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DIVIDING LINES
Through dust, fumes and choking heat, Andrew Marshall rolls to the brink in India and Pakistan

Mohammed Pervez’s train was a heap of junk, a rusting pile of squabbling spare parts dragged by a 40-year-old American engine way past its retirement age. The windshield was shattered, none of the gauges worked, and even at its top speed—25 km/h—the whole train shimmied like an overweight belly dancer. “Sorry,” grinned Pervez, “but if I drive any faster, it falls off the track.” Not that I cared. Why? Because he was taking me on the first leg of a 5,000-kilometer journey across Pakistan and India, from the haunting moonscape of the Baluchistan desert to the lush tropics of the Indian northeast. And because Mohammed Pervez let me ride up front and blow the horn.

The Chaman to Quetta train pulled a single carriage of similar decrepitude. All the original fittings, like coat hooks and ashtrays, had been stripped away or had simply fallen off, to be replaced by a thick layer of grime. The women had a compartment to themselves, so all my fellow passengers were men. There was a migrant bricklayer returning home with blistered hands; a bearded youngster who smirked, “I’m from al-Qaeda,” although his friends said he was a soap salesman from Pishin; a chemistry student who had read Karl Marx in his native Pashtu and called himself “progressive”; and half a dozen Kalashnikov-toting policemen to protect me from all of the above. The police were assigned to this duty by the Baluchistan authorities—an admission of just how lawless this vast desert state could be. Chaman itself lay only a few kilometers from Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. It was chaos there. An endless stream of trucks piled high with sacks of grain thundered into Afghanistan. Pakistani border guards lashed out with canes at Afghan men and boys trying to enter Chaman to sell tank tracks and shell casings—any old iron that would fetch a handful of rupees from the town’s scrap merchants. Yet this pitiful scene belied a more heartening trend. Almost a million refugees had returned to Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban, with a million more expected to follow soon. When a ferocious dust storm blew through a nearby refugee camp and lifted the flaps of the tents, I saw they were all empty.

“In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful,” intoned Mohammed Pervez as we pulled out of Chaman. Soon the train was trundling through a lifeless plain stretching off to heat-blurred horizons. Somewhere to the southwest, in a district called Chagai, Pakistan had conducted its first nuclear tests in 1998. The vibrations are still being felt today. As my trip began, India and Pakistan had once again been mobilizing for war over disputed Kashmir, with both hinting that nuclear weapons were an option. But as I would discover on my journey, the futures of both countries are also clouded by internal divisions. Over 50 years after its creation, Pakistan is still struggling to find a national identity amid poverty, corruption and ethnic unrest, and is split over the government’s support of the U.S.-led war against terrorism. In India, Hindu nationalism has led to violence against Muslims and shattered the nation’s cherished image as a secular, progressive state. Meanwhile, separatist activity has made northeast India almost as deadly as Kashmir. I couldn’t fail to sense these tensions as I made my way slowly along the subcontinent’s immense railway network—a 72,000 kilometer system that ranks among the greatest engineering feats on earth.

Strife has long been synonymous with the subcontinent. The British built the line from Chaman to Quetta over a century ago to carry soldiers and munitions to defend the Empire’s wild western frontier. To reach its destination, the track must burrow through three kilometers of mountains by means of the spectacular Khojak Tunnel. Considered the jewel in Pakistan Railways’ crown—the tunnel’s picture graces the country’s five-rupee note—it was built between 1888 and 1891 by the most cosmopolitan of workforces. The British recruited laborers from Kabul and Kandahar, Swat and Kafiristan, the Tibetan highlands and the African trading port of Zanzibar—all under the supervision of Cornish tin-mining engineers. According to legend, the nearby station of Shelabagh was named after a dancing woman called Shela who entertained the workers. “They don’t build tunnels like this any more,” says Reg Mohammed, 52, a maintenance worker on Khojak for three decades now. He demonstrated the ingenious lighting system still used to inspect the tunnel: an enormous swivel mirror heaved onto the track, then angled to send a wide, dusty beam of sunlight deep into the gloom. This illuminated half the tunnel. “How do you light the other half?” I asked. Stupid question. “We’ve got another mirror at the other end, of course.”

The train clattered on past dry riverbeds and mud-hut villages chiseled from the landscape. The number of graveyards—simple mounds of dust decorated with white stones—testified to the hostility of the environment. Beyond Quetta the train entered the Bolan Pass, a spectacular mountain route forged by centuries of invaders from Central Asia and, since the 1880s, plied by a plucky extension of the Indus Valley Railway. This train was faster than Mohammed Pervez’s junk heap—it would hit an enviable 50 km/h on downhill stretches—and was positively a blur by the standards of a legendary train that traced a route through the North-West Frontier province. That one was so slow, I had heard, that you could jump off, relieve yourself, have a leisurely cup of tea, and still manage to climb aboard again without it even stopping.

As I hung from an open train door, the superheated desert wind grating like sandpaper against my skin, the Bolan run felt like a roller coaster ride. The train plunged and twisted through tunnels with fortress-like entrances bristling with battlements, and emerged each time to an ever-changing vista: a herd of camels standing motionless against hills carved by earthquakes and streaked with minerals, or a middle-of-nowhere village with a tiny mud mosque and the forbidding name, Ab I Gum (where water disappears). Abruptly, the mountains reared up into giant, ragged wedges, like a petrified tsunami.

I arrived in Sibi just after sunset. This was good timing, since this Baluch town has only one claim to fame: it is the hottest place on the entire subcontinent. By 10 the next morning, a thermometer bought in the bustling bazaar read 51°C in the sun. By noon, as the market crowds began to thin—began, it seemed, to evaporate—the mercury edged past 55°C and then shot off the scale. I stood there, a hideous Niagara of perspiration, idly wondering why I was not dead yet. I rented a pony and a trap—Sibi’s chief form of transport—and set off through the well-kept streets of the British-built cantonment area on a doomed quest for an air-conditioned hotel. There wasn’t one. I settled for a guesthouse where the walls still radiated the day’s ferocious heat, but where—with the aid of a violently wobbling ceiling fan—the nighttime temperature dipped to a positively chilly 48°C.

The main (male) pastime in Sibi is watching bootleg Indian videos in shaded tea shops. Pakistan’s government recently banned cable operators from offering Indian entertainment channels, even though (as one outraged Pakistani columnist noted) watching Bollywood movies was the best way “to escape the tension of an ever-imminent war.” I asked a man at one Sibi establishment if he thought it unpatriotic to watch Indian films at this time. “Just watching is O.K.,” he replied. “But we are mentally prepared to fight India at any time.” Mental preparation, in this case, consisted of studying two pneumatic Bollywood babes jiggling in bath towels.

The only other women to be seen in Sibi were widows lining up at the town’s colonial post office for a twice-yearly government stipend of 1,000 rupees. They mostly hail from the Bugti tribe, their gray, henna-streaked hair draped in colorful scarves that sometimes slipped to reveal ears pierced by countless silver rings. Among the Bugti, I had read, tribal law is so strict that an honorable woman must hang herself if she is spotted with a man other than her husband. It was tempting to view such unforgiving codes of conduct as an extension of radical Islamic law. In fact, many Bugti traditions probably predate Islam—like the “ordeal by fire,” in which a man charged with a serious crime, such as murder or theft, is obliged to walk across hot coals. If his feet blister, he is guilty. I thought such medieval practices would be dying out. But according to Shaheed Bugti, a clansman I met in Quetta, ordeals by fire are not only routine but increasingly popular among other Baluchistan tribes. “No case takes more than a week to be settled,” he explains. “If a plaintiff seeks justice through a state court, he will go to his grave before he gets it.”

State control in such remote districts is almost nonexistent. For many tribespeople, the government’s authority—and even the authority of the local mullah—pales beside that of their sirdar or clan leader, whom they imbue with almost supernatural power. The head of the Bugti was Nawab Akbar Bugti, educated at Aitchison College in Lahore—”the Eton of Pakistan”—and still known as the “Tiger of Baluchistan,” even at 76 years of age. His remote seat of power, a place called Dera Bugti, lies some 130 kilometers to the east, in a region rich in oil. It is currently besieged by hundreds of state troops, sent there to halt a series of attacks on oil installations by unnamed Bugti “terrorists,” whom the government suspects the Nawab of harboring. I called a Dera Bugti number that Shaheed Bugti had given me, and to my great surprise the Nawab himself answered. “It’s very hot up here,” he said in a clipped British accent. “A lot of natural heat, as well as—you know—the man-made variety.” Helicopters were circling his house, and his water and electricity had been cut off. “And the phones are tapped too,” the Nawab added—at that point the line went dead. When I rang back, nobody answered.

left Sibi on the Quetta Express, bound eventually for the important Punjabi city of Multan. At each stop passengers disgorged onto the platform to wash their faces and refill drinking flasks at trackside water pumps. Vendors served curry in pages ripped from a Karachi telephone directory and tea in plastic cups pilfered from Pakistan Airways. Just before midnight we crossed the Indus, whose dark waters irrigated a landscape of rice fields and fruit orchards—a welcome lushness after bone-dry Baluchistan. Then we skirted the edge of the Cholistan desert; and once again choking dust poured through the open windows. India lay on the other side of the desert, and a patrolling Pakistani fighter jet streaked low across the night sky, its wingtips blinking red.

My compartment was a spartan, metal box with windows barred to thwart fare dodgers—a kind of holding cell on wheels. It was too hot to sleep, so I read instead. I had picked up a copy of a book called Mechanics of Doomsday and Life After Death. An alarming blend of pseudo science and Koranic prophecy, the book revealed all the telltale signs of a coming apocalypse. More earthquakes will occur, it warned, and rain will fall out of season. Human blood will become worthless and “singing women will be on the increase.” It also quoted a verse from the Koran, which—with two nuclear-armed countries straining at their leashes—I found quite chilling:

They wait not but one blast,
Which will surprise them,
While they are disputing.

According to a Persian saying, Multan was famous for four things: heat, dust, beggars and burial grounds. The latter were the magnificent tombs of various Sufis, or Islamic mystics. Legend has it that one Sufi deployed his miraculous powers to lure the sun closer to earth, thus creating Multan’s crippling heat. In the 4th century B.C., Alexander the Great swung through town on his world tour, almost dying there when an Indian spear punctured his lung. Seven hundred years later, a Chinese traveler found a mammoth Hindu temple in Multan. Not a brick of it survives today, although a tiny community of Hindus does.

They live in Railway Colony, an area near the station with crumbling brick houses and narrow, cobbled lanes. It is mainly inhabited by Christian descendants of rail workers employed during British rule. About 35 Hindus cluster among them, where they feel more secure (most Hindus in Punjab province fled over the border after partition). I watched as a small temple, shaded by a hallowed pipal tree, slowly filled up with worshipers. Inside was a tinsel-draped shrine loaded with votive fruit and smoldering incense. A sign above it read, “Om sweet om.”

Multan’s Hindus have many grievances—grievances echoed by Pakistani Christians I spoke to. Muslims are always favored when it comes to job offers or college places, they say. “We are poor—much poorer than the Muslims,” says Parwan Lal, a 20-year-old arts student. Yet Parwan and his friends claim they would not hesitate to defend Pakistan against any aggression from their Hindu brethren in India. “I’m a Pakistani first, and a Hindu second,” says Chaman Lal, 20, another student. “We will defend our motherland, just as Muslims in India would fight to defend their country against Pakistan.”

Was this simply the necessary patriotism of a minority, part of an embattled community’s highly-evolved instinct for survival? I’m sure it was heartfelt: even casual visitors are impressed by Pakistani patriotism. Yet Pakistanis seem to love their country without being particularly proud of it, a schizophrenic attitude they share with my compatriots, the English.

This struck me at my final stop in Pakistan: Lahore. I arrived in the blazing noonday heat. The British-built station is sturdy and imposing, like a Victorian prison. It was Sunday, and the sky was peppered with thousands of kites flown from the city’s rooftops. I joined the families strolling through Hazuri Garden in Lahore Fort. Above us soared the red minarets of Badshahi Mosque, built of sandstone quarried in India and ferried here by elephant. You could once climb one of the minarets for an unrivaled view of the city, but recently it had become a popular suicide launchpad, and was now closed. “Poverty, joblessness—these are the main reasons for the jumpings,” shrugs Sami Ullah, a local tour guide.

In one corner of Hazuri Garden lies the simple sandstone tomb of Mohammed Iqbal, the Punjabi philosopher-poet. It was he who first proposed the idea of a separate Muslim homeland, a prosperous nation guided and governed by pure Islamic principles. Nearby, a group of old men, their grizzly beards tinged with henna, were heatedly discussing Iqbal’s legacy. One man was recalling before a rapt audience the 1997 celebrations that marked Pakistan’s 50th year. “But what is Pakistan?” he asked accusingly. “Corruption only. Why on earth were we celebrating?” Here, it occurred to me, is a nation created in God’s name, a promised land, yet it seems unblessed. It is impoverished and fragmented, united only by a futile hostility toward a giant neighbor, whose teeming millions—beset with problems of their own—care less about Pakistan’s opinion than most Pakistanis seem to realize. What had gone wrong?

None of the old men debating near Iqbal’s tomb could agree. Apparently it had nothing to do with burning issues such as the toppling of the neighboring Taliban regime, or Pakistan’s edgy role in the ongoing war on terror—topics the men didn’t even mention during the hour I listened to them. Instead, some claimed the problem was too much religion—too much power in the hands of the mullahs. Some—like Mohammed Buta, 71, a retired railway worker—believed the problem was not enough religion. “Yes, we are an independent nation,” said Buta, “but look at all the sin and corruption here. We are nothing.” He raised a withered finger toward the tomb. “If Iqbal were alive today,” he declared, “he would look around and he would say, ‘This is not my Pakistan.’”

India beckoned. My original plan was to cross the border on the so-called Friendship Express, but inevitably the train service was suspended. Instead I drove to the border through flat scrubland pimpled with military bunkers. I got my passport stamped at a deserted immigration post, then walked across the border, which was marked by a thick white line painted across the road. On the other side was a sign: “India, the world’s largest democracy, welcomes you.”

The Indian post was deserted too—but not for long. Every evening, thousands of people come here to watch the border-closing ceremony; similar numbers flock to the Pakistani side. By 6 p.m., Bollywood theme tunes blared from loudspeakers, and a purpose-built seating area was heaving with Indians chanting, “Long live Hindustan!” A hundred meters away, across the border, another crowd was screaming, “Long live Pakistan!” and waving its own flags. Giant, stern-faced soldiers moved among both crowds, blowing whistles to keep everything in order.

The ceremony finally began. It was quite intricate, and very, very funny. An Indian guard in a curious fluted headdress would swing on his heels, quick-march to within a meter of the border, and, with hands on hips, turn his head and pout furiously at his Pakistani counterparts. Then he pirouetted again, and goose-stepped gymnastically in the direction from which he had come. What did the Pakistani guards think of all this? It was hard to tell, since—on the other side of the thick white line—they were performing an almost identical ceremony.

A bugle sounded. The two flags were lowered, and the two crowds fell silent as two national anthems were played. Then, the Indian guards slammed the border gates shut in the faces of their Pakistani brothers, who responded in kind. And that was that. Two great nations had just delivered the best display their respective ministries of silly walks could come up with, and had nothing left to say to each other.

After 10 days bucketing through Pakistan’s dreary stations, arriving in India was like switching from black-and-white to Technicolor. At the Sikh holy city of Amritsar, my first stop after the border, the station was a heaving, seething, jostling, squabbling masala of humanity. Women sported saris of every color—drab burqa territory was long gone. The Sikh men wore magnificent turbans of sky blue and electric pink, skillfully wound for a visit to the Golden Temple.

Indian trains are no more punctual than Pakistani ones, but Indian stations are much more fun to hang around in. At Amritsar there are bookstores stocked with spiritual tracts, Internet guides and—that now archetypally Indian best seller—Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. There are dozens of flashing weight machines, which, in return for a single rupee, click and whir, then spit out a little card bearing your weight and—this being India—a spiritually uplifting message. (“The end of doubt is the beginning of repose,” read mine.) Other shops sell everything from souvenir toothpicks to hefty luggage chains, not to mention a women’s beauty product called The Big Smile Offer—”for the removing of the public hair, sir,” explained its vendor.

The platforms were clogged with huge hessian mailbags secured with Dickensian wax seals. Behind one barricade of luggage sat R.P. Singh, a high constable with the Border Security Force. He was going home after a year’s posting in Kashmir, which he called “a very fine and peaceful place”—notwithstanding the fact that India and Pakistan had fought two wars over it. Was another likely? “No chance! But believe me,” R.P. Singh added gravely, “we are ready to fight. We will fight Pakistan with our guns, with our bare hands, with our … ” Abruptly, he had run out of things to fight the Pakistanis with. “Cup of tea?” he inquired.

While I rarely encountered Hindus in Pakistan, Muslims in India were too numerous to ignore—too numerous, really, to be truly called a minority. There are 120 million Muslims here, nearly as many as in Pakistan. Pakistan is proud of her “Muslim bomb,” and pointedly named her long-range missile systems Ghauri, Ghaznavi and Abdali, after three Muslim warlords who invaded India between the 11th and 18th centuries. But the great irony is that India’s bomb is Muslim, too. The architect of India’s 1998 nuclear tests was A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a national icon recently named as the nation’s third Muslim President.

Of course, not all Muslims are so celebrated. Most still rank among India’s less privileged. Every day at Old Delhi Station, a group of porters gathers at a water tap on platform 12 to perform their ablutions before kneeling on mats laid out in a specially roped-off section. Their prayers are barely audible amid the grumble of departing commuter trains and the maddeningly frequent station announcements. Muslims make up one-third of Old Delhi’s thousand-odd porters. Business is bad, says Azam Ali, 33, carefully folding his topee away. Yet Ali, a father of five, would rather lose customers than miss his five-times-a-day prayers. “Allah will provide,” he says. Perhaps this fatalism is a key to Ali’s survival, as patriotism is to Pakistan’s Hindus.

From New Delhi I traveled to Lucknow on the Shatabdi Express Service—which, like the Bomb, is for many Indians a symbol of modernity and progress. It is clean, equipped with aircraft-style seats, and brutally air-conditioned throughout—pretty much everything an Indian train isn’t supposed to be. And punctual, too. My Shatabdi left New Delhi right on time, and was soon hurtling through a countryside that had remained unchanged for millennia: buffalos lounging in village ponds, tiny houses decorated with drying cowpats, the immense sky bruised black with the coming monsoon. The Shatabdi blasted imperiously through the smaller stations without stopping, and I wondered if this created any resentment. The answer came in the form of an enormous bang, as a stone hurled from a passing village cracked one of the windows. Then another rock clanked off the side—and another.

The passengers, mostly businesspeople, seemed oblivious. They pored over documents or glanced hopefully at their mobile phones to see if there was a signal, which of course there wasn’t. This was rural Uttar Pradesh, a state bigger than most countries and the heart of India’s “cow belt.” No mobile phone rang here. So the high-tech Shatabdi glided onward through a no-tech landscape, silent except for the crash of rocks ricocheting off its thick metal hide, and the soft beeps of passengers playing “Snake” on their otherwise useless Nokias.

The decline of Lucknow was an Indian tragedy. By the mid-19th century, the Nawabs of Avadh, the country’s last ruling Muslim dynasty, had created a city famed for Urdu poets, dancing girls and lavish architecture. While ravaged during the 1857 Indian Mutiny—the ruined Residency still stands as a shrine to British imperialism—Lucknow’s deathblow came a century later with the violence of partition. The Muslim élite fled for Pakistan, to be replaced by thousands of Punjabi Hindus. The Nawabs’ treasured monuments—like the Great Imambara, with its breathtaking vaulted ceiling—now moldered unloved amid a sea of modern concrete.

If Lucknow’s woes went unnoticed, it was partly because of its proximity to Ayodhya—a town upon which the fate of secular India itself depended. Ayodhya was once home to the 15th century Babri Mosque, built—so Hindu hard-liners claim—on the site of a temple marking the birthplace of Ram. In Dec. 1992, a Hindu mob stormed the mosque and destroyed it, sparking nationwide sectarian riots. Then, in February this year, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims left Ayodhya for the west Indian state of Gujarat, where it was set ablaze by local Muslims, killing 58 people. Egged on by politicians, vengeful Hindu mobs went on a rampage that left over 2,000 Muslims dead. Seemingly unperturbed by the horrific echoes of partition—women gang-raped, neighborhoods torched, charred corpses spilling from trains—the Indian government was criminally slow in deploying troops to quell the violence.

Not surprisingly, Ayodhya was a profoundly eerie place. Its empty cobbled streets were lined with stalls selling pictures of Hindu deities; many were run by Muslims. But there were no worshipers, Muslim or Hindu; just edgy soldiers patrolling the streets while monkeys bounded across the rooftops. Security at the temple complex itself was astonishing. The area was guarded by high barbed-wire fences and hundreds of government troops. Even air traffic over Ayodhya was banned. To enter the temple, you must submit to three rigorous body searches, then proceed through a long, narrow walkway flanked by four-meter-high steel fences. Eventually you arrive at an opening in the fence, through which you glimpse a small shrine bearing a statue of Ram surrounded by sandbags. There is just enough time to stop and pray before a guard tells you to keep moving. Exiting the complex you pass a huge crater—all that is left of Babri Mosque.

Ayodhya had a significant visitor the day I arrived. His name was Vinay Katiyar, a radical Hindu politician with solid low-caste credentials, who had participated in the mosque’s destruction. The Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had recently elected Katiyar as its leader in Uttar Pradesh to boost the party’s flagging popularity among voters. (An Indian newspaper had announced his election with the wry headline DEMOLITION MAN TO REBUILD PARTY.) Like other politicians eager to garner conservative Hindu votes, Katiyar had sworn to build a grand new Ram temple where Babri once stood. Long-term residents of Ayodhya—whose voices are rarely heard—resent this incendiary issue being exploited for political gain. Afzal Ahmed, a retired army captain who has lived there for 30 years, says locals had always lived in harmony—as long as the politicos stayed away. “If a Hindu brother dies, we go to the riverbank,” he says. “If a Muslim brother dies, we go to the graveyard. We’re like a big family.” A local Brahman priest also expressed his disgust with “both Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists.”

A different kind of storm was brewing over Ayodhya. The monsoon was due any day, and I was anxious to reach India’s remote northeast before the inevitable floods made travel there impossible. I traveled onward via Varanasi, waiting beside potbellied gurus smeared with holy ash, for a connection to Calcutta. There the monsoon hit with full force, and soon barefoot rickshaw wallahs were wading thigh-high through Calcutta’s already insanely congested streets.

I headed north on a sleeper train, a muffled symphony of snores and burps emanating from its curtained-off berths. By noon the next day we were passing through the “chicken’s neck,” the sinew of land which attaches northeast India to the rest of the country. My destination was Siliguri, the starting point of the famous “toy train” that chugged up through tea plantations to the British hill station of Darjeeling. But the monsoon got there first. Sections of the track had been destroyed in a mudslide, and the service had been suspended indefinitely. The same floods had also forced thousands of people across the northeast to abandon their homes.

So I continued east in a third-class carriage scented by fermenting lavatories. The train seemed implausibly full. Somehow, a wiry peasant woman struggled aboard with three sacks the size of baby elephants, followed by an old man with an enormous pot of gulab jamun, a sweet smothered in syrup, perched on his head. Then a conductor battled heroically through the crush in an outsized blazer and absurdly baggy trousers, as if in his very effort to collect tickets he had sweated off half his body weight.

We were now venturing through what appeared to be a different country. Figures in conical hats waded through newly-planted rice fields; villages nestled behind groves of banana, bamboo and betel nut. The people were different too—smaller-bodied, with neat Mongolian features. It was as if we had taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in Southeast Asia.

The northeast is populated by a bewildering variety of armed insurgency groups—29 by one count—each agitating for another mini-partition of India. The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) wants independence for the Assamese; the National Socialist Council for Nagaland (NSCN) wants a separate Naga homeland; and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) is willing—as a common graffito in the region puts it—to “do or die for Bodoland.” Bombing trains like this one is a favorite terror tactic, as is kidnapping oil or tea company officials. The NDFB and ULFA operate from remote jungle camps in Bhutan on Assam’s northern border, and stood accused of an ambush only two days before that had killed five people.

One group that has borne the brunt of northeastern insurgency are the Adivasis. These are tribal people from Bihar and Orissa states who migrated during British times to work on the tea plantations. Many now fester in refugee camps dotted across Kokrajhar district. I got off at Kokrajhar itself, a small market town protected by sandbagged army checkpoints. Not far from town stands a statue of the Bodo hero, Jawhalao Daimalu, carrying his bow and arrows. The people of Jaypur refugee camp live nearby in less heroic circumstances, in straw-roofed huts cringing beneath the rain.

They hail mostly from the Santhal, Orang and Munda tribes. Some are Hindus, others Christian, like Robin Hambron who arrived with his family in 1996 after Bodo guerrillas burned down his village. “We just want to go home,” Hambron says, “but the government says it still can’t provide security.” The state does supply a monthly rice ration, but it lasts only 10 days. Other necessities, like salt, mustard oil, clothes and blankets, are provided by a Lutheran charity.

I continued my train journey the next day, crossing the magnificent Brahmaputra River, then nudging slowly through squalid shantytowns of Bangladeshi refugees marking the outskirts of Guwahati, the ramshackle Assamese capital. The station milled with Indian troops en route to the northeast’s trouble spots. I was now traveling toward the very origins of the subcontinent’s rail system. The second stretch of track ever laid in India was built to ferry coal from the mines at Margherita—my penultimate stop—to barges moored at Dibrugarh on the Brahmaputra’s banks.

The train soon arrived in Digboi, home to the oldest oil well in India, and still the center of the country’s main oil-producing region. Without the railway—specifically, the British-owned Assam Railways and Trading Co., Ltd.—oil might not have been discovered so early. According to legend, the search for oil began when one elephant employed in the construction of the Dibrugarh to Margarita line was spotted with a black substance on its feet. “British officials would urge on the coolies by shouting, ‘Dig, boy, dig!’—thus the town’s name,” explains local oil official M. P. Chaliah (who insists this story is true). Today, Digboi is run almost entirely by Oil India. A giant refinery dominates the town, but tucked away in the surrounding hills are neat roads leading to spacious company mansions and a golf course where employers play with the help of barefoot boy caddies. It is all very orderly and prosperous, a country within a country.

After Digboi the train briefly veered south, heading straight for the formidable Patkai mountains, a distant relative of the Himalayas. Beyond them lay Burma, linked by the famous Ledo Road, built to ferry Allied supplies during World War II. Trains are a rarer sight in these parts, and delighted children spilled out of passing houses to wave and shout, like they were cheering us past the finishing line—which they were. At 11:46 a.m. the train pulled into Ledo, the most remote station in northeast India and my final stop.

Ledo is a sleepy town of colonial-era cottages, their eaves dripping from the monsoon rain. Less than a month since leaving the dust-choked Afghanistan-Pakistan border, I could not have arrived in a more different place. Yet the two regions—Baluchistan state and northeast India—have much in common. Oil rich and riven by separatism, both lie so far from their respective capitals as to seem like separate countries; both boast an ethnic diversity that no border, man-made or natural, can ever hope to contain; and both were plied by British-built railways that now have a new purpose: not to ferry troops to Chaman, or coals to Dibrugarh, but to try to connect far-flung peoples to a larger, more encompassing national identity.

I took a car and followed the tracks. They continued for a while, to within 30 kilometers of the Burmese border, past coal yards and army barracks. But soon the tracks lost the sheen of regular use and began to rust. Then they burrowed into the jungle and disappeared.