Andhra Pradesh

Every Andhra journey worth making seems to begin at Visakhapatnam. Mine began on the 6.50 a.m. Kirandul passenger train out of Visakhapatnam station, a train famous among a certain kind of traveller for doing something trains are not supposed to do: climbing. Over the next four hours it hauled itself nearly a kilometre into the sky through the Eastern Ghats, threading fifty-odd tunnels and crossing bridges that looked down on clouds. In my compartment, a group of college students sang film songs; a tribal woman travelled with a basket of custard apples between her feet; a retired stationmaster, learning it was my first time on this line, appointed himself my guide and announced every tunnel by number. 'Thirty-two!' he would shout into the darkness, delighted, as if the tunnel might answer.

Araku Valley, at the top of the climb, smells of two things: eucalyptus and coffee. The coffee is the valley's quiet revolution, grown by Adivasi farmers on smallholdings under jackfruit and silver oak, organic mostly by tradition rather than certification, and now served in cafés from Visakhapatnam to Paris. I drank my first cup at a stall near the station from a man who told me, with a farmer's precision, that the bitterness I could taste was the altitude and the sweetness was the shade. I have repeated this to baristas in three countries' worth of Indian cities since. None has contradicted him.