Andrew Buncombe: Another world beyond the train

An early start for the morning express to Lucknow – famed city of the Nawabs and location of a famous siege during the 1857 uprising against the British. Even at dawn, New Delhi station is alive with people; porters with steel muscles and red jackets carrying luggage on their heads, sadhus pouring off the arriving night trains with nothing more than a knotted bedroll. There are families and bags and noise.

The train – a Shatabdi – is sleek and clean. As we cross the Yamuna river, I settle down with White Tiger, Aravind Adiga's unsettling, Booker Prize-winning novel that details India's economic disparity – the divide, as he puts it, between the Darkness and the Light.

From where I'm sitting I can see both. Every train journey in every country in the world passes the underbelly of a place, the run-down, broken-down backside of a city. But as we leave the outskirts of Delhi and enter the state of Uttar Pradesh, the scenes of poverty are shocking; the landscape is filed with countless numbers of people defecating in the open, communities gathered around a single water pump, rivers of grimy black sewage, litter, and filthy children.

The train is air-conditioned and smooth. A uniformed attendant serves tea and snacks and then breakfast. No one seems to look at the landscape through which we're passing. Adiga's novel asks why there are not more uprisings, like the one against the British, why the Darkness doesn't stand up against the Light. Who knows? Perhaps people are too busy just scrambling to survive, too worn-out collecting old plastic to sell for a few rupees, struggling with their cyclo-rickshaws, trying to raise their barefoot children.

We arrive in Lucknow, a city of rotting, mesmerising, historic buildings, and a flurry of rickshaw drivers vie for our fare.

Terrorised by monkeys

Lucknow has a major problem with encroaching monkeys. On Friday, confronted by a group of two dozen of the creatures, an eight-year-old girl grabbed her four-year-old brother and leapt from the roof of their three-storey home in the old quarter. The boy died, the girl is critically ill.

The morning paper reports that the city authorities claim that only one person wants the job of monkey-catcher and that he charges 5,000 rupees (£65) a time, a sum that they cannot afford. Now there is to be an inquiry. "The poor children screamed for help," says a neighbour.

Expensive taste

Does Lucknow have the most expensive sweets in the world – more than £150 a lb? Friends say there's a shop here that sells mithai – the Indian confection made from sugar, condensed milk and nuts –that's covered with gold leaf.

Lots of mithai has silver leaf, but pure gold? My friends are adamant the story is true.