"On my return to Raxaul I traveled on my own down to Calcutta, a two day train journey with an overnight stop in Patna. On the second day, soon after crossing into West Bengal, the train stopped in the countryside surrounded by police with big sticks, and hundreds of people, who had been travelling on the undercarriage and the roof, were taken off because they didn’t have a ticket or were smuggling rice.
In Calcutta I stayed at the Red Shield Hotel ran by the Salvation Army, and full of travellers like myself, and where I lost my only spare shirt, snatched by a monkey from the flat roof of the hotel where I had left it to dry after washing it." - MH