Morning at The Oberoi hotel in New Delhi. Breakfast in the room—croissants and watermelon juice and the teapot in its cozy. We are in India to see the great Bengal tiger. But to see the tiger we will have to see India.

We have a look at Delhi, which, perhaps from its heritage of discordant rulers, is a spread-out lowrise city of no visual distinction. It is a city of wealthy green enclaves, polo clubs, and former British mansions, bejeweled in metropolitan catastrophe. There is lassitude built into the constructions going up. Older buildings, monuments of tenuous, half-assed business ambitions, are falling to rubble at their edges. . . . Ditches and empty lots are strewn with garbage. . . . Every imaginable kind of vehicle crawls along, honking, pressing its advantage by inches. The buses can’t accommodate the crowds waiting at the bus stops.

The air is fetid. Families of squatters living in open lots rise from their sleeping bags to make their morning ablutions at hydrants. They cook their breakfasts on makeshift stoves assembled from the bricks lifted from nearby construction sites. Delhi is supposed to be one of the better-off cities in India. The squatters are internal refugees—rural people moved off their land or flooded out: A network of dams is being constructed peremptorily across the subcontinent. Apparently in this nation of one billion, the Indian government is willing to sustain losses.

As tourists, we courteously attend to the architectural relics of the ancient rulers. At each historic site—Humayun’s Tomb, the Red Fort of Shah Jahan—we are assailed by peddlers and importuned by beggars, some of them severely disabled. One man scuttles like a crab in the dirt at our feet. Small children run alongside us with their hands out saying “hello, hello!” as if this achievement of the English language will release rupees into their palms. There are no fat people in the streets of Delhi. The only fat people are in The Oberoi. We are back in our rooms watching the cricket matches on television.

We board our train early in the morning and head southeast, clacking along the route that will take us through Agra, Gwalior, the Bhopal of the infamous toxic petrochemical disaster of 1984 that killed almost four thousand, and on to Gondia, where we will disembark for the road trip to the tiger reserve. It is a journey of about six hundred miles, an overnight ride.

Our train is known as the Palace on Wheels. It is a modern take on the original accommodations, presumably by divine right, of a raja of Rajasthan: fourteen air-conditioned cars, or saloons, each containing four staterooms with twin beds and private bath and a small sitting room at one end; a pair of turbaned attendants to see to the needs of the travelers in each saloon; two dining room cars, the Maharaja and the Maharani; a bar and lounge with upholstered seating; and a beauty parlor and spa car whose staff includes a masseuse.

Our party of friends is a fraction of a larger group of American birders and nature lovers traveling under the aegis of Victor Emanuel, the youthfully white-haired, passionately idealistic, natural-world tour operator who has serious ornithologic credentials and a loyal cadre of conservationists and earth-loving adventurers along with him on this expedition. All told, there are about sixty of us, travelers and guides.

Our destination, the Kanha National Park, is the home of Bengals, leopards, several species of grazing animals, wild dogs, monkeys, and innumerable birds of the kingdom. Something for everyone. As spoiled Americans, we are pleased with the service, particularly of our car attendants, who are sweet-tempered and accommodating; less pleased with the food, which is indifferent Indian; and disappointed in the condition of the train, having noticed about our luxurious Palace on Wheels that the lounge furniture is sprung, the wall-to-wall carpet has never known a vacuum cleaner, the baths are tiny, the fixtures temperamental, and the white towels gray. But we are not inclined to criticize: In the middle of the day, with the sun at its height, our train pulls into a provincial station. On the adjoining track is a train of the India Railways, its ancient coaches packed tight with citizens who sit, stand, and hang out the windows to breathe, while the importunate sway en masse at the coach steps, attempting to board with their babies, bundles, and bags, all of them heedless of the train whistle blowing and various officials running along, shouting at everyone. We see this from the coolness of our interior.

We are traveling a route through the state of Madhya Pradesh never before undertaken by the Palace on Wheels, which heretofore had been restricted to the state of Rajasthan. Schedules have been rearranged in our favor up and down the line. Strings have been pulled by Raj Singh, Victor Emanuel’s Indian counterpart, an amiable, elegant, mustached fellow in his forties. Raj, the author of a book on the birds of the subcontinent, is a graduate of the Scindia Public School, founded in Gwalior in the 1890s for members of royal families. Scindia’s graduates, of whatever generation, need no introduction to one another. They move as if by inheritance into positions of influence and know how to get things done.

If we needed to be confirmed in our postcolonial guilt, people drawn to our mysterious train rush across the platform to peer in the windows. They catch a glimpse of a polished wooden headboard or the portrait of an ancient Moghul, but it is enough. They shout and slap the sides of our car until they are shooed away by the local police.

Prices & Places

On the Wild Side

High-end exotic nature tours are hot tickets; in fact, most of the India itineraries currently planned by Victor Emanuel Nature Tours are either already fully booked or were nearly so at press time. Scheduled tours are also smaller in scale and somewhat less expensive than the one described, which was customized: “Tigers, the Taj, and the Palace on Wheels” took 76 people—a trainful—at $8,595 per person. Victor Emanuel plans to tackle a similar itinerary in 2004, but for now, most nature tours include only 8 to 14 people and do not involve the Palace on Wheels train.

In the meantime, the company conducts excellent nature tours all over the world from its base in Austin, Texas. A typical 2002 tour of India, nearly sold out at press time, is “Western Himalayas and Deserts of India” (Jan. 3–24; $6,222 per person), which has a 13-day add-on called “Tigers, Taj & Bharatpur Extension” for another $3,175 per person (512-328-5221; ventbird.com). The prices are steep, but for more than pampering purposes: $25,000 of the proceeds from the Palace on Wheels tour we took went to the retirement fund for the staff of Kanha National Park, to buy a jeep for Desert National Park, and to purchase night-vision binoculars for Ranthambore National Park (to guard against poachers).

Raj Singh and his able, obliging staff arrange tours in India through Exotic Journeys in New Delhi (11-617-8685; exotic@del2.vsnl.net.in) and its sister company, the Indian Experience, in Oxford, England (441-865-554277; rajsingh53@aol.com). A typical custom tour lasts two weeks and costs $3,000 per person.

(The country code for India is 91.)

Lodging

Although it begins and ends its eight-day tours in Delhi, the Palace on Wheels operates principally in Rajasthan (11-3381884; palaceonwheels.net; $350 per person per night).

In India, all 13 hotels in the Oberoi chain are deluxe and well run, including The Oberoi in New Delhi (11-4363030; oberoi hotels.com; doubles, $169–$215; w).

The Royal Tiger Resort, a cluster of cottages, occupies ten jungle acres near Kanha National Park (11-6149226; royaltiger.com; doubles, $280).

Shopping

India is a shopper’s heaven right now, particularly in the hotels, which generally choose their selections wisely.

In Delhi, near the Connaught Hotel, Vedi’s of Rangoon took an order for two suits and four shirts, and upon our return from the eight-day tour, the clothes were ready, ironed, and packed in cellophane in our hotel rooms. The clothes were beautifully made, of superb material, and absurdly cheap: $150 for a suit, $10 a shirt (L-23/7 Connaught Pl.; 11-335-8181).

In the Oberoi shopping arcade, Hamadan is run by Kashmiris and has jewellike silk carpets and pashmina shawls, including antique Jamavar shawls. Ask for Mussafa, and expect to bargain (11-6921-092). In the same arcade, Banaras House Limited has ravishing saris for all budgets, right up to saris embroidered with gold thread (11-430-4453). FabIndia is a well-known place to buy cheap, well-made, practical traveling clothes (N Block, Greater Kailash). More chic items, from jackets and evening clothes to exotic bedcovers and quilts, are at Shri Vrindaven Society, in a small complex in the Delhi suburb of Vasant Kunj. The same quilt that might cost $500 in Paris costs $50 here (11-689-0463).

In the Tholia Building on Mirza Ismail Road in Jaipur, Tholia’s Kuber sells beautiful things at reasonable prices: antique tribal jewelry, high-quality clothing, gauzy cotton shawls (141-377-416). On the same road, the Gem Palace has indisputably the most complete collection of stones and jewelry. The prices are high but still a fraction of U.S. prices, and if you have the time to have things made to order, they will be perfect. Ask for Moonu (141-374-175).

Reading

Background reading on India inevitably means confronting the country’s colonial history. Jeremy Bernstein’s Dawning of the Raj is a compelling account of how the British expanded their empire (Ivan R. Dee, $29). Gandhi biographies abound, but Gandhi: A Life, by Yogesh Chadha, gives a controversial glimpse into the personal life of the spiritual leader (John Wiley & Sons, $20). And for a visual approach to history, try Judith M. Gutman’s Through Indian Eyes, a collection of 19th- and early-20th-century Indian photography (Oxford University Press, out-of-print).

Thrill seekers will like Man Eaters of Kumaon, an adventure classic on tiger tracking written by the famed hunter-conservationist Jim Corbett (Oxford University Press, $9). For those who prefer nature reading of a calmer variety, and who might like to follow in our footsteps, look for Birds of India, coauthored by Richard Grimmett, Carol Inskipp, and Tim Inskipp (Princeton University Press, $30).

Those interested in modern India can turn to the works of Arundhati Roy, whose celebrated novel The God of Small Things transforms the story of twins into a sweeping narrative of modern India (HarperCollins, $14). Roy's talents are not limited to fiction; The Cost of Living is a charged polemic against the dam-building project that is displacing millions on the subcontinent (Modern Library, $12).