Better Late

On the road to Kathmandu, MATTHEW CLAYFIELD adjusts his clock and hangs on for the ride.

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I was supposed to be in Raxaul, on the Indian side of the Nepalese border, at eight in the morning. There had been difficulties from the get-go. The Mithila Express, the train from Kolkata, had been fully booked until Muzaffarpur. So I booked a bus to Muzaffarpur and the Express to the frontier. A little fiddly, perhaps, but the timing worked – the bus was scheduled to arrive several hours before the train did.

What I hadn’t considered was that the bus might leave Kolkata two hours late, stop for half an hour on the edge of the city after leaving someone behind at the bus stand, and fall even further behind as it bounced and meandered its way north through the night. I was still new to India at the time, and hadn’t yet come to accept schedules as well-meaning but essentially meaningless expressions of idealism, utterly disconnected from reality.

Not that it particularly mattered by the time we arrived in Muzaffarpur. I hadn’t missed the train at all. The Mithila Express had been cancelled.