First Class AC on Indian Railways is a lie told in linen and plywood. The name promises luxury. What you get is a private compartment with curtains that do not quite close, sheets that smell of institutional detergent and generations of previous passengers, and a door latch that requires a specific jiggle-and-lift technique which the attendant demonstrates once, rapidly, and then never explains again.
The carpet is a shade of maroon that was chosen, presumably, to hide stains. The reading light offers two settings: interrogation-bright and broken. The folding table has been folded and unfolded so many times that it has developed the structural integrity of a paperback. And the window — the one thing you actually want — is sealed behind a pane of glass so scratched and smudged that the landscape outside looks like an impressionist painting, which, depending on your feelings about impressionism, may be a feature.
But at ten o'clock at night, when the train pulls out of the station and the platform slides away and the city lights begin to thin and the rhythm of the wheels establishes itself underneath you — it becomes, briefly and improbably, the most romantic way to travel in India. This is a piece about that improbability.
The Compartment
The First AC coupé is designed for four people, which means it is comfortable for two and intimate beyond all reason for four. Two lower berths, two upper berths, a sliding door with a lock that inspires more hope than confidence, and a space between the facing seats that is technically a corridor but is, in practice, a negotiation zone.
The design dates from an era when Indian Railways imagined First AC as something approaching grandeur. The evidence is everywhere, like archaeological layers. The mirror above the washbasin — too small to be useful, too ornate to be purely functional. The bracket on the wall designed to hold a water bottle, because someone in a design office in the 1970s imagined that First AC passengers would travel with glass bottles rather than plastic. The curtains, which are a shade of blue that suggests the sea as imagined by someone who has only read about it.
Everything in the compartment has been touched by a million hands. The berth leather — not actually leather anymore, some synthetic descendant — has a patina that no new material could achieve. The reading light switch has been toggled so many times that the word ON has been worn to a ghost. The folding table has a wobble that is not a defect but a personality, developed over decades of chai cups and paperback novels and elbows and someone's grandmother's steel tiffin box.
I love this compartment. Not despite its decrepitude but because of it. A brand-new train would be more comfortable and less interesting. This compartment has stories in its surfaces. You are not its first passenger and you will not be its last, and that continuity — that sense of being one in a sequence of travellers who have all lain in this exact berth, staring at this exact ceiling, listening to this exact rattle — is the whole point.
The Departure
An Indian train departure is a specific kind of chaos. The platform is a society compressed into a narrow strip — families seeing off passengers with the gravity of permanent separation, vendors selling chai and magazines and phone chargers, porters navigating luggage carts through crowds with a precision that borders on the supernatural, and someone, always someone, running alongside the moving train with one hand on a railing and one foot still on the platform, making a boarding decision that has no business working out but always does.
Inside the compartment, the departure has a different texture. You hear it rather than see it. The whistle — two long, one short. The lurch that travels through the train like a shiver. The gradual acceleration that you feel in your body before you can confirm it through the window. And then, slowly, the platform slides away. The faces of the people who came to see off the passenger in the next coupé drift backward and disappear. The station roof ends and the sky opens up. And the city begins to thin.
This is the moment I wait for. The transition from city to not-city, from platform to motion, from the noise and obligation of wherever you have been to the pure, unstructured emptiness of a twelve-hour journey. Nobody can reach you. There is nowhere you need to be. The train will arrive when it arrives — which may or may not bear any relationship to the published schedule — and in the meantime, you belong to nobody except yourself and the three strangers in your compartment.
The Strangers
The uncle is always there. Not your uncle — the universal Indian train uncle, a man in his fifties or sixties who has packed enough food for an expedition and whose first act upon boarding is to offer you something from a steel container with the quiet authority of a man who will not accept refusal. The food is always homemade. It is always better than anything you brought. And the offering is not generosity in the conventional sense — it is a social protocol, a way of saying: we are sharing this space for the next twelve hours, and sharing food is how we establish that we are not strangers. We are temporary family.
On the Rajdhani from Mumbai to Delhi — seventeen hours, if the gods and the Northern Railway are willing — I once shared a compartment with a retired colonel, his wife, and their fourteen-year-old grandson who was reading a book about black holes. The colonel produced, in sequence: home-made theplas wrapped in foil, a container of mango pickle that he had carried from his kitchen in Pune, two oranges, and a small box of kaju katli that he presented with the ceremony of a man unveiling a masterpiece. His wife watched him distribute the food with the fond exasperation of someone who has been watching him do this on every train journey for forty years.
By midnight, the colonel was telling me about his posting in Siachen. By one in the morning, I was explaining what a startup was and why anyone would voluntarily choose a life without a pension. By two, his grandson had abandoned the black holes book and was asking me questions about coding with the specific intensity of a teenager who has found an adult willing to take him seriously. The colonel's wife was asleep and had been since eleven, which I suspect was a deliberate strategic withdrawal rather than actual fatigue.
I never saw any of them again. I do not know the colonel's name. I remember the pickle vividly — it had whole mustard seeds and was sharper than anything you would find in a jar. The grandson sent me an email once, six months later, about a Python tutorial he had found. I replied. He never wrote back. This is how train friendships work: total intimacy, total transience.
The Night
The sounds of an Indian train at night form a specific composition that I have never heard adequately described, probably because it requires experiencing the full duration — not a sample, but the whole eight-hour performance — to understand how the sounds layer and shift.
The base note is the wheels. Not a smooth hum — Indian tracks have joints, and the wheels announce each one with a rhythmic da-dum, da-dum that becomes, after an hour, the heartbeat of the journey. You stop hearing it consciously. It enters your body instead, synchronises with something, and becomes the substrate on which everything else is built.
Above the wheels: the creak of the berths. The metal frame shifting as the train rounds a curve. The curtain moving in a draft that comes from nowhere identifiable. The distant clank of the pantry car, where someone is always making tea, at every hour, regardless of demand, as if the tea is not a beverage but a continuous process that the train requires to function.
Stations arrive as interruptions. The train slows and the sounds change — the wheels quieten, replaced by voices and platform announcements in a language you may or may not understand, depending on how far you have travelled. You hear the station without seeing it: the names called out by vendors, the metallic scrape of a luggage trolley, someone laughing. Then the whistle, the lurch, and the station slides away, and the composition resumes.
I do not sleep well on trains. I never have. But the insomnia of a First AC compartment at two in the morning is a different quality of wakefulness than any other. You are lying in a berth that is rocking gently, in a room that is moving through a landscape you cannot see, surrounded by the breathing of strangers who have become, for this one night, the people closest to you in the world. It is uncomfortable and strange and I would not trade it for the best hotel bed in India.
The Morning
You wake up and the geography has changed. This is the magic trick that only a train performs. A flight deposits you in a different city, but the transition is abstract — you were in a metal tube, you walked through a corridor, and now you are somewhere else. A train lets you watch the transition happen. You fell asleep in the flat, dry scrubland of Maharashtra and you wake up in the green, wet farmland of — where? You check the name of the last station the train stopped at and calculate your position. You are in Madhya Pradesh. Or possibly still in Maharashtra. The train is running three hours late, which means all spatial predictions are provisional.
The morning in a First AC compartment has its own rituals. The attendant arrives with tea — not good tea, but train tea, which is its own category, served in a paper cup with too much sugar and too little leaf, and which tastes better than any tea you will drink that day because of the context in which it is consumed. The colonel — or whoever your compartment uncle is — is already awake and folding his bedding with military precision. His wife has produced a toothbrush from somewhere and is heading to the washroom with the purposeful stride of a woman who has been sharing a small space with three other people for fifteen hours and requires five minutes of solitude.
The landscape outside the window is moving slowly now — the train has been decelerating for the last half hour, which means the destination is close. You watch the outskirts of a city assemble themselves: first the tracks multiply, then the warehouses appear, then the apartment buildings, then the station, then the platform, then the faces of people waiting, and the journey is over.
What's Being Lost
I am not going to be sentimental about this. The Vande Bharat trains are faster, cleaner, and objectively better. Flights are cheaper, when you factor in time. The demographic that chooses First AC for long-distance travel is narrowing to retirees, people who are afraid of flying, and people like me who have developed an irrational attachment to the experience of sleeping in a plywood box on rails.
But something is being lost, and it is worth being honest about what that something is. It is not comfort — First AC was never truly comfortable. It is not efficiency — the trains are late more often than they are on time. It is not even the romance, exactly, because romance is a word that implies an idealisation, and I am trying to describe something more specific than that.
What is being lost is a particular texture of Indian travel. The enforced intimacy of a shared compartment. The twelve hours of unstructured time in an era that has eliminated unstructured time. The experience of watching a landscape change gradually, mile by mile, rather than being teleported over it. The colonel and his pickle. The grandson and his black holes. The attendant and his two-setting reading light. The tea in the paper cup at six in the morning, served by a man who has been awake all night making sure the tea exists, for everyone, at every hour.
I do not think this needs saving. Things that are fading are allowed to fade. But I think it needs remembering. And if you have never done it — if you have never taken the overnight train in First AC, with its scratched windows and its institutional sheets and its wobbling folding table — you should do it once, while you still can, and lie in the upper berth and listen to the wheels and watch the ceiling move in the reading light and know that you are part of a sequence of passengers that stretches back decades, all of them lying exactly here, hearing exactly this, going somewhere else.