INDIA IgI 
after everything en route, but this was refused. Under regulation 
number so-and-so, oblique stroke something else, the van doors 
had to be shut and sealed before the train could start. This was 
just too bad. I was there to look after my birds and I told them 
what they could do with their regulations. In the end the police 
arrived. I was holding up the train, and they threatened to remove 
me or detach the van, but I was near the end and most of the 
birds had all had a good feed and a drink. I wasted a few more 
precious minutes puttings things away, and saying all the time 
that I was just coming, in order to make sure that all the nectar- 
feeders had had something, as they are the first to feel the effects 
of hunger. 
Finally I descended among an irate crowd of officials and the 
doors were shut and sealed while I raced up the platform to my 
compartment. There were hundreds of heads hanging out of 
windows leering at the man who had the audacity to hold up 
the mail train for thirty minutes. 
The eleven-hundred-mile rail journey was the means of cutting 
a few miles off the homeward trip, but was so worrying that I 
began to wish I had embarked on a steamer at Calcutta and 
made the longer sea voyage home via Ceylon. Fate, however, 
probably had a finger in the pie, for Delys struck up a friendship 
with one of the passengers, whom she married two years later. 
