.

Chakrashila Wildlife Sanctuary nearby holds one of the most understated wildlife encounters of this entire journey, the golden langur, a primate found in a genuinely narrow range of the world and easy to miss entirely if you are not looking upward at the right moment. A local guide named Bwiswmuthiary, who has tracked langur troops here for years, told me the animals have their own daily circuit through specific fruiting trees, predictable enough that patient observers can more or less schedule a sighting around it rather than leaving it to chance.

A golden langur moving through green canopy against a grey Bodoland sky is the kind of sight that makes ten stations, and every uncomfortable seat in between, feel entirely worth it.

I stayed three nights, longer than almost anywhere else on the loop, reluctant to leave. This was the one point in the whole year where the Vande Bharat network simply stopped, no service in either direction bridges Assam to the Karnataka coast, so I walked back to the station and booked an ordinary long distance train instead, a straightforward stretch rather than anything I have tried to dress up as something it was not, that carried me most of the way toward Mangaluru over the better part of two days.

Chapter NineUdupi

Where a temple kitchen quietly changed how India eats

Those two days were mostly a blur of changing country, red soil giving way to coconut palms as the air thickened somewhere past the Karnataka border, and once I reached Mangaluru Central I switched onto the short Mangaluru to Madgaon Vande Bharat for the final, brief hop up the coast to Udupi, the first stop on that line. The family sharing my section for that last short leg had packed enough food for a small gathering, insisting I try a rice dish nobody at my end of the country makes quite the same way. Their teenage son, more interested in the passing scenery than the conversation, kept pointing out temple gopurams visible from the window and naming each one before his mother could, a small private competition of local knowledge that seemed to matter to him far more than it did to anyone else in the compartment.

I stepped off at Udupi, left the station behind on a shared auto that dropped me near the main temple lane, and had already eaten one meal before I had properly unpacked. Udupi's temples are calm in a way that coastal towns rarely manage, side by side with a beach at Malpe that fills only briefly in the late afternoon before emptying out again by dusk. I took the short boat crossing to St Mary's Island, whose basalt rock formations rise out of the sea in hexagonal columns that look, from certain angles, almost engineered, though they are entirely the work of ancient volcanic activity cooling and cracking over time.

The detail I kept returning to, across the three days I stayed, is how directly Udupi shaped vegetarian food across the country. Udupi's temple kitchens, tied closely to its Krishna Matha tradition, are widely credited by food historians and by the priests I spoke with as the origin point of the modern Udupi restaurant format now found in nearly every Indian city, a lineage that began with temple cooks migrating outward and carrying strict vegetarian techniques with them.

Half the vegetarian restaurants in this country owe their format to a temple kitchen most of their customers have never heard of.

I ate the same simple thali on three consecutive days in Udupi and found something different in it each time, which I am fairly sure was the point. On the last morning I walked back to the station and asked about Kasaragod, only a short distance further south. No Vande Bharat covers that particular stretch, since the Kerala service begins at Kasaragod itself heading the other way, so I booked a short ordinary train for that one last connecting hop, changing quickly at Mangaluru along the way.

Chapter TenKasaragod

Kerala's coast when nobody is watching

The short ordinary train down the coast ended this notebook the way I had hoped a train ride would, unhurried, coconut groves rolling past close enough to the tracks that their shadows crossed the window in a slow rhythm. A retired schoolteacher travelling to visit her grandchildren spent the ride describing a Theyyam performance she had watched as a child, the memory of the drumbeat clearly still vivid decades later, and told me plainly that no photograph she had ever seen of the ritual came close to what it felt like to stand near one in person, the ground itself seeming to hold the rhythm along with the performer.

I got down at Kasaragod, left the station on foot, and found a homestay within walking distance before the afternoon heat set in properly. Kasaragod moves at a pace that made me suspicious for the first day, the way silence in a house makes you check every room. The beaches here do not perform for a camera the way the more famous Kerala coastline does further south. Malpe and Kovalam get the postcards. Kasaragod gets fishermen mending nets in the same unhurried rhythm their fathers used, and a backwater system locals navigate more than they photograph.

Bekal fort draws a modest crowd, fair enough given the coastline views from its ramparts, but almost nobody I met outside the fort itself brought up Theyyam without me asking first, and even then the answers came slowly, almost reluctantly, as though the ritual belonged to a register of life not meant for casual conversation with a stranger holding a notebook. Theyyam performances happen in village shrines during specific months, a form where a performer is understood locally to become the deity itself for the duration of the ritual, face and body transformed through elaborate paint and costume, and the intensity of watching one up close, uninvited by any tour operator, felt entirely different from anything else on this trip.

Nobody warned me that watching Theyyam would feel less like sightseeing and more like being allowed to witness something that was never staged for me in the first place.

I stayed four nights in Kasaragod, longer than anywhere else on this loop, and on the last morning I walked back to the station one final time. Kasaragod happens to be the starting point of its own Vande Bharat, the service that runs down to Thiruvananthapuram, so the loop ended the way it began, boarding a Vande Bharat with sand still in my shoes, which felt like the right way to close a year that had rarely run in a straight line.