An hour past the border and the first tide of unseated, the lawyer rose to make the perilous journey to the WC. He instructed the Pakistani student not to admit anyone into the compartment in his absence. He repeated his instructions to Betsy very slowly, but she shook her head. She was searching for enough words to make a speech. C’est impossible, it would begin.
“Look, none of them have paid for first class,” he tried again, enunciating each word with care, pantomiming a ticket purchase. “We did and stood in line for reservations. No reason we should be crowded and miserable all night. See, these seats can be pushed down to meet across the aisle,” he demonstrated for her. “We’ll each have a bed to ourselves if you two don’t blow it.”
The Pakistani arranged his features into those of a deaf-mute. Communication with him would prove impossible. Satisfied, the lawyer nodded in his direction.
Betsy colored and said, “If someone asks me if there’s a vacant seat, I won’t say no.”
The lawyer’s back stiffened at the English words. He whistled softly, “Don’t say anything then, mademoiselle. Say you don’t spreckenzee or whatever. ‘No savvy.’ For you, as easy as stepping on a bug.” He pivoted hard on his right foot and removed a roll of toilet paper from his suitcase before looking once more at his two first-class companions.
The Pakistani sat looking at his shoes, discreetly oblivious to their exchange.
“You won’t worry if I leave you alone with Winston, will you ma’am?” The lawyer snorted and pulled the heavy curtain across the glass of the compartment that faced the aisle. “It’ll be hot as hell with everything closed up, but it’s just for a few minutes. Until I get back. There,” he congratulated himself, “that says ‘don’t fuck with this compartment’ in any language.”
Moments after his departure, a small dark woman slid the door open and threw aside the curtain, surveying the chamber.
“Libero?” she demanded, pointing to the seat that the lawyer had just vacated. Her left eyebrow arced across her forehead like black lightning.
“Non parlo Italiano,” Betsy returned faintly but with scrupulous adherence to the truth. Her practiced Gallic shrug would do no good here.
The woman’s voice rose in a crescendo of abuse. Betsy wished herself back in Nice where invective would not continue to be showered upon an uncomprehending ear. She waited for the stream of words to empty the woman’s mouth, then realized that the flow had only begun, that the woman, all umber and umbrage, was just now warming to her subject.
Betsy held up her hand. “Scusi,” she said. She pointed to the lawyer’s seat. “Non libero,” she said. Then she pointed to each of the remaining empty seats. “Libero. Libero. Libero.”
The woman clasped her hands together before her face, giving thanks to the madonna, or in a salute to Betsy as a madonna. She disappeared after the rigorous exercise of imparting to Betsy and the Pakistani instructions to advise any other comers that the seats were now all non libero.”
She returned with five suitcases, one at a time. The Pakistani student turned to Betsy with both palms up and said, “But where are the chickens?”
The woman trailed back with a saucy girl of eighteen and a sullen boy of twelve. Her offspring carried the two remaining bundles before them—massive sprays of flowers, at least four feet in length, wrapped in varied swatches of colored paper and bound by string. The luggage was wedged in here and there, displacing the air that had made the hot, tiny compartment bearable. Betsy rested the lawyer’s briefcase on top of the student’s suitcase and the madras jacket on his seat. She watched as the enormous parcels of flowers were laid reverently across the top of her canvas backpack and the lawyer’s creamy, butter-yellow leather suitcase in the overhead racks.
Suddenly the light from the aisle began to flicker like an old film. The regularly exercised frame of the lawyer filled the doorway as he slowly shook his head. “Christ,” he said.
“No chickens,” Betsy said humbly, sending a small smile to the Pakistani.
The conductor arrived to collect the increase in the fares of the signora and her children. The daughter’s eyes hibernated, cold and unanimated, beneath half-closed lids, while the conductor spoke in a hushed voice, but her short yellow skirt moved several inches up her thighs, snaked its way, as though the conductor’s voice had charmed the skirt quite apart from his failure to charm the girl.
“Now me,” said the lawyer to the Pakistani, “you’ve probably guessed I’ve never been a leg man myself. Just between the two of us, what’s your preference, Winston? White meat or dark meat? Breast or thigh?”
The Pakistani smiled.
This little senorita is pretty flat, what you might call titless, but then so’s her old lady.”
“For God’s sake,” Betsy said.
“Que pasa?” the lawyer turned an innocent face to Betsy. She stared at the lines etched into both sides of his mouth and the faded scars on his forehead—perhaps left by childhood chicken pox.
The signora perched alert and quiet as a cat, as a duenna, until the conductor left. Betsy waited for her to address her daughter, but instead the signora stood up and closed the window with great satisfaction.
“No,” said Betsy firmly, “no, signora,” confident the lawyer had her pegged as the type to be cowed by foreign bullies and domestic welfare cheats.
“Per favore,” said the signora. “Un momento.” She left an opening of a few inches at the top of the window.
Betsy pushed down on the upper pane until there were ten inches of air coming into the compartment. She was pleased with her no-nonsense manner.
The Pakistani was writing a letter on his lap. The lawyer was watching Betsy noncommittally. He made her think of her parents.
A few minutes later, the signora got up and closed the window another two inches.
“No,” said Betsy on the edge of her seat.
“Per favore,” the signora pleaded, her raised thumb and forefinger separated by the tiniest space to show how little she deprived them. Betsy turned away and the woman closed the window another inch before settling back into her seat.
Betsy picked up her newspaper but her eyes wouldn’t focus on the print. Fifteen minutes later, the signora stood and subtracted another four inches from the open space.
When Betsy said, “No, signora,” the woman produced a cough of consumptive proportions. Defeated, Betsy sat back in the stifling compartment. The boy, embarrassed, was staring out the streaked window while the girl chipped away at her painted nails. The Pakistani slowly added words to the paper in front of him.
When the signora took a blue-flowered handkerchief from her dress pocket and held it to her lips as she rose toward the window, the lawyer crossed the compartment with one stride. He jammed his tightly rolled Herald Tribune between the top of the glass and the frame. Looking at neither the signora nor Betsy, the lawyer said, “You heard of John Kenneth Galbraith?” He took the Pakistani’s newspaper and opened it and stabbed with his forefinger. “He says, ‘The happiest time in any man’s life is just after his first divorce.’”
Betsy struggled with her newspaper, trying to appear absorbed in each page, until she found the Galbraith quote. Maybe the lawyer and his wife had begun their marriage with a trial separation.
After another uncomfortable hour, Betsy caught herself slapping at her arm. Seconds later an identical gesture came from the lawyer.
Betsy examined her fingers. “Ants,” she diagnosed, puzzled.
The student pointed above their heads to the bundled bouquets.
“Oh no!” the lawyer roared. “No livestock in first class, lady!”
The woman was all incomprehension. Betsy displayed on her palm another ant, then pointed to the flowers. The woman replied in obdurate pantomime that the ants came through the small opening at the top of the window.
“No,” Betsy said resolutely. “The
window stays open. Les flora avanti,” she insisted, though not at all confident she had said anything in any language.
The lawyer jerked his thumb up at the flowers and then in the direction of the corridor.
“No, no,” wailed the signora. Words frothed and bubbled at the woman’s lips, now beseeching Betsy, now bemoaning all the injustices that had befallen her in life. Her daughter said something low, cold, and knifelike, but though the woman paused for half a heartbeat, upsetting her rhythm, the barb did not stop her. The boy turned his face against the window.
“Let’s pitch the damn things,” the lawyer said.
Betsy said nothing, knowing he didn’t expect her to reply.
“We can at least put them out of the compartment, can’t we?”
“Where?” Betsy said.
They kept their eyes from the corridor, where people now stood as cattle, as people traveling as cattle. “Christ,” he submitted. Betsy almost liked him at that weakened moment.
She spent the rest of the night slapping at ants and keeping her face averted from the malodorous stockinged feet of the slumbering signora, which somehow came to rest on the edge of Betsy’s seat from across the narrow aisle. Then the train broke down, or the track needed to be repaired—she could only salvage the word “broken” from the conductor when he looked in on the signora’s daughter.
Betsy fretted about being late for her four-thirty a.m. connection in Pisa. Overtired, hemmed in by the bodies of the student, the signora, and her children, all floating in sleep, she felt like she was underwater. Only the lawyer was awake to throw her a line of conversation, but she knew she had cut off any hope of rescue from that quarter.
They were delayed an hour and a half somewhere between stations, but even, so the train for Florence had not yet departed. She could see it across the train yard from the compartment window. Betsy stood and set the bundle of flowers upright on her seat. She eased the heavy pack down from the rack and then replaced the flowers. All eyes were shut in the dim compartment: there was no one to take leave of. But Betsy knew the lawyer was playing possum.
She scattered “scusi”s all over the corridor like rose petals and still could not find a path through the tangled, drowsy mass of travelers. As she stepped over bodies, Betsy wondered suddenly what the lawyer’s bride had been doing while he was surveying the beaches of Nice.
Finally out on the platform, she saw she must scrabble across lines of empty, forbidden tracks—there was no telling when her train would leave—but she stopped outside the coach and pulled a map of Nice from her capacious purse. With a felt-tipped pen, she quickly printed KELBY! in large block letters across the diagram of the city. She counted the windows to their compartment and held the map to the glass above her head. Seconds later he was at the window looking down at her.
She glanced over her shoulder toward the other train but her overstuffed backpack curtained her view of the station. “Where’s your wife?” she whispered.
A long, pale pink spiky bloom spiraled down from his fingers and hit the platform near her feet. “No capish, sugar,” he said before he disappeared from the window, taking his rolled-up newspaper with him.
Thick and Thin
6.
Winston Mansukhani was the shame of his father. Or he would have been, had anyone in the family or among their acquaintance in Hyderabad known of his true occupation.
Father and son both continued to wrap him in the camouflage of a student. But Winston had not been that for some time. “Not even a student of human nature,” his father thought sadly.
Already now his “studies” exceeded the norm in duration and his father was running short of explanations. “Even graduate students would have graduated by now,” his father wrote with some bitterness. “And loving sons would not let so much time pass without a visit home to their mother.” Or their father, Winston read between the lines. But he was even worse at dissembling than his father, so he stayed away.
The truth was that Winston had withdrawn from Trinity College. Sanjib Mansukhani could not understand how a boy who had worked so diligently in school and achieved top A-Levels in Maths, Chemistry, and Classical Civilization could throw his education away. This came close to breaking Sanjib’s heart.
Sanjib would have been so proud to have a medical doctor—which Winston had talked of becoming—in the family, or a chemist. A chemist would have brought him exquisite joy.
Sanjib’s own father had aspired to be a chemist but was unable to complete his education due to ill health. He had been severely beaten in an anti-Hindu riot two years after his son was born. Both his legs had been fractured and his left lung punctured by a broken rib. By the mercy of Vishnu, he had been carried to the doorstep of a Muslim physician, who took him in and tended to him. The doctor had plunged a needle attached to an empty syringe into his chest. Sanjib’s father was ashamed to report that he had thought the man was trying to finish him off, injecting air into his Hindu heart, but the doctor was just letting the air around the collapsed lung escape without allowing any external air back in. “He was not killing me. He was saving my life, even while he could see I thought the worst of him.” He had wanted to resume his night-school education when his strength returned, but he never fully recovered. As he grew older, his legs gave him enough trouble that merely walking any distance caused him to have difficulty breathing. When his own doctor warned that he must not exert himself or he could bring on repeated incidents of pneumothorax, he retired to his bed in despair.
His disability necessitated that Sanjib forgo his own dreams of a university education and go to work for his father’s brother in the umbrella trade. Not only did they manufacture umbrellas for personal use—“the best bumbershoots in Pakistan,” the uncle persisted in calling them—they also made kaleidoscopic accordion umbrellas for shading pedicabs and cycle rickshaws and shipped those around the globe. At first Sanjib had hated his job but felt that this abhorrence was tantamount to hating the uncle who employed him, so he squelched the discontent in himself and cultivated gratitude instead. He was very glad he conquered those unworthy feelings for it made him a happier person and a more effective businessman.
Not only had Sanjib been able to support his parents, but in time, he had managed to provide a costly education for his son, both in Pakistan and later in England. Now, with the money Winston was posting home, Sanjib was even able to send his daughters to university and perhaps eventually on for postgraduate degrees. He tried to be happy about that, but it was proving very awkward.
People were talking. Not just the neighbors, but the family too. After so many years of being trusted, it pained him to see the glint of suspicion in his uncle’s eye. But he understood. Where was all this money coming from that went to educate Winston and his three younger sisters? His uncle didn’t want to believe him guilty of embezzlement, but Sanjib’s explanation that he had carefully invested his savings and they had grown exponentially was less plausible. Especially since, upon questioning, he did not seem to know much about the entities he had invested in.
In the beginning, Winston did not reveal the source of his income to his father. He said only that he had come by his earnings honestly. His secretiveness combined with the sheer improbability of a university student sending money home caused his father to write, “Everyone knows that university students are careless spendthrifts. They are always asking their parents for money. They do not send large sums home to the parents. It is against the order of things. I am sorry to say this, my son, but I cannot believe in my heart that you have truly come by this money in an honorable way. I am thinking many fearful things. Please tell me the nature of your good fortune so that I can put these worries aside.” So Winston finally telephoned from London, a complicated business made more complicated by the content of the conversation. “That is not coming by money in an honorable way!” the father cried. “‘Legally’ does not mean ‘honorably,’” h
e fretted.
Sanjib was troubled and conflicted. He wanted to assure his aging uncle that the increase in his own fortunes had been honestly obtained. Or to confess that it had at least been legally obtained, but he couldn’t bring himself to reveal that his pre-med son whom all admired was a dropout and a professional gambler. And he couldn’t bring himself to refuse the bank drafts Winston deposited in his account.
Winston was awakened by the signora and her two children gathering their belongings in preparation for exiting the train. The brazen, painted daughter loaded parcels onto the arms of her sullen younger brother, her sherpa. The mother wordlessly thrust the enormous bundles of spiky flowers at Winston, who managed to hold them and shield his face from them at the same time, while she arranged herself and her packages for departure.
When the signora threw back the curtain covering the door of the compartment, he saw that the corridor had emptied. The American, sitting opposite him, noticed as well and collapsed back into his seat with a deep sigh.
The signora and her feral offspring gone, Winston cast an eye over the luggage racks, taking inventory.
“She left in the middle of the night,” Kelby Bradshaw said of the young American woman who had occupied the sixth seat in their compartment. “Good riddance, I say. She was even more of a pain in the ass than that mamamia.” He jerked his head in the direction of the corridor, where petals from the floral spears littered the floor, “With any luck it will be just the two of us from here on.”
Winston nodded. He watched as the lawyer opened his briefcase, which held little in the way of papers and much in the form of foodstuffs. Kelby set a half-baguette, a wrapped wedge of cheese, a small jar of olives, a bag of granola, and two bottles of beer on the seat next to him. He snapped the case closed and set it across their knees like a dining table. “Breakfast,” he said.
“One moment.” Winston slid out from under and stood to remove a plastic sleeve of shortbread biscuits and an orange from his bag. “A modest contribution,” he said, settling himself back into place.
The Opposite of Chance Page 6