We skipped breakfast.

Our train to Fatehpur Sikri left Agra before anything opened. We could wait ninety minutes.

The sleeper car looked nothing like the air-conditioned trains we had grown used to. Triple bunks lined the walls. Blue vinyl mattresses sagged beneath barred windows. Ceiling fans stirred the warm air.

When we stepped aboard, people looked up.

We folded the middle bunks against the wall and took the lower seats before the car filled. At each stop more passengers climbed in until the aisle narrowed to a single path between knees and bags.

The city thinned out.

Brick buildings gave way to fields. Fields broke into clusters of huts patched with tarps. Plastic gathered in drifts along the tracks. Laundry hung from lines strung between poles. Children stood close to the rails and waved as we passed.

Then the vendors came through.

“Chai! Chai! Chai!”

The tea seller sang the word, high and thin, cutting through the rattle of the train. Teenagers on the opposite bunks laughed each time he passed. One copied his call until the others leaned into each other, laughing harder.

The tea smelled sweet and sharp.

I watched him carry a stack of paper cups in his left hand. He poured with his right, moving quickly between the train’s lurches.

I let him pass.

A few minutes later another boy pushed through with clear plastic bags of roasted peanuts.

Dani nudged me. “You should get some.”

I waited until I saw another passenger buy a bag.

“Ten,” the boy said to him.

When he reached me, he smiled. “Twenty.”

Before I could answer, one of the teenagers dropped from his bunk.

“No. Ten.”

He spoke fast in Hindi, tapped the boy’s shoulder, and kept talking until the boy dug into his pocket and counted out change into my hand.

The teenager climbed back into his bunk without looking at me.

Outside, the train kept moving.