Small-town South Africa in India

This week was the first time that I travelled on a train. I’d been on those little novelty choo-choos that whip kiddies around the zoo or the amusement park but I had never actually journeyed, from one city to another, on a train. Johannesburg’s Gautrain, which goes from the heart of the CBD in Sandton to the airport in 16 minutes doesn’t count.

The Jan Shatabdi Express, part of one of the largest railway networks in the world, now that’s a train. It was far more elaborate than any of the ones I had seen in old Bollywood films. Nothing nearly as exciting as what happens in the movies happened to me, but I was still thrilled to be on it. It was bumpy and bustling. It left Delhi to pass through kilometres of fields and approached Chandigarh with the sight of rolling hills, although only their shadows were discernible as darkness descended.

It was the ideal, surreal start to three days in Chandigarh, where the roads are wide, the streets are quiet and the big-city edge is non-existent. In anyone’s book, it would pass for a small town. Perhaps not in its entirety, but certainly when looked at one or two sectors at a time. Sector 63, where the PCA is, reminded me of where my grandmother stays, 80 kilometers North West of Johannesburg in a town called Brits.

It’s the kind of place I would go to a few weeks before exam time to make sure I could study with no distractions. It’s the kind of place where a woman of almost 90 can live by herself in big, bad South Africa and feel only a little insecure. In Chandigarh, even that little would be erased. There’s something different about it, not a feeling of greater freedom, although it can be interpreted that way, but of greater space.

I was able to go running on the road the morning before the match, without wrestling with autos or ambassadors. I was able to walk right up to the Sikh Temple, just a few hundred metres from the stadium, where the Deputy Chief Minister of Punjab was attending prayers (so I was told by the police officer) and was let through by every member of the security force and only stopped before entering and advised to cover my hair. I was able to see what looked like miles of open space. It was totally different to the big smoke that Delhi had been and quite similar to the small towns that are so precious in South Africa.

Move to Sector 35, and it becomes a little closer to Bloemfontein . The strip, where the restaurants and shops lie, is apparently the busiest in the city. Two other sectors fit the bill but I didn’t have the time to visit them. It was missing the student feel that Bloemfontein’s rowdy bars have, but it retained the small-town feel. The kind that celebrates families going out for dinner in big bunches and thriving communities where everyone is an acquaintance. The manager was wearing a Tommy Hilfiger designer rugby shirt – quaint, I thought, quaint like Bloemfontein.