Social Reformers

I was being nicely rocked into a lazy half-sleep yesterday on a busy, early evening passenger train from Trivandrum to Varkala, when I felt a soft thud next to me. A hawker had dropped a pile of thin booklets onto the seat. It was the first of these many wallahs I'd seen not selling nuts, coffee, tea and an infinite variety of tasty, greasy snacks. All the pamphlets were written in Malayalam, and judging by their front covers there were stories, puzzles, guides on learning English, astrology charts, you name it. People handed them out, I smiled at him, he disappeared, and moments later he had handed me 'Social Reformers': written in English, a serious little booklet with about 40 one-page profiles of Indian social revolutionaries, from Gandhi to Nehru to writer Arundhathi Roy, who wrote The God of Small Things and is from Kerala. Lesser known names include Sri Aurobindo, whose eponymous ashram I'm going to visit outside Pondicherry, and Kiran Bedi, the first Indian woman to join the police. Can you imagine that happening in England? It seems not just a peculiarly Indian thing to do, but particularly Keralan, the most literate, educated state in India - and run by communists/socialists to boot. I happily parted with 10 rupees.
Talking of trains, travelling local class for the short hop to Trivandrum, I attracted more interest than when I travel AC-2 (the air-conditioned class for tourists and professional Indians). Rex was late and the train was pulling into the platform when I saw him run into the station entrance. I assumed he missed the train, but he'd hopped across the tracks and jumped on the back and called me to tell me he had made it. I had barely squished onto a long window seat next to a lady and a chap, who immediately offered me some of their snacks, when the questions started. Was I travelling alone? (No, with a friend, in another carriage.) Rex appeared and stood by the carriage door and the questions intensified. Was that my friend? How do I know him? Was I staying with him in Varkala? (Absolutely not. With two friends in a guest house....). How long have I known him? Was he staying at the guest house too? Were we going to stay in Trivandrum together? All the questions came from the man, who translated immediately for the lady. She responded with nods and mouth curls that seemed to mean, 'hmmm, so she's that kind of Western girl, is she?'. I was quite glad to get off the train. Walking round Trivandrum, Rex told me that if any tourist touts talk to us, I was to say we were married. That way, I would get charged for anything at fair local rates. Otherwise, they would assume I was the tourist, he my guide, and would inflate everything. One way and another, quite a political afternoon.