Where Men Once Walked

by Mark L Watson

  “Do you know what time the train will be here?” he said slower.

  The man leant in and thought for a moment and chewed on nothing.

  “At thirty minutes past three”

  The kid glanced up at the time on the green clock hanging from the terminal wall. It read 17:12.

  He turned to the man again.

  “Half past three in the morning?”

  The man smiled and shook his head sharply.

  “You mean it was due at half three this afternoon?” he asked the man.

  The old man nodded.

  Another hour or more later a murmur grew across the platform and the waiting crowd began to shuffle and move and pick up their luggage though most were travelling without it. A boy on a bicycle came racing along the train track shouting that the train was coming and the horde began to push their way to the platform edge and those on the tracks pushed back in the other direction to vacate it in time. The kid and the airmen put their rucksacks onto their backs and joined the crowd and, though the people at the front of the platform were falling into the tracks, the crowd continued to push forward. The American called to them to do whatever it took to get on to the train and if needed they would meet again in New Delhi.

  The train slowly appeared around the bend and let out an earpiercing screech and the brakes whistled and whined and it was still moving along the platform when the first passengers started to leap onboard. A slim teenage boy in shorts and sandals spring onto one of the little steps and wrenched open the door and climbed inside and others joined him in jumping through the opening. The train stopped and the doors were pulled open and the crowd poured frantically onboard. The kid saw the American using his size and weight to muscle through the crowd and saw him haul himself up onto the train. The kid pushed his own way forward with the crowd and eventually reached the edge of the platform and got bustled onto the carriages by the crowd behind him. He looked around but saw nothing of either of his friends and he moved forward into the carriage with his fellow passengers.

  His was the only white face in the sea of people crammed into the train.

  Eventually when everyone was onboard, the train made a loud hiss and started to return to motion. A man appeared next to the carriage with his bicycle and swung a chain around it and fed it quickly through the barred window and fastened it back around the wheels of the bicycle and climbed up the side of the train to the roof where others sat and the kid could see their sandalled feet dangling next to the bars as the train pulled out of the station.

  The seats along the main carriageway were already filled and the kid pushed along the carriage and pushed open the swing door of the first booth and peered inside. A group of men sat shouting to each other and gesticulating wildly and they did not stop to look at him as his head rounded the door and he retreated and pulled the door closed behind him. He moved to the second booth and then the third and the fourth and at the fifth he opened the door to an elderly man with two young girls with little pink knapsacks. They stopped talking and the girls watched him wide-eyed. There were two free seats inside but the man’s luggage was on them and the kid was unsure whether or not to proceed.

  “Can I sit here?” he asked and the man nodded and waved him in and he entered but the man didn’t remove his bags and the kid pushed them gently to one side and created enough room for himself to sit down on the hot plastic seatpad.

  He sat for some time with his pack on his lap and watched as the old man spoke to the girls. He couldn’t understand what he was saying but the girls were listening intently to him and they smiled and laughed together at moments as he spoke. The younger of the two kept looking over to the kid and he saw in her eyes a great interest in himself and as they passed through the stations she warmed to him and he smiled to her a couple of times and eventually she smiled back.

  The hills rose and fell outside the little square window and the white sun eventually dropped behind the trees in an explosion of pink and orange and the pink and orange faded to purple and eventually to darkness and the sky twinkled with a billion stars above them.

  They passed into Guwahati station, glowing in neons of pink and yellow, juxtaposed entirely with the dry and dark and dead world around it and more passengers flooded onto the train and onto the roof of the train and two young women in saris joined their booth and sat quietly together on the floor with packages bound in brown paper and string and sat quietly holding each other’s hands. The two young girls opposite had fallen asleep either side of the old man who sat with an arm around each of them.

  The sweltering heat and the humidity and the stink of the train had subsided somewhat and the soft breeze blew in through the barred window and the kid put his head back and thought of home.

  He worried for his parents and he worried for Abi and he cursed himself for taking the job and for making the trip there. He could not know whether any of the people he cared for were safe or not and he knew they would be worrying about him too, wherever they were. He was separated from them in every way imaginable and there was nothing he could do but to sit on that train and make the slow journey home and whether it would be in vain was not to be known. He didn’t know whether or not they had all been evacuated and he didn’t know where they would be evacuated to if they were. He again tried to go through all the options in his head but it hurt to do so and he tried to push it away and think of something else but there was nothing else to think of.

  He looked across to the old man and he was falling asleep in his seat holding the young girls.

  He cursed that his work had taken him so far from them all and though he knew he had been saving lives in helping the conservation of those rainforests, he feared it may all have been in vain too. He thought about the elephants there and worried that the heat and the water shortage would affect them also and he thought about the new young he had fought so hard to protect but this thought hurt his head like the others and before he knew it he was asleep.

  He woke again in the dead of the night and the lights in the booth had been dimmed throughout the train. The two young women with the packages bound in paper had left and a young man sat in their place on the floor with his knees pulled up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them holding a knapsack and a battered old leatherbound book which he read in the paling light. He looked over to the kid when he woke and smiled just slightly and the kid nodded back to him.

  Through the little window the country passed by silent and dark like a filmstrip spinning idly on a projector wheel. The kid rose and pulled his rucksack up and stepped around the man reading on the floor and pushed open the swing door into the carriage. Men were sleeping in the corridor under blankets and some under nothing at all with their sandals by their heads and their bags and belongings held tight to them. The carriage was lined with seating booths, each with their door closed, and he stepped through the metal door at the end and across the opening between the carriages and through the rushing breeze and into the next car. The carriages were of different design and the next held no private seating at all and was set out open plan with lines of plastic benches, battered and cracked, and there were far more people and there was far more noise. Every seat was occupied and though many were asleep under sheets or under nothing at all there was a low chatter of voices all about him. He was watched by every pair of eyes as he stepped over the carpet of bodies and baggage and detritus.

  A man with no shirt and his belongings wrapped together in a pillow case held his bicycle on board and a family had brought with them three small dogs and they were standing together tied and bound to the bars across the window and they watched him through white eyes and looked fearful of everything. A young mother sat silently with her eyes wide as she cradled her sleeping baby and she too seemed petrified of everything around her. The kid passed through the second carriage, busy with people of all ages sleeping on the floor and on the seats and people sitting around them talking and children crying somewhere.

  On the right side of
the train he spotted the shaved head of the American sitting on one of the blue plastic benches with his pack next to him and his head hanging forward asleep. He moved over to him and the men opposite watched him as he sat down next to the soldier.

  He spoke loudly and sharply.

  “Sleeping on duty private?”

  The men all turned to look and the Americans eyes flicked opened and he looked across to the kid without barely lifting his head.

  The kid smiled.

  “Fuck yourself” he said and dropped his head back to his chest.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?” the kid asked.

  The American scowled with his eyebrows threateningly but said nothing.

  “Did he make it onboard?”

  The American sighed, knowing the kid was not going to let him just sleep and he begrudgingly raised his head.

  “I don’t know” he said finally, “I couldn’t find neither of y’all. I looked up there some time back and couldn’t see you from anybody else”

  “I was in a booth back there”

  “He’s probably up ahead, there’s too many people up there to get on through”

  He looked over at the men opposite who had gone back to their business and he looked up at the tiny open window where the stars flickered in the distance.

  “Where in God’s good name are we?”

  The kid shook his head.

  “No idea. In the middle of nowhere someplace. In open country”

  The American nodded.

  “These guys here”, he nodded to the three young men sitting across from him, “they say we won’t be in Delhi for some twenty four hours or more”

  The kid raised his eyebrows.

  “So” he said leaning backwards onto the plastic seat, “I could do with you not coming over here and waking me up just to talk shit”

  The train sat in the dark outside of Bongaigaon station for some time and many of the passengers wanting to depart there pushed open the doors themselves and climbed out onto the tracks and pulled their luggage with them and walked off into the night like ghosts. When the train pulled to the platform there was no electricity running to the station and it too was ghostly and dead and broken signs hung from the wall and the walls themselves were crumbling and smashed. They waited on the platform for a moment but no more as everyone who had been due to depart at that place had climbed from the train long back.

  They could hear shouting and commotion from somewhere outside.

  Men selling water and nuts and old fruit plied their trade along the train windows, handing items in through the bars like they were feeding animals in a cage. As they pulled away from the dark platform the kid saw the silhouettes of three men pulling another along the stone concourse in the shadows and he couldn’t tell from where he sat if the man was alive or if he was dead or what fate had befallen him and before he could focus they had gone from view entirely.

  The train calmed with the fewer passengers but the peace was broken at Kokrajhar as a huge horde of people joined the train and in doing so woke every passenger onboard and the noise that followed their embarkment continued through the night. Men and women old and young and desperate and scared and some extremely sick pushed onto the train with luggage and some without and they pushed for places to sit and they pushed for places to stand and for places to put their bags and their children and the train remained that way until the sun was up.

  The American and the kid retained their places on the bench and they talked to each other about how the world was and the things that they missed and the things they wished they could do again and the things they knew they would never do again for there was no going back. They drank all of their water and the American smoked cigarettes out of the open window and though he knew this was certainly prohibited he was not the only one doing and nobody voiced concern.

  When the sky was white and the sun had heated all it could again they passed through the great station at Jalpaiguri and the white sky turned grey. The junction station intersected many rail lines which fanned out east and west and their train sided in with others. The smell of hot metal and rubber and smoke gave way to the smell of the people and the sickness on the train and it was overwhelming to both the kid and the American and all aboard grew thirsty and restless and irritable and arguments and fights began to break out.

  As they passed over the Mahananda at the boundary of Bangladesh the land around them grew wild and arid and brown and in the distance a factory burned in an inferno otherworldly and spat fire into the heavens. The kid left his pack with the American where he sat and pushed his way through the carriage in the hope of finding something to drink and he asked those he saw with water but none would spare any and he had passed three carriages to nearly the front of the train before a young woman handed him a warm bottle of water still unopened.

  She smiled softly at him and he thanked her and told her that he was in her debt should their paths cross again and she said that he was not as it was only water and everyone should spare what they were able to in life for those who need it more. He thanked her again and drank some from the bottle and took the rest back to the American. At no point did he see the Dutchman, though he had been keenly looking out for his dreadlocked hair in the crowd.

  As the sun passed high overhead both men felt sick and sat slouched in their seats not speaking to the other and both poured with sweat in the heat from which there was no escape. The kid felt faint and was sure he would vomit but he didn’t and his vision clouded and the world spun around him and he steadied himself and sat forward with his head in his hands. The American had removed his boots and was breathing heavily with one hand holding the bridge of his nose.

  Others in the train suffered likewise and a man vomited and a young boy was crying behind them. People were climbing up the walls of the train to gain position at the open windows and men fought with one another as they jostled for space and for a cool that just did not exist. Further along their carriage a thin woman lay flat on the floor and a man fanned at her face with his shirt and poured trickles of water into her thin lips and the kid and the American could not tell if she was already dead.

  When they pulled into the tiny old platform at Barauni just after noon there was an immediate exodus.

  Many who had no intention of stopping their journey in that place did so as a matter of survival and the kid and the American moved from their seat to the doorway to leave too but didn’t for risk of losing the Dutchman even though he may not be onboard. All the children were taken from the train and the woman who had been laying on the floor was carried out by a group of men and they could yet tell no more of her mortality.

  In the suburbs outside of Patna the train ground to a screeching halt in a cloud of dust and rubber fumes and sat idly on the track for some time without explanation. It was not the first time in those twenty something hours that they had stopped without warning and they were running behind schedule though the kid and the American didn’t know the schedule anyway.

  Eventually there was manic shouting from somewhere ahead of them on the train and a group of armed men dressed in dark green shirts and brown hats appeared next to the train and surrounded each doorway.

  The passengers shouted from the train to the guards and the guards shouted back and called in Hindi and in Assamese and then in English for everyone to remain where they were.

  At the back of their carriage a young man in a blue striped shirt pushed open the door and started to step out onto the track and two guards raised their rifles to his face and when he didn’t desist his exit one butted him with the toe of the rifle and he crumpled backwards onto the steps of the train and a friend pulled him back inside. The guards shouted over their guns and the men closed the door again behind them.

  The guards held the passengers on the train without explanation for a long time and the crowd grew nervous and frantic and desperate and they grew yet sicker and more dehydrated and though they screamed to the guards for water and to ta
ke care of the infirm they would not and any attempt to open the doors was met with fierce resistance.

  A gunshot rang out somewhere up along the track and then another and the passengers recoiled and those near the exits backed away further.

  Eventually the guard in the red cap shouted to the rest of his platoon and they systematically opened the doors of the train one by one and boarded, holding their rifles up at eye level. They called onto the train and the kid and the American didn’t understand them but the other passengers gathered on one side of the carriage and the kid and the American joined them. At rifle point they led everyone from the carriage out onto the tracks and held them there and other guards did the same with the other carriages until there were some four hundred people huddled together against the side of the hot metal train. The guard in the red hat walked slowly along the train track from front to back flanked by a lieutenant in a black shirt and turban.

  The kid turned to the tall bearded man standing next to him.

  “What do they want?” he asked.

  The man shook his head.

  “I do not know”

  “Who are they?”

  The man shrugged and said he did not know that either but that he did know that they weren’t the police and they weren’t in the uniform of the army.

  An old man in a brown shirt open at the front turned to them both and spoke.

  “He is Assam Rifle” he said pointing to the man in the red hat, “look at the sash he has”

  “Who are they, the military?” the kid asked.

  The man shook his head.

  “Paramilitary”

  The American scoffed at him.

  “They look like damn boyscouts”

  The man shook his head sharply.

  “They guard the borders and act as security force in time of crisis here”

  “So what are they doing now then, holding up a train? Boyscout highwaymen”