Waiting under a towering corrugated roof at Kurla Terminus on the northern edges of Bombay, I wonder about the Netravati Express, which is not running so express at the moment. In student days, I spent weeks on such evocatively named Indian trains as the Frontier Mail and the Kashi Vishwanath Express, going here and there to places of interest or personal connection. Mastering the Indian railways was a schoolboy achievement that I was as proud of as my (one) hairbreadth victory in a footrace. My trips gave me good stories to tell—of volumes of cinders and soot lodged on me from engines fired by soft coal (now replaced with diesel or electric power), of out-of-the-way stations I’d gotten down at, of sadhus and hooligans, eccentrics and families I had joined for the course of a journey. Now, though, I’ve planned a seamless, comfortable journey on this brand-new rail line, down the west coast of India, a route I flew over some years ago and saw as one continuous stretch of empty beach. And the train is late.

The Netravati runs on the Konkan Railway, whose full 470-mile route opened only in 1998, after drillers from the north met drillers from the south to complete the Pernem Tunnel in Goa. The line makes its way south of Bombay, through a section of the range of small mountains called the Western Ghats, and then follows the coast to Goa and on through the coastal districts of Karnataka to the small city of Mangalore; from there, older lines, of the Southern Railway, travel south to Kerala and east toward Mysore, Bangalore, and, eventually, Madras. Its completion, in a way, is a delayed incident in Jawaharlal Nehru’s imagining of India. It is the missing link in the encirclement of India by rail, ties Goa (which Nehru’s army took back from the Portuguese in 1961) into the nation, and carries the promise of old-fashioned big development: power plants and exports and industrial-strength tourism.

Eventually, the train does come. I’m booked in an upper berth. Rajesh Kumar Kundapur has the lower one, and as the train starts up we sit there together. The train stops after just a little while, and it’s a while longer before it starts up again.

“The Central Railway must give us priority,” says Rajesh, who, though just thirty, turns out to be an officer for the Konkan Railway Corporation Ltd. (KRCL). He explains how this unusual semiautonomous corporation, which built and operates the new line, is still sorting out its place in the hoary bureaucracy of the Indian railways. It’s difficult to get slots in Bombay’s central terminal, which is why our train departed from a suburb—though Rajesh assures me that this situation will soon improve. Right now, he suspects, we’ve been shunted aside while a train belonging to a more venerable railway—like the Central, built in 1853—moves onto the main line. Things will pick up, he says, once we reach the new line he helped to build.

Seven years earlier the KRCL hired Rajesh, and many others like him, a few years out of engineering college. It gave them motorcycles so they could survey the route for the railroad. Sleeping often in the rain forest of the Western Ghats, he and his companions would burn fires at night to scare off animals. “I did not meet any elephant or tiger, but I did see many wild boar and one leopard,” Rajesh says. Two engineers with another batch of surveyors were trampled by gaur, the Indian wild ox. Despite this and other gory tales—between 1991 and 1997, seventy-six people died building the railroad—Rajesh is methodical in his optimism. As we roll along, he enumerates the railway line’s bridges (1,998) and tunnels (92), the distance saved over the old route east of the ghats down the Deccan Plateau (seven hundred miles, or twenty-six hours on a fast train). The ride gets smoother after we reach Roha, where the Konkan Railway’s own track begins. The rails are continuously welded, he says; in principle, trains can reach speeds of one hundred miles an hour.

This is Air-Conditioned Two-Tier—the best class of transport on the Netravati. I climb up onto my berth, a padded shelf about three and a half feet wide, made up with cotton sheets, a blanket, and a small pillow. There’s a reading light and two adjustable fans. Stretched out, I look at the ceiling and remember a lecture I heard on littoral South Asia. The way to picture it, the speaker said, is to turn the map of the Indian subcontinent upside down. Forget about the Khyber Pass, the Himalayas, and the way the Indian plate joins the landmass of greater Asia. Instead, see the narrow coastal plain, isolated by the ghats from the hinterland, become the first face of the “Rose-Apple Island,” or the Jambu-Dvipa, the old Sanskrit idea of South Asia. From these shores, trade and culture went to Egypt and Bali and Angkor. Vasco da Gama and countless other traders were drawn here on the monsoon wind. “It is the region of greatest exchange in Asia,” the lecturer said with overexcited charm. Dozing off, I picture a tiger’s tooth jutting up into the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, or the receptor on some molecule looked at under a fancy microscope on educational TV, revealing a shrewd maximization of its surface area.

Rajesh wakes me just before midnight at Chiplun, where a car is waiting to take me up to the Gateway Riverview Lodge, an old hunting lodge now converted into a hotel. The next morning, after tea on a terrace overlooking a well-tended garden, small bees buzzing romantically in the purple flowers beside me, I walk over to the temple of Parashurama, the leading Hindu god in town and the mythological founder of the Konkan coast. His temple is inside a wall of porous laterite stone and is marked, like temples from here down to Kerala, with a tall, round tower studded with small shelves. Each shelf holds oil and a wick, and the whole tower is lit up on festival evenings. Outside the wall, shopkeepers sell garlands, incense, and pamphlets. It’s too late for the morning arati, the waking-up ceremony, so I peer through a grate at the icon of Parashurama, or Rama with an ax, number six of the ten avatars of the great god Vishnu.

Parashurama resolved to kill the Kshatriyas, the caste of kings and warriors, after his Brahmin father was insulted by a tyrannical king. That done, he didn’t think it right to atone in the land of those he had massacred. So he came here, to the edge of the earth, and looked out over the ocean. Standing in these Sahyadri Hills—in Chiplun, maybe—he asked the sea to recede. When it refused, he used his ax one more time, to dam the ocean and create the western coastal plain. The translation of the myth I will pick up later at the Mangla Devi temple in Mangalore reads, “On the new piece of land he located a hillock which was suited for his meditation.” There he stayed until the goddess appeared before him, “pleased with his penance and divine performance.” After instructing him to build her a temple, Mangla Devi absolved him of his sins.

Backhoes and bulldozers have replaced Parashurama’s ax, but this territory is again being manhandled, the Konkan Railway being perhaps the most benign intrusion. At Dabhol, where the Vashisthi River, which runs beside my hotel at Chiplun, enters the sea, the Enron Corporation, a Texas energy company, is nearing completion of a second power plant. Meanwhile, the project’s first plant is on the verge of financial collapse, and the treatment of villagers displaced by the project has drawn the attention of Human Rights Watch. At Kaiga, south of Goa, two nuclear reactors have gone on line despite complaints by a nuclear bureaucrat that their design is out of date and unsafe. Nearby, at Karwar, construction has begun on a large Indian Navy base, which has resulted in the dislocation of villagers there. At Bekal, in the northern-most district of Kerala, the Communist state government has claimed a number of fishing villages to build five large “eco-friendly” beach resorts.

My plan was to spend the day here, overcoming my jet lag and walking a bit in the hills, but shortly after I return from visiting Parashurama’s temple and sit down for more tea in the garden, S. T. Killedar arrives. Killedar, who is from Kohlapur, just across the ghats in the Deccan, has been sent by Rajesh. The structural engineer for the Chiplun station, Killedar wants to show me two of the railway’s most striking marvels: the ventilation system for its longest tunnel, and what’s claimed to be Asia’s highest bridge (at fourteen stories, “it’s taller than the Qutab Minar in Delhi,” he says).

What pleases me greatly in our day together, driving in a railway corporation jeep, is the chance to see the landscape. The hillsides are green and terraced. The Vashishti is a clear-running mountain river, especially at Sangameshwara, where a large, old stone temple to Shiva marks its confluence with a hill stream. We drive down the ghats to Ratnagiri, where the rails meet the Konkan coast, stopping at the tunnel and the bridge and at various stations along the way.

The Western Ghats and their intermittent diversions across the narrow coastal plain are what made building a rail line here so hard. The stretch heading down to the coast after Chiplun is like a game of Snakes and Ladders, shooting through long tunnels and then out over bridges that span narrow valleys. It occurs to me finally why the Western Ghats are called ghats. In Hindi, ghat means a spot from whence to enter the water. At a place of ritual bathing like Banaras, the steps down to the river are called ghats; so is a ferry landing. In a few days, at Gokarna, south of Goa in Karnataka, I will see the ghats dramatically step down across backwaters to reach the sea in just this way. This evening, however, I ride the hills down to Goa, where tomorrow I am to meet with the Konkan Railway’s bête noire.

For Anthony Simoes, Rajesh’s optimism is a hoax and the railway is going nowhere good. Set up as a partnership of the four states it serves and the central government’s Railway Board, the Konkan needs to start making money soon. But Simoes says that the partnership is engaged in “a firefighting operation” to keep itself solvent and that its losses will not be reversed, because the railway embankments will never be able to support freight trains, whose loads are much heavier—and more profitable—than those of trains bearing passengers. He says the line was opened with inappropriate haste in order to shift remaining construction costs to the operating budget, possibly in anticipation of a plea for state subsidy. (I saw, perhaps, some evidence of this with Killedar at the Panvel Nadi Viaduct: Although trains had been running through for months, laborers were only then laying the safety rail that would prevent a derailment off the “highest bridge in Asia.”)

I meet Simoes in Mapusa at the offices of the Goa Foundation, an environmental group that led a losing suit against the railway’s path through Goa. “They don’t print my letters in the newspapers anymore,” he says, “but I will keep fighting.” Simoes’s father got his start at the locomotive works of the South Eastern Railway in Calcutta, so, Simoes explains, “I’m not against any train. If this one had followed an inland alignment, I would have been all for it.” We drive out of town and stop in Revora to climb a high embankment, and he shows me where the track is sinking into the buttery soil of the paddy fields. A set of water conduits has collapsed, and their replacements are already silting up. Elephant grass and lotus flowers encroach on large patches of the previously fertile fields, which use a system of tidal irrigation. Simoes says that the stagnant water will breed more malaria- and Japanese encephalitis–bearing mosquitoes than animal hosts can satisfy.

Traveling on the new rail line, speaking English and Hindi—languages imported here only in the last two hundred years—I find it hard to sort out the local layers of the map. Konkan is the undelimited stretch from north of Ratnagiri to Mangalore where people who speak Konkani live, while the local name for the stretch of coast south of Goa, in the state of Karnataka, is Karavali. Various other local and foreign, ethnic and administrative names occur for the places I am going through: Languages overlap, settlements of different peoples abut one another everywhere in changing patterns.

Through Goa, the railway, closely aligned to the coast, has its prettiest stretch. As the train crosses the rivers that divide the state’s districts, the views are open and long, with light refracting out over the water. I stop in Canacona, an old-style village a short walk from Palolem, a crescent-shaped beach coveted by the big international hotels, where I spend the night.

Just before nine o’clock on Monday morning, I catch the Gandhidham-Nagercoil Express to Murdeshwar. I arrange for a car to take me to Bhatkal, to search out a series of small temples from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Khetapai Narayana is the most extraordinary of the group. A frieze carved around its low plinth tells the Ramayana, the epic of Rama and his bride, Sita, a link to a pan-Indian world of mythology, elegance, and devotion.

Seeing my excitement for these neglected temples, my driver turns off the highway to show me another one a few miles farther south. Next to a tall, tall banyan tree, there is a concrete shed filled with coconut husks and flowers offered in the great annual goddess festival, which has just ended here as it has all over India. The main priest, a young man, goes in and out of a distracted trance, answering questions in tongues or in Tullu, a language of the coast spoken from here down into Kerala. In a corner, another priest shaves the head of a young family’s infant son, to safeguard the child’s health. Dozens of statues stand upright behind a metal railing. The newer ones are realistically carved, brightly painted matronly figures: Objects of hero worship, they look nonetheless like mannequins advertising a home appliance or a wrinkle-free line of saris. Behind them, starker blocks of weathered wood are carved in angular abstractions of a woman’s figure, painted only with black lines for eyes, nose, and mouth.

On the points of tall iron tridents propped in a corner, women have offered, for decades or longer it seems, their glass bangles. It’s a strange sight: Bangles are emblems of a married woman, never to be taken off. The temple’s name is Mahasathi, which suggests that it commemorates sati, the practice of burning widows with the bodies of their husbands. The place is a shrine to the dead, depicted as heroic mothers empowered by their untimely deaths—in childbirth, from disease, by accident or violence, as much as if by sati, the troubling model ideology.

A group of about twenty young people are playing Frisbee, swimming, and ordering Cokes from a little cabana when I arrive at the Turtle Bay Beach Resort in Maravanthe. The most daring of the girls swim in shorts and a T-shirt, the rest fully dressed. I sit by the pool and chat with one of the guys. He tells me their college in Manipal is “the best in India” for hotel management.

“Would you come to manage a place like this when you graduate?” I ask.

“Oh, no. Here there isn’t any scope.”

To me, though, this place has as much “scope” as any beach hotel on this coast should have. A simple set of cottages, it is small enough not to challenge new restrictions on building next to the beach; small enough not to displace great quantities of water, or electricity, or people; and secluded enough that visitors with bathing suits less modest than those of the boldest girls from Manipal might not shock the neighbors, and the neighbors, for whom the littoral is the latrine, might not shock the visitors. Abraham Chacko, the owner, has a real appreciation for the spot he has chosen. The fishing village that supplies the kitchen is set back in the palms, its boats pulled high up on the sand every evening. The beach, which curves in a little right in front of the property, rises and falls for a mile or two past the village in a strange rolling pattern, effected, I imagine, by the tides.

Between Maravanthe and Mangalore are other beaches where some think a travel industry may develop, with overflow from Goa and Kerala and given the impetus of traffic on the railroad. But visiting them, I realize that they are already put to use. Under the coconut trees, every yard of beachfront seems occupied. After visiting the Krishna temple town at Udipi, I walk one evening along the long white sand crescent at Malpe Beach. Busloads of local tourists have come out to see the sunset. As I head back to the road, I notice a formation of young men prostrate and praying directly across the sea to Mecca. Behind them is an empty tourist complex whose completion local opposition has prevented.

On the outskirts of Mangalore, in the tapovan, or “forest of austerities,” on Kadri Hill—the site of Parashurama’s meditation—I meet Mohannath, a resident sadhu from Punjab in northern India, who explains to me that yoga is best practiced before the age of thirty-six or after sixty-three, the numbers being mirror images.

“Don’t risk it now,” he says.

The city is mostly still below the green cover of palm trees. To me, more at home in the bazaar and the city than in the jungle or on the water, it is a great pleasure to wind up here. The shops, where I look for a fresh roll of black and white film, are as interesting to me as the town’s namesake Mangla Devi temple. Things are booming in a small way—apartment buildings are going up, I see banners for a cybercafé and a billboard advertising burkas (the black tents worn in public by conservative Muslim women) more stylish than ones you can buy in Dubai.

The railway has brought a welcome direct connection to Bombay. For decades people from Mangalore, educated and uneducated alike, have traveled for want of work at home. Easing the burden of that migration seems a good thing, not only for Mangalore but also for the overloaded city of Bombay. The boy who sells me film likes the railway. “It cuts so politely through the countryside,” he says.

Across from the old Mangalore port, I meet Kamalaksha Suvarna, who worked in Bombay for fourteen years as an electrician while living in a suburban slum. Now he lives in the overcrowded, but electrified, fishing village where he was born. He prefers it, he says. “Everyone knows me. They call me Current—I’m the only electrician here.” He takes me to see the sights: a school, a mosque, a number of temples to local gods that are in the process of being subsumed by mainstream Hindu deities. All the houses are cement and well constructed, with tube wells for water. Current points to one house and says, “A boy from that family is working on the Konkan Railway.” The shoreline behind Kamalaksha’s fishing village, though highlighted on my map with a little beach umbrella, is used as a dump and old polyethylene bags blow across the sand.

It’s not until I reach Ullal, just south of Mangalore, that I find a beach that is accessible or acceptable to me. Under fifteen acres of tall coconut and casuarina trees are forty-two small, square brick cottages laid out in a grid. The Summer Sands Beach Resort, just south of Mangalore, has settled comfortably into its surroundings over the years. A statue of Jesus of the Sacred Heart looks in at the reception area, and beyond that, waves beat with surprising power against a wide, coarse sand beach. In the 1970s, the Albuquerques, who own the place, leased it out to the families of American engineers who built a chemical plant in the city. There is a small pool, a badminton court, and facilities for yoga and Ayurvedic massage. The place seems built for settlement rather than hospitality, which appeals to me. In the afternoons, I eat my lunch along with newlyweds from Bangalore, who sit two by two around the large, airy room, murmuring to each other. I immediately begin to imagine retiring here, from the onset through the retreat of the monsoons perhaps, some year.

One night, after watching the waves break in the moonlight in front of the Silver Sands, I meet Rosemary Albuquerque, the owner’s wife, standing in her sari by the gate to the beach, her graying hair in a braid down her back, a delicately worked bindi of sandalwood paste on her forehead. We talk about the rains here—ten feet of water fall in two and a half months. She likes the early stages of the monsoons best, when the rain falls in buckets and is perfectly safe to walk about in, to work in, and to get drenched by. The light rain falling now, as the monsoon lingers before being pulled back into the Indian Ocean, she says, can cause fevers.

Feeling lazy but not feverish, I spend my days wandering the beach at Ullal and the town of Mangalore. I take a car up into the ghats, rising up for a stretch over the Netravathi River. Driving along, I see outposts of various increasingly mainstream cultures from India proper—a monastic center for one of the first pan-Indian Hindu movements, a hydroelectric dam—and it occurs to me that just as this first face of India has long attracted visitors from across the sea, India proper has also been continually knitting its peripheries into itself. An elaboration of this old process, the Konkan Railway lets me see it all firsthand.