These thoughts I carried with me as I rode to my fiancée’s home, the December afternoon of my engagement ceremony. Watching the people and houses pass behind our cart in the dappled sunlight, the weather almost alarmingly beautiful, these concerns seemed to grow inside me, until they achieved something like anger. This anger was completely unrelated to the figure of the little girl I was to marry, but as soon as I saw her—the heavy sari draped over her shoulder, the glint of her nose jewels—this anger attached itself to her figure.
At the hall, a coterie of family members came to the cart, holding flower garlands and sandal paste and a vessel of rose water, and before I had even stepped out of the cart they began to sprinkle and anoint me. Inside the compound, young women peeked at me from behind their friends’ shoulders; children came to touch me and hold my hand until their mothers pulled them away. Indeed, silliness and horseplay were strictly prohibited in my general vicinity.
“Like a rajah,” people whispered, admiring my appearance.
A chair was offered, as others sat on the floor. Sweets on a tray appeared. Chips and savories. Coffee or lime juice? Coffee and lime juice. Because I didn’t finish my coffee, my bride’s father scolded his wife, the wife yelled at the cook, the cook berated the servants. I began to have an inkling of what was meant by the expression “to be treated like a bridegroom,” and when time came to leave for the temple and begin the ceremony itself, I had left behind entirely the gloom and anxiety, the anger, with which I had begun the day.
We walked toward the temple on a route that took us within a few meters of the railroad station. I had left the station that day in Dhanu’s capable hands, with R. as his help. And while I had total confidence in Dhanu, I did have a small worry he might use the occasion to pick some quarrel with hapless R. I walked down the road with my parents flanking me, and the bride’s family all around. Behind me stood the very uncle-in-law who was my nominal supervisor in Madras, and alongside him were my future brothers and cousins, everyone in a grand procession with me, resplendent, at the center.
At what point did it become clear to me that something was amiss? In retrospect, there was a strange agitation in the street, an excited general chatter, but at the time, of course, I assumed this excitement was a result of my own presence on that street.
When the railroad station came into view on our left, I noticed that there was an unusual crowd on the platform for so late in the day—why were they milling about? Only then, strange to say, did I notice the elephant, so to speak, on the horizon: the massive Madras Mail sat idling on the tracks, one full hour past the time it should have departed!
“What is this?” my new uncle asked me, in surprise.
I began to make abject and nonsensical explanations, all the time puzzling through in my mind what might be going on. I spotted Dhanu through the crowd, and called to him, and when he came running toward me, he was in actual tears of agitation.
“I flew the green flag, sir. I promise you. I cleared the tracks.”
“Tell me plainly, what happened?” I grabbed him and shook him by the arm, to calm him. “Why is the train standing here? What have you done? What are all these people looking at?”
We were tacking toward the platform now, somehow redirecting the entire engagement procession, pushing our way around the loitering mob, who turned but briefly to acknowledge us. And then I heard Dhananjayan confirm what my eyes were only then showing me.
“It’s R., sir!” Dhanu said. “It’s R., it’s R. who’s done this!”
R., you see, was doing what he had always done: he was writing. He had broken off a piece of white brick from the outhouse wall, it must have been, and was using it as a chalk to scrawl all over the dun walls of the station. His abhorrent scratches covered the doors, the windowpanes, the very floor of the platform. Running out of space on the building, he was writing now on the fat trunk of a neem tree and even the unpaved ground, and would soon begin on the train itself. We had denied him pen and paper, and he had made the whole earth his canvas.
The same obscure, convoluted designs that had been shown only to me were now scrawled in the open, writ large for everyone to see. It was as if all that was private and awful had been drawn into sunlight, grandly revealing its horror.
Passengers had disembarked to smoke and chat and watch the spectacle, and laugh at our own variety of village idiot. The dawdlers ignored poor Dhananjayan’s entreaties that they return to the train. The train conductor himself leaned leisurely out of the window of his engine. He shook his head at the marks, observing to those assembled, “He must be a learned fellow, to be able to write so many interesting things. Myself, I have never learned Sanskrit.” In response, one listener spat, “Sanskrit—how ridiculous! That fellow is clearly from Calcutta, and he is writing in Bengali. A very ugly language, as you can see. My uncle has visited Calcutta, so I should know.” And to this, another laughed. “You’re both mad. The Britishers have ordered improvements to all our village stations. Hadn’t you heard? This man is just a simple housepainter, painting in the British style.” And from within my own engagement party came the reply: “Housepainter? ‘Vandal’ is more like it. And we should beat him about the head if he were not a Brahmin.”
Oblivious to their attentions, R. hopped about from place to place. He had tied his vaishti high and tight to afford ease of movement, and it slipped looser and lower as now he squatted and now he stood, and wrote and wrote. Thus, for all to see, was the eminently qualified fellow I had hired as my own personal secretary! Some passengers could not contain their mirth: the maddening, haphazard scratches seemed to tickle them deep inside, so that even their eyes showed surprise that they could not control their giddy giggles. “It is so pretty,” one small child squealed foolishly to his mother—and perhaps this is where Dhanu got his idea, much later, that those horrific marks were pleasing to look at. Meanwhile, the train conductor revised his original appraisal: “It is not Sanskrit, it’s English. Just look how carefully that foreign gentleman over there is reading.” The foreign passenger in question was indeed monitoring the scene gravely. He turned, finally, to his also British companion and explained, with sage dispassion, “It is best not to interrupt him,” indicating R. “You see, the superstitious symbols he is making are deeply meaningful to the Hindus of this region.”
My new uncle-in-law, for his part, had grown quietly furious. He stared at R.’s display as if those lines spelled something of direct offense to his dignity and soul; he dripped and pulsed with sweaty indignation. He called out darkly in my ear, but I could not hear what he said, for on the other side, Dhanu had dissolved again into helpless, childlike tears—the boy seemed to have been pushed past his limit.
I could not turn to face either of these people, but instead, adorned all in flower garlands, I stormed up to R. I screamed oaths and imprecations at the back of his head, demanding an explanation. But the man calmly continued writing as if he hadn’t heard me.
Finally, I grabbed him by the shoulder and swung him round by force. He stared at me, calmly blinking. Did he recognize me at all? I grabbed the chalk from his hand and flung it into the tracks.
“Get out of my sight!” I said. I am ashamed to say that I struck him across the face, in front of all of my guests. But this blow had the effect of finally bringing him back to reality.
“Get away from here, you imbecile, you fool! Never come to this station again.”
He seemed to understand what I had told him. He gathered up his vaishti and walked away.
I turned aside in disgust, only to find standing before me and blocking my path a slick-haired photographer supporting his grotesque contraption. My in-laws had hired him all the way from Madras, and he had only now disembarked from the train and found our company. “Let us have it over with,” my bride’s uncle instructed me. So, steaming and humiliated, I moved to the part of the station least sullied by R.’s offenses, wiped off his marks with my hand, and stood with any and all dignity I could muster—at any
rate, I knew I looked smart, with a magnificent new shut-coat given me as part of my dowry. After several minutes of tedious immobility, while the frenzied crowd settled down to stare, the fellow finally uncloaked his head, the crowd hoorahed—hadn’t they enjoyed quite the show this afternoon!—the enginneer finally blew his whistle, and we continued our tense procession to the temple. (Would that I had imagined you then as I do now—I might have bashed that camera! There is something altogether too ticklish about your reanimating me and setting me in ink … even as I suppose there is something revealing in it. Nevertheless, carry on.)
After this incident, my bride’s uncle was understandably concerned about my management of the station and my prospects in the Railway, and consequently, my suitability for his niece. My judgment and character were called into question. For a few anxious weeks, there was some uncertainty as to whether I would continue as Rombachinnapattinam’s stationmaster, and indeed, whether the wedding would still go forward. To have a wedding canceled for a scandal so public would have been disastrous to my family’s reputation, and to my personal prospects. In my secret heart, I had hoped for some reprieve from the wedding, but now it had come I saw the horror of it. Social death was not a price I could pay.
I saw my whole life passing from the plain and legible world to that of ugly incoherence. Things were reversed: the wrong side was facing out. During these days, as my mind obsessively rehearsed the steps toward my predicament, trying to pinpoint its first warnings, and how it could have been avoided, I kept alighting on one scene: I sat smugly at my desk, relating an eloquent and well-considered letter, as R. scribbled dutifully; then R. quietly handed me back a piece of paper that bore no resemblance to what I had composed, that was not at all what I had expected to see.
That letter began to seem filled with uncanny portent; those bizarre scrawls seemed the sign and analogue of my own inner turmoil, my emptiness, my lack of power. The indecipherable signs on that page spoke of some mystery inside me and all around, in plain sight yet stubbornly inaccessible. I felt very alone, and the image of my loneliness was also lost among R.’s unreadable characters.
And now, ironically, I might share R.’s fate. I wondered what had become of him since I had publicly scolded him, since our simultaneous humiliation. What had happened to his poor mother, to the wedding he had spoken of? Had his family been plunged into poverty? Had I sent him to go begging in the streets?
Some afternoons I found myself wandering in the particular Brahmin quarter where I knew R. to stay. I made inquiries with his neighbors, found out which humble house was his, but I could not bring myself to look in on him. I was too guilty. I had hit him in public. But deservedly so! For I was also terribly angry with him—to recall that scene on my engagement day filled me with a humiliated rage I could not bear.
Don’t get the wrong impression: I was judicious in my anger, and not lacking in compassion. Just ask Dhananjayan if you think I was incapable of tenderness. Just ask Dhanu if you think I was incapable of love!
Well, come to think of it, don’t ask Dhanu, because what did even he know about me? As it turns out, I also understood very little about him. He was just a boy, after all, and how much could he tolerate? But Dhanu was to have his revenge on R. and on me, and when it came, one evening not long after my engagement-day fiasco, it was spoken softly, in tones of love, even while he held me in his embrace.
“I have some happy news,” Dhanu told me, with his sweet voice.
“Yes, Dhanu? Good. Tell me.”
“He has disappeared. You can relax now. He won’t bother you anymore.”
“Who has disappeared, Dhanu?” I asked.
“Mr. R., of course,” and at the sound of his name, I felt a seizing in my guts. “Mr. R. I thought you must have heard.”
“Heard what, exactly?” I asked, trying not to betray the feeling of foreboding inside me.
“Why, heard about Mr. R. About the manner in which he left.”
“What was the manner in which he left, Dhanu?” I asked again. In this way, cruel Dhanu made me struggle for every scrap of information. Finally, I managed to gather that R. had come to the station the previous day and bought an open ticket, one way. “You were away on one of your long afternoon walks,” Dhanu took care to note. “Otherwise you would have been there to see him.” Without a single piece of luggage, alone, and without uttering a word, R. climbed aboard the 3:38 Madras Mail and vanished.
“Vanished?” I asked.
“Yes, vanished.”
I laughed uncomfortably. “You make it sound as if it were something mystical that had occurred. Surely he has simply gone to visit some relatives somewhere. Where did he tell you he was heading?”
“He didn’t say. I tell you, sir, when he stepped on the train, he vanished almost like a cloud of steam. He talked with no one, and his face had the look of someone who has no intention to return.”
Now I could not hide my agitation; I threw off the boy’s arm. “So R. is gone? For how long? Why didn’t you stop him? Why didn’t you make him tell you what he was up to? Dhananjayan Rajesupriyan, did you just stare dumbly and watch him go?”
“Always you tell me not to ask pointless questions,” Dhanu said. “I felt it was not my place.” Then he paused. “Could it really be, sir, that you are upset Mr. R. has left? Didn’t he cause you only distress and worry when he was here?”
“Well, yes, Dhanu,” I had to acknowledge. “Mr. R. has caused me more distress than anyone I have ever known. He almost ruined my life.”
“Then, sir,” Dhananjayan asked, blinking his eyes, “shouldn’t you be quite happy that he has gone away?”
I could not find an answer. The devious boy knew he had me in a corner.
(Briefly, may I take this opportunity to call into question your judgment and character? As dramatic as all this is, I must reiterate that it puts me in a gratuitously unflattering light. What, finally, is the point? To have one’s life reflected back so unrecognizably, so bizarrely is a form of torture. Interesting, to be sure, but hellishly so. At any rate, hurry and finish.)
To shed some light on the strange events narrated by Dhanu, that evening I finally visited R.’s house (it was a room, actually; a dark room rented in a shabby home) and looked in on his poor mother. But what I learned there only deepened the mystery of R.’s disappearance, for R.’s mother had even less knowledge than I did of the boy’s whereabouts. The nearsighted and anxious old woman told me that she had awoken previous morning to find R.’s bed neatly rolled, his shirt and notebook missing, and absolutely no sign of the boy. He had left without leaving any note, without any indication as to where he was going. He had, indeed, so far as she knew, simply disappeared.
The old woman was distraught and amazed to hear that R. had been observed boarding the Madras Mail.
“Mami,” I tried to reassure her, “surely he is only gone to some neighboring town to visit relatives, or to seek work.”
“What relatives?” she cried. “What work? He doesn’t know anyone; he doesn’t know to do anything. You understand this as well as I do, sir.”
The lady was inconsolable, alternately worried about her son’s fate, and furious with him. “His wedding day arrives in three weeks, sir,” she told me. “I was lucky to find a bride willing to marry a boy like him. It would have been understandable if she was the one to disappear.”
“Surely he will return in time for his wedding,” I ventured. “He is not … totally incapable.”
“Just look at this, sir!” The old lady opened a cabinet. “These are his things. This is my son.” The shelves were stuffed full with loose papers, torn and wrinkled scraps and salvaged bits of newsprint—hundreds upon hundreds of pages. I began to take them out one by one and examine them. They were each completely covered in the same indecipherable scrawl—page after page. “This is my son. This is the boy we are talking about!” the old woman wailed, as my very skin began to crawl.
That week I telegraphed all my contacts in the Rai
lway, all up and down the line, even in Madras, to see if anyone could report on R.’s whereabouts. But no one at all, anywhere, could recall even having seen him. Dhanu’s imaginative description began to seem more and more apt: R. had stepped onto the train and somehow evaporated.
Three weeks passed. The date planned for the boy’s nuptials came quietly and went with no word from him. Despite my concern for the boy’s fate, I resolved to carry on with life, to let none of it bother me. Whatever had happened to him, I insistently reminded myself, was no fault of mine.
A month passed. Then three months. I heard meanwhile that the bride’s family, furious, had demanded the return of their small dowry from R.’s poor mother.
It was pitiful to think of R.—lacking all social graces, who had never before left our village—lost and alone somewhere in vast South India. I imagined him driven to extremis—starving on the roadside or throwing himself in despair into the ocean. In my heart, I cursed the train for having spirited the helpless boy away. Why existed such a thing? Where was ever the need to travel so quickly? I even wondered if Dhanu had planned the scheme, and somehow deceived R. into leaving; but my conversations, later, with people who had been on the platform that day confirmed that R. had clambered aboard the train of his own volition, without uttering a single word.
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