To the city Shusaku Endo loved, on a sleepless third-class train.

The station in Delhi was already chaos.
Crowds of people were pushing and shoving, and the air vibrated with a mixture of deafening honking and various shouts. In the midst of that vortex of heat, I boarded the third-class sleeper carriage of the train bound for Varanasi.

The inside of the train was truly people, people, and more people.
There was no room to step, even to get to my assigned berth. The aisle was packed with people sitting down and luggage. I managed to find my spot and squeezed my body in with a grunt.

The night train was a microcosm of chaos.
If someone started singing, there were people clapping along. Vendors passed by, shouting 'Chai, chai' at the top of their lungs while clinking coins together. Mingled with those voices, the sound of a baby crying echoed, and the voices of men talking could be heard loudly.

Even when I closed my eyes to try to sleep, the situation was far from conducive to sleeping. The rattling of the train and the ear-piercing noise. What passed through my nose was a unique, stuffy air, a mixture of sweat, spices, and various other unidentifiable scents.

A journey of about 12 hours. Fatigue welled up slowly from the depths of my body.
If I were at the beginning of my journey, I would surely have been unable to endure this situation and would have screamed that I wanted to run away. But a year and a half of traveling had changed me significantly. I knew that there was energy in being alive precisely within the imperfection and incompleteness of things. Even so, the chaos of this train sapped my strength completely.

Night broke, and the morning sun began to illuminate the outside of the window. Beyond the dirty window glass, a vast expanse of land stretched as far as the eye could see. As I stared at that scenery, a different emotion welled up in my chest. It was a sense of exhilaration for the sacred place that awaited me ahead.

Ever since I read Shusaku Endo's 'Deep River,' I had been thinking that I wanted to see the Ganges River with my own eyes someday. Many people entrust their entire lives to this river. A place where life and death are mixed together, creating one great flow.

The setting of that story was at the end of the journey for my body, which felt like a burnt-out candle. Perhaps this train journey was a time to prepare my heart, leading to the Ganges River.

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—Ah, once again, I am muttering to myself in a strange foreign land.