Our final twenty four hours in Shimla is a time I shall never be able to forget. India had two more tricks to play – the final one being deadly.

I think that we all liked Shimla. It was so different from anything we had experienced. The people were different in every way to those we had met in the rest of India. These were the mountain people, their appearance was different, the smell and freshness of the air was different, it demonstrates the vastness of India that you had such vast differences. They were more stand-offish, we had less encounters with the people of Shimal, they seemed more reserved. I presume this comes from generations of being isolated before the comng of the railway and the British.

Shimla had two of the most vivid experiences of the trip. The first hurt, but was also one of the funniest. The second was deadly.

On our final night we went to a restaurant in the main street of Shimla. We were in good spirits, we knew we were on the final leg and we would soon be home. This was our final meal and we wanted to celebrate.

We chose one of those restaurants on the main street that had a narrow entrance but opened up into quite a large seating area. Opposite us sat two businessmen and that was it apart from the enthusiastic staff.

We ordered drinks and looked through the menu. There was something about this being our penultimate night in India that made us more ambitious about what we ordered. I sat with Clare, one of the students who had kept me sane, and we ordered a meal to share.

It came out with these vegetables (?) that looked like small black runner beans. They were a chillie, but they were intriguing to look at. They had no hint of the power they contained.

What was so fantastic about these chillies was the concealed heat. But they tricked you. I did not know what they were, so timidly I bit into one of them, chewing on half.

No real flavour, no heat. So Clare did the same thing. Then after thirty seconds the heat hit me. A massive wave of heat, the hottest thing I had ever experienced. My mouth burnt.

It was all about that thirty seconds. Clare had bitten into hers about ten seconds after me as she thought it was safe. She now looked at my contorted face and knew it would hit her soon. It did.

One of my favourite pictures. The heat was unbearable. My mouth was on fire, I had never felt anything like this before. And then it hit Clare, the exact same reaction. How could it have been so hot, yet had a delayed reaction?

Others in the group, particularly David thought that this was some kind of wind-up. He had seen us eating them and there had been no reaction at first. The waiters, who had found this funny, were sent away to bring out some more.

With the whole group watching, David launched into his first one. A whole one. He chewed away. Because of the thirty second delay he felt nothing, this fed into his theory that we were winding everyone up. First one eaten, he then ate his second one. No reaction. He then ate his third. By this time the thirty seconds were up.

Boom! The first wave hit him. The two businessmen opposite found this funny. The staff of the restaurant had come out to watch David eat three in quick succession.

His face went red, he started to sweat. Three explosions hit his mouth. He threw water and lager into his mouth. More water, more lager. The rest of us looked at his contorted face and could not help but laugh. The business men laughed as did the waiters. Extra water was brought out and sugar. Sugar on your tongue helps to take away the heat.

Others in the group wanted to try as well, the reactions were all the same. I never did find out what this black ‘plant’ was. I still smile today thinking about that evening.

As we were enjoying our meal I felt something hard in my mouth. At the time I did not realise that a crown had come off of my tooth. A dentist near to whereI lived in Winfrith Newburgh had put the crown on after many bodged attempts to fill the tooth. Thinking that it was something in the food, and having had a few beers, I looked at the object and threw it under the table. Only later did I realise it was the crown.

Many months later when I returned to Bridport I realised that I had lost the crown of a tooth and booked an appointment to see my local dentist. It was the same Burmese dentist who had fitted the crown in the first place, he wasn’t a good dentist! Our conversation went something like this:

“If you have the crown I can reattach it,” he said.

“I don’t have it, it’s lost,” I replied.

“Where is it?” he asked again

“On the floor of a restaurant, in Shimla, on the edge of the Himalayas,” I responded.

“So it is lost,” at that was the end of that conversation.

—

The train journey back to Kalka. The deadly train journey.

And so we approached the last 48 hours of the trip. At this point I don’t know how I would have processed the whole trip or what was going to be the outstanding memory, it’s certainly working with the sixth formers and the extraordinary things we had seen and done together. But what was to happen in the next 4 hours came to be the over-abiding memory, or at least for 6 months afterwards.

 It was the final day and we set out walking down to the station. This was the process of actually going home aswould be going down the mountain, joining up with the main train to Delhi, one night in the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Delhi again before heading off to the airport.

 I knew that this would probably be my last time in this part of India at least, so I took the seat by the window thinking that I was going to see the sun setting over the Himalayas. The carriages were all cut off from each other, you couldn’t walk through from one section to another. This meant that I had a small group with me of 7 students and so the we took up two rows of seats facing each other.

 My camera was ready, the sun sets very quickly in this part of the world, you don’t really get twilight. One minute it’s sunny and the next minute and the sun has gone over the horizon, so I only had a few photographs of the sun of the short sunset.

 It got dark very quickly, we were chatting away in our small group when the train suddenly came to a halt in the middle of nowhere. This is not unusual as the train stops and starts at different times but this time it seemed different.

 A few people started to walk off the train and there was some noise outside the window. Being inquisitive I looked over the side out of the window. Underneath, exactly where I was sitting was a pair of legs sticking out from under the train. They were the legs of an old person. I can’t recall anything else about what was going on outside except for looking out the window and seeing this body emerging from underneath the train.

I looked at the students, they knew something was wrong. Andrew then looked down andthey could see that his reaction was very similar to mine. The other students knew that this was something serious. More people were getting off the train and there was a bit of a commotion outside.

 I don’t know why, but I looked again. They pulled the old man out from underneath the train. He had been dressed in very simple clothing, just a white sheet and he had obviously been walking down the mountain using the rails as a guide. He’d obviously been caught by the train. He had a massive cut down the front of his face, his leg from his knee down to the ankle had been sliced. I have never seen anything like this before in my whole life. I wonder now how long I might actually have looked at the scene, I think it was probably only a few seconds. But the horror of the sight, the blood, the cuts, the man was seered into my mind.

 He was brought onto the train, his body wrapped in a grey blanket. Wet with blood, the body was put underneath the seats of students opposite.

The smell was metallic, the blood was starting to ooze across the carriage floor.

In moments like this you can find the best in people. A young Indian gentleman could see the shock in our faces. He came across to us. He talked about his faith and how death was not the end, they saw it as part of the journey to the next reincarnation. It was not something to be sad about, this was only part of the cycle of life. I will never forget how he spoke to us, what he did to help try and calm us.

At the next station the train stopped. The body was taken from underneath the seats and placed on the platform of the solitary station. Phone calls were made, everyone else got on the train and we started to pull away from the body lying until the weak orange light. I looked back, the blanket had come away from his face and he was making an expression. He was not dead. Or at least he was not dead yet.

We set off down the mountain trying to process what we had witnessed. I knew that I had to take responsibility for the group. I started talking about anything and everything. I had to try and get everyone’s mind off of what they had seen.

But it was hard, very hard not to the face of that old man.