You know you’re in trouble when it’s two in the morning and you’re trying to project your vomit through your legs on a rickety train’s lavatory halfway between Delhi and Jodhpur. And you miss.

And you were wearing your honeymoon underpants and everything. Rinsing the sick off those pants, legs and, well, you know, one can’t help but reflect on how the journey had started so well.

We had made it from our hotel to the station to the right platform to the right carriage in one piece, with all our luggage and with nobody, neither my new bride nor me, throwing up or worse.

This was a big deal, because we’d been doing an awful lot of throwing up, and worse, in the preceding five days. We had done very little else. We certainly hadn’t done much of what you’re supposed to do on a honeymoon. I had been out of action from about eight minutes after a warm chapati and chips on day one.

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Day two, I don’t remember anything except waking up to the sound of worried, muffled shouting through a bathroom door as I lay clinging, naked and shivering, to the bottom of a hotel lavatory. (“Don’t come in, I’m fine, I can’t let you see me like this.”)

Day three, I reached that joyous moment when you feel you could manage a Coke and at least contemplate a naan. That was when she went down. I had told her not to risk the ice. Day five, we were both thinner but better. And we’d caught the train. And nobody was in our . . .

“Good evening.”

You only get big, fat, sweaty businessmen and honeymooners in the first-class compartments of Rajasthan trains. The thin, non-sweaty businessmen all fly. The backpackers go in second class. So it was me and her, both better for the first time in days, on our honeymoon, both feeling vaguely romantic for the first time in days, because you have to on a honeymoon, that’s the whole point.

And there’s a long shot of some canoodling, because, again, it’s a requirement. But then there isn’t, because of the big, fat, sweaty businessman, who, as the train pulls punctually out of the station, takes one of the bottom bunks after bouncing on it unpleasantly to check it will support him.

As we grind out of Delhi, and the houses and office blocks give way to mile after mile of slum, and we have an us-and-them moment from the top bunks, the FSB opens his briefcase to reveal an extensive array of curries and bits of bread in foil. We’re only just out of the vomiting woods, so this isn’t ideal. We politely decline his offer to share and grimace at each other.

When he finishes his noisy, sweaty meal, and wipes his moustache, his forehead and his hands, a miracle occurs. He tells us three is not company when you’re on your honeymoon and offers to move cabins. We protest quite convincingly. He tells us it is not a problem and leaves. Alone at last.

After only the briefest of arguments — well, not that brief, but brief enough, given we had hours and hours of train journey left — about whether I had been rude and inhospitable and unwelcoming, which I hadn’t, yes I had, no I hadn’t, we kissed and made up.

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