Stepping back into the corridor, he saw the little porter staggering off in the other direction with his luggage, his drenched pillow and his forty-pound book bag all stacked on his head, now shouting, with beautifully rolled r’s, “Trainsport, yes! Trainsport! Yes yes!” Hoping he meant transfer, Peter followed.
The man led him down the stairs on the opposite side of his car, through a teeming station crowd in what turned out to be the city of Secunderabad, and over to a bona fide train—or at least to a row of cars sitting on the main track, connected to an engine. And sure enough, in the windows of the very last car Peter was relieved to recognize the hot, disgruntled faces of some of his first-class co-travelers.
Then he recognized something else: every car in the train, his included, was one of the trusty open-air third-class jobs that Gandhi had cherished. Like Americanness, raw India is not so easy to escape.
The porter placed Peter’s belongings upon the only vacant seat left in the car. He then moved up so close to Peter that it became impossible to move, and remained there, rigid as a statue. Peter was baffled—till he remembered his home-appliance servant, Lakshman. He then reached in his pocket, gave life to the porter-statue with a limp rupee, and watched it join its palms, bow, and disappear.
Digging his emergency purified-water bottle out of his suitcase, Peter drained it dry against his own better judgment, grabbed a couple of texts and a dictionary out of his book bag, stashed the rest of his gear in the chickenshit-spattered luggage rack, settled as comfortably as he could onto the impossibly uncomfortable bench, looked out the jail-like bars of the window, thought of bleacher seats, thought of church pews, thought of the three hundred circuitous miles and eight or ten stops between himself and his destination, and sighed out the single, quintessentially American word: “Shit.”
“My sentiments exactly,” said the man on the bench across from him.
Peter was surprised. The man’s complexion and clothes, the small-boned body and diffident manner, the undersized wire-rimmed glasses and little Nehru cap all said India. But the accent was plainly East Coast Yankee—maybe Long Island. The man gave Peter an exhausted smile. “Was it Chesterton or Kipling who said that an adventure is just a misfortune correctly understood?”
Peter smiled back—a little too eagerly, perhaps, but the prospect of traveling with a man who could quote even Occidental literature beat the prospect of a man who could quote nothing. He said, “Was it Dickens or Trollope who said that train travel isn’t travel at all, it’s being shipped off to a place like a parcel?”
Long Island rubbed his stiff neck and sighed. “If only we were parcels! But was it Johnson or Jonson, Sam or Ben, who said that the miserable are sacred?”
Peter smiled. “Neither, I suspect. And you know it, I further suspect. But wasn’t it Socrates who said that becoming literate was a good way to forget who said everything?”
“No no no,” Long Island countered. “The way to forget everything, Socrates said, is train travel.”
Peter laughed, and began fishing through his head for another quotation. But before he’d come up with one an Indian boy of eleven or twelve burst into the car and began to emit a dreadful singsong sort of sales pitch. Or Peter assumed it was a pitch, since the kid was hawking wooden snakes. What it sounded like was a dirt bike with no muffler. The kid had a sales demo too: it consisted of squeezing a sample snake’s scissorlike handles, causing it to extend in a lifelike strike right into a potential customer’s face. Nor were these the only distractions the boy had to offer: his lips were crimson, his cheeks covered with rouge, his eyes and lashes black with something like mascara; he wore bangles on his wrists, brass bells round his ankles, and his hips were writhing like a stoned hula dancer’s. “Mother of God,” sighed Long Island. “Here comes our next adventure.”
Peter shook his head. “I can’t understand a word he’s saying. Which by our definition makes him a misfortune, not an adventure, for me.”
“So you don’t speak these infernal languages either,” his new friend said.
Peter shrugged. “I read Hindi and Marathi, but Indians speak both so fast I don’t grasp one word in five. I carry a quote unquote Practical Urdu handbook, but usually can’t tell when I’m hearing it, so I hardly know when to refer to it. I read and write Sanskrit, which is exactly as useful here as Latin is in, say, New Jersey. Ich spreche Deutsch. My name’s Chance, by the way. Peter Chance.”
“Dessinger,” said Long Island, and the two Americans shook hands. But Dessinger was growing too irritated to talk. The snake boy was manipulatively, aggressively loud. “Is he some kind of transvestite or what?”
“I think he might be a Hijara,” Peter said. “Which is nearly the same thing. I’ve never seen one, but they’re an outcaste tribe of males who dress and behave like women. Or in this case, like a nasty parody of women. Good musicians, I read somewhere, but this kid shoots that theory too. Wealthy Hindus pay them to make merry at weddings and mourn at funerals. I heard they traveled in groups to protect themselves from persecution, but again, our young friend here seems—”
His discourse ended when the sample snake darted almost into his mouth. Peter smiled wanly and shook his head no.
The boy extended the snake into Dessinger’s face. Dessinger ignored it. The boy chanted louder, writhed his hips faster, sent the snake striking forward again and again. Then it hit Dessinger’s glasses. In a flash he ripped it from the boy’s grasp, tore it to pieces, and flung the splinters against the boy’s chest. “Piss off, faggot!” he snarled, pointing down the aisle.
The boy stared at him without surprise, then fluttered his lids and flounced away. “Sorry,” Dessinger said to Peter. “Fell back on my old subway instincts there. I’ve been two days on the rails, and I’m just too tired for that kinda shit.”
“I know the feeling,” Peter said. But he was lying. The violence of the man’s reaction had shocked him.
“How far are you going?” Dessinger asked.
“Clear to Nasik,” Peter murmured, trying to withdraw.
“Going to sleep soon?”
“I haven’t slept on a third-class train car yet. I’m going to try to get a little work done.” He tapped the books on the bench beside him.
“Would you mind waking me in Jalna, then? I’m getting off at Aurangabad, but I hear it’s a little crazy there these days, so I want plenty of time to wake up.”
“No problem,” Peter said.
Dessinger covered his head with a shirt, curled up on the bench, and almost instantly fell asleep. Peter opened one of his books, eyed the words for a while, but felt too claustrophobic to lose himself in them. The air was like a cross between a sauna and a latrine. He slid over next to the window. There was no breeze. Just as he began to grow frantic, the train jolted violently and began to roll. He wiped his face, and tried to steady his breathing. Dessinger didn’t stir.
Nizamabad/same journey
On the blazing hot concrete of the Nizamabad station platform, a woman with no legs and a grotesquely hunched back was dragging herself along on a board with wheels, like an auto mechanic’s dolly. A girl of four or five accompanied her. They were begging, in tandem, from the cars on Peter’s train, dumping the coins they collected into a brass pot nailed to the front of the dolly. The girl was pitiably cute in her dirty rags—a perfect UNICEF ad for the back pages of some American fashion magazine. But the woman was something else again …
Her only piece of clothing was a kind of loincloth. Her hump was naked, and had been exposed to the sun till it was as cracked and crosshatched as the mud in a dry riverbed. The backs of her hands were gnarled, the knuckles worn fuzzy as old warts from pulling herself along the streets. Her face was concealed by her dusty gray hair, but when those she passed on the platform dropped coins into her pot she would blindly place her palms together, above her hair, in thanks. As she neared the train a shower of coins began to tinkle all around her, sometimes hitting her hump, once striking her head with an audible t
hud. She didn’t seem to mind. With the patience of a sea turtle on sand she dragged her dolly along, gathering what money she could reach while the little girl chased down the rest.
As she pulled up beside the car in front of Peter’s she stopped, raised herself up by her arms, and quickly scanned the passengers’ faces, as if trying to assess the potential for pity and rupees. Peter still couldn’t quite see her face, but he saw her breasts now: they looked like car-killed carcasses scorched on a desert road. Yet it’s calculated, he thought with fascination and horror. The hump, the dead breasts—they’re her tools, like a ball and glove are Papa’s. She exposes them just so. It’s her art, a kind of dancing almost . … But no sooner had he thought this than the old woman turned toward his car, picked out his pale face at once, lowered herself, and began scuttling toward him with astounding speed.
Peter’s hair stood up. He drew back from the window and sank low in his seat. He felt like stalked prey. But when he heard her roll up outside he grew ashamed, and forced himself to look:
She was waiting, right at the edge of the platform. And the instant he appeared she raised herself with a soft, surprisingly feminine grunt of effort into an almost vertical position—and he saw that the hair was gray with dust, not age, that the skin of her face was unlined and youthful, the eyes deep brown, the lashes long, the gaze alert, clear, even sexually attractive. Unable to stop himself, Peter let his eyes rove over the sun-cracked hump, the dead breasts, the wild hair, back to the eyes. And she smiled as he did this—a smile terrible for its intelligence, its beauty, its complete awareness of the ruin in which it lived. Then she touched her forehead with a root-wad hand, and in a voice like a little girl’s said, “Prem se bhiksha dijiye?”
“Lover, give alms”? “Give with love”? Peter should have known what it meant, but he was mesmerized: he began blindly groping in his pockets, his eyes locked to hers—and he found himself wondering what her legs might be like if she had legs, what her breasts might be like had they not been crushed for years against the board, what she might still be like down beneath the cloth, whether the little girl might possibly be hers …
Then he realized that she was reading his thoughts. He felt it almost physically—felt her reach right behind his face and eyes and clutch not the language but the essence of his feelings. And though she continued to smile, her gaze now bound him, as if in ropes. Then it burst into flames. She seared him with flirtatiousness, then with malevolence; she demanded and received his pity, then scoffed him for its meaninglessness, reveled in his horror, exulted in his helplessness and shame. “Nange se Khuda bhi darta hai!” she cried in her girlish yet furious yet triumphant voice. Then the train lurched, and began to roll.
“Wait!” Peter gasped, as if that might stop it, and he turned his change pocket inside out, picked up eight or ten rupees, wadded them into a ball, jammed his arms out the window slats and threw them as hard as he could back toward her. “I’m sorry!” he shouted. “I’m so sorry!” But the breeze blew the ball to pieces, stopped the crumpled rupees far short of her reach, whisked them down the platform as the little girl chased them, then tumbled them off the edge, where they were sucked up close to the wheels of the train. The little girl scrambled down off the platform. The legless woman shrieked. Peter felt the world and everything in it turn to lead …
But the girl was still running when a man in a ripped brown T-shirt jumped down off the train and deftly scooped the rupees up. The little girl ran to him, smiled, held out her hand. The man looked down at her, smiled back—then clutched the rupees and fled, running right alongside the train, right beside Peter, before veering off and disappearing in a maze of mud-and-mat hovels. And all the while the woman kept shrieking, not at the thief, but at Peter:
“Nange se Khuda bhi darta hail Nange se Khuda bhi darta hai!”
Nizamabad to Parbhani to Jalna/same journey
From Nizamabad all the way to Nanded, Peter dug through his lexicons and scribbled phonetic possibilities on a page, trying to work out the exact spelling and meaning of the phrase Nange se Khuda bhi darta hai. He had just concluded that it could only mean “Even God is afraid of the naked” when the train lurched once again, rolled out of Nanded station, and two Indian men walked into his car.
Or not “walked” exactly: one staggered, drunk out of his head, while the other sauntered, giving each passenger a wry, affable smile as they warily eyed his crocked compadre. The drunkard was wearing the red turban of the Sikhs and a red-handled kirpan dagger. A band of scarlet gauze squeezed his beard into a thin, greasy rope. A half-empty fifth of booze was jammed in the sash round his waist. His eyes were as red as the turban. The saunterer, on the other hand, was clear-eyed and clean-shaven, steady on his feet, and wearing the kind of clothes you’d expect to see on a Palm Springs golf nut—double-knit slacks, polyester shirt, pointy white shoes. The two men could not have been more different in mood or style. Yet Peter guessed at a glance that they were brothers, and that each had a great deal to do with the way the other looked and acted.
Every passenger in the car had a bench seat to himself. The two Sikhs were destined to upset that equation. Given the kind of day he’d been having, it did not surprise Peter at all when the drunken Sikh took one look at the sleeping Dessinger, wordlessly flung his feet off the bench, plopped down, and glared at Peter as if he dared him to do something about it. Dessinger stirred slightly, took a discreet peek at the man who’d disturbed him, and wisely decided to pretend to fall back to sleep. Meanwhile the clean-shaven Sikh nodded graciously when Peter made room on his bench, sat down beside him, squinted past him out the window, and said, “I like t’ride out alone over the wide Dakota prairie. I like m’bacon cut thick, m’whiskey straight, an’ m’coffee black.”
Peter acknowledged these assertions with an involuntary giggle, then set aside the lexicons and dove deep into his A. S. Barnes critical edition of Tulsi Das’s Kavitavali.
“Book learnin’s fine for some,” the clean-shaven Sikh said. “But me, I like t’slip off m’boots after a long day’s ride, warm m’feet by a little chip fire, rest m’head on m’saddle, an’ watch those bits o’ busted star come fallin’ down outta the night sky.”
Peter looked up long enough to give the speaker a cautious smile.
“I am Gobindh Singh,” the cowboy-and-Indian said. “An’ this is my strawberry stallion, Old Pal.” He rolled his eyes at his besotted brother.
“I’m Peter Chance,” Peter said, and he and Gobindh shook hands. But when he offered his hand to Old Pal, the red-eyed Sikh only sneered at it. Peter’s adrenal glands slammed into action.
“Ropin’ an’ ridin’, ropin’ an’ ridin’,” sighed Gobindh Singh. “That’s all there is t’this life, m’friend.”
Peter said nothing. The greasy Sikh kept sneering.
“Got m’friends, Doc an’ Miss Nellie, over in town,” Gobindh said. “But they don’t really understand me. Got m’hoss here. But Old Pal, he don’t say much. Got the brandin’ in spring, the roundup come fall, an’ the billion stars blisterin’ that black prairie sky at night. But in the end you look back, you see your life strung out behind you, an’ it’s plain as the color o’ the Dakotas in December. Ropin’ an’ ridin’, Pete. That’s all it was. Just ropin’ and ridin’.”
Noticing that Old Pal had either dozed off or passed out, Peter risked a nod.
“There’s got to be more, is what I tell the stars at night,” said Gobindh Singh. “But them stars, they don’t never answer.”
Peter shook his head sadly.
Then Gobindh also noticed that his brother was asleep, and his manner changed completely. Leaning eagerly forward, he pointed at his brown arms and face and said, “You know, my skin wasn’t really this color! It was a childhood disease! I was very light-skinned as a boy—as light as you, nearly.” He pointed out the window at some women carrying water. “Look at those black-skinned sluts! I looked nothing like that, I can tell you!”
Old Pal lurched upright, s
aw his brother’s distress, glared at Peter as if he were the cause, and literally began to growl. Gobindh shook his head sadly, reached over and slid the bottle from Old Pal’s sash, took a long pull, then turned to Peter. “I don’t reckon a fine gent like yourself’d take relief from a bottle that’s been lipped by the likes of me. But if ya care t’cure what ails ya—” He held it out.
Peter knew better than to hesitate: he grabbed the bottle, nodded thanks, and drank as if he craved it. It was some kind of rotgut whiskey—the first hard liquor he’d tasted since he was sixteen or so; he managed to stave off a coughing fit, but it burned him and left him gasping. When he could see again, both Sikhs were smiling, though for warmth and coldness the two smiles could not have been less alike. “You got any sisters?” Gobindh Singh asked.
“Two,” Peter said without thinking. Then Old Pal began to leer, and he realized he’d fallen already into another trap.
“Out in Nevada, I reckon,” Gobindh said. “Or maybe up Wyomin’ way.”
“Washington State,” Peter said. “But they’re just little girls.”
“I marry!” shouted Pal, pounding his chest with both fists. “You bring, I marry! No dowry! Just marry! Then live with in America!”
Gobindh smirked. “You think he’d let his sisters marry a black-faced pig like you, Kalsa Singh?”
Again the red-eyed Sikh glared at Peter as if he’d spoken the offending words. And again Gobindh Singh just smiled obliviously. “But listen, friend,” he said. “Do speak to the little ladies about our life here on the wide plateaus and prairies. Tell ’em how you found us sittin’ proud in the saddle. Tell ’em how we—”
“You bring!” Kalsa Singh roared, slamming his chest. “You bring, I marry!”
The Brothers K Page 60