understand

I carry my train journeys in my bones, the juddering song of the Indian rail. Our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, famously likened India to a palimpsest, no layer quite effacing the one that went before. That’s how I think of Indian railway journeys. They inscribe on the mind our fellow travellers, our ways, our thousand languages, our landscapes, our climate.

I think of a rail journey I made in 1998 – that brutal summer of nuclear testing – setting out from Mumbai, in an ordinary three-tier sleeper, for Dehradun, 1,000 miles (1,600km) north. The frazzled train fell off any semblance of a schedule. The voyage grew longer, past 50 hours; hotter, past 50C. I remember the metallic burn on the window grilles; the hot, killing wind that blew through them; the sizzle of water drops splashed on the face when theyhit the uncovered platforms in the heart of the country; the melt of my rubber soles. A fortnight later, having trekked to the mouth of a tributary of the Ganges, completing my expedition from the Arabian Sea to a Himalayan glacier, it was possible to look back on the rail ordeal with affection.

I wonder, as I write, whether this memory seeped into the heat-addled odyssey made by the runaway protagonist of my novel Railsong. Physically depleted as she is by its end, she is sustained by the benevolence and solidarity of strangers. Alighting in the great city of Bombay, as Mumbai was then called, standing below the gargoyles of the gothic masterpiece then called the Victoria terminus (now the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj terminus), she knows she has emerged on the other side of something.

In no other activity, so easily available to all, does India offer itself up as wholly as train travel. Mahatma Gandhi, initially a critic of the railway system (“Railways accentuate the evil nature of man”), came around to accepting this, hitting the rails to understand his country on his return from South Africa. This is why I recommend to the prospective traveller not necessarily the heritage or scenic routes – though by all means sample the quaint narrow- or metre-gauge hill railways, or the gorgeous run down the Konkan coast – but instead using the railways simply as a way of getting from one place to another.

In the process, one learns much about oneself. Consider sleeper travel. Is there a situation more exposing than sharing a compartment with strangers? With luck, you might fall into invigorating company. A few months ago, I made an overnight trip up from Mumbai to Delhi with three large policemen, one nursing an injured toe, another dedicated to his newspaper, the third his phone, each initially taciturn. As the journey unspooled, so did their stories. They were going out to capture someone. If it was anything like their last outing to Delhi, when a slippery accused murderer had them chase him for more than 600 miles across three states, these officers would make it on to the news again. Another time, a painstaking manhunt had taken them to Mangaluru on the south-western coast, where they discovered instead the fellow’s namesake – himself wanted in a decades-old riots case. That led to a medal.

Food is also a valuable companion on the rails. No matter that dining cars are gone, that regulations about open flames have restricted platform fare, or that the foil-boxed meals served on premium services trigger thousands of official complaints every year and much casual grousing – eating remains a crucial railway habit. Depending on the season, and your route, it is possible to pop out on to the platform during a halt and buy top-notch, farm-fresh lychees, custard apples, bananas and mangoes in places famed for them.

On the Mumbai-Pune route in the west, vendors at Karjat align themselves with the carriage doors, bearing metal trays of the town’s famed vada pav – a deep-fried, lightly spiced potato ball, placed inside a soft bun with a mix of dry and wet chutneys (for the cautious, the dry is safer). On the same route, as banker (helper) engines push the rake (coupled carriages) up the Western Ghats, the hill station of Lonavala offers up its famous chikki – an energy-boosting sweet made from nuts and jaggery (unrefined cane sugar) – and the more decadent chocolate walnut fudge. In the southern states of Telangana and Karnataka, you might help yourself, as I did a few years ago, to vividly peppy breakfasts of ograni – a mixture of soft puffed rice and an array of condiments and spices, similar yet so distinct from the crunchy, mustardy puffed-rice jhalmuri of Bengal in the east. And there is always the prospect of packing yourself a tuck and sharing food with any friends you make along the way.

Despite the myriad challenges of Indian train travel, the journeys are pleasurable and affordable, not to mention sustainable. For these reasons, my family and I do as much of our travelling as possible by rail. Routinely, we curve out east from Delhi, across the great swathe of the Gangetic plains, the dusty brownscapes gradually getting greener, up past the trim tea gardens in the eastern Himalayan foothills, through the narrow corridor known as the “chicken’s neck” (officially, the Siliguri Corridor), into bamboo-shaded Assam, to my wife’s ancestral home. This run, 24 or 28 hours long, depending on the service, sometimes stretches past 35. Our two young girls don’t mind; it’s flights that make them feel claustrophobic.

The causes of these delays are often dramatic, and instructive about Indian life.

One time, a station footbridge collapsed under the weight of Kumbh Mela pilgrims – typically, a last-minute change of platforms was involved, causing a stampede – in the town then known as Allahabad (since renamed Prayagraj by a regime intent on scrubbing Islamic fingerprints off Indian history). More than 40 people died, putting into perspective my trivial discomfort of waiting in the chilly hours for the train to pull into Mughalsarai (also renamed, after the philosopher Deen Dayal Upadhyay). On another occasion, a derailment sent us on a circuitous gallivant through Bihar and Bengal. Then there was the time our rake first mowed down three cows and then, in the middle of the night, smashed into a stalled Jeep. The occupants got away. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

On a monsoonal Assamese morning in 2012, the train I was on came to a standstill beside a paddy field. This was an inexpensive regional service, fitted with unreserved bench-seating – in Indian Railways parlance, a “passenger” train – and it was halting at the merest hint of a station. But even by the standards of passenger trains, this seemed like an eccentric location. Eventually, I climbed off to investigate. In front of the locomotive sat a mangled autorickshaw. The bodies of three men had been laid alongside the tracks.

I don’t mean to deter you from passenger services. In fact, I highly recommend them. In a land as diverse as India, a passenger train is a full-blooded immersion in the local: the dress; the produce the farmers carry; the food vendors serve up; the unknown halts that mail and express trains roar past, which are the centres of their own little worlds. After all, on the railways, as in certain novels, the intimate and the epic, the local and the national, are linked together, making the whole.

Rahul Bhattacharya’s latest novel, Railsong, is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply