Raka stops laughing instantly.
‘Juhi!’ he hisses. ‘You can’t smuggle food into the movie hall like this! Outside food isn’t allowed!’
But Juhi just sniffs. ‘Arrey aise kaise? Why should I pay so much money for their baasi popcorn and oily salty chips? These sandwiches are ekdum fresh. Take Maddy, take Shaanu – cheese, lettyoose and cucumber.’
‘Yeah, shut up, Raka,’ say his buddies, cramming sandwiches into their mouths gratefully.
‘I want cheese,’ Raka capitulates, grabbing one before they’re all gone. ‘Achcha, Baaz, what about Afsana Sidnani? She’s lovely. You helped her run her stall at the fete. Why don’t you try your luck with her, huh?’
Shaanu puts down his sandwich. ‘What the hell, man?’ he demands, hassled. ‘What is this try your luck, try your luck? A lucky dip or what? I like Afsana, she’s a nice lady, but not like that, yaar.’
But both his friends are already spluttering into their sandwiches. ‘Lucky dip!’ they guffaw. ‘Ha ha, Baaz, lucky dip! Maybe if you’re lucky she’ll let you dip.’
‘Hawji!’ Juhi gasps, swatting at them with the tiffin box lid. ‘Dogs! Pigs! Chhee!’
‘Tum dono kutte ho,’ Shaanu gives his verdict as he sits back with folded arms in the rickety folding seat. ‘Sick, perverted dogs. I have three sisters, I don’t like all thi—’
But right then, the screen, which had been showing the standard black-and-white Films Division News Reel, flickers and displays an image of green mountains and a pristine waterfall. An insistent drumbeat kicks in and a guitar begins to strum.
They turn their attention to the screen.
‘Hey, what’s this?’
‘Must be the new Freesia soap ad.’ Raka sits up excitedly, so excitedly that his seat snaps shut and spits him out. He gets up and sits down again, his eyes glued to the screen. ‘The first-ever bikini ad of Bharatvarsh! Dilsher from my squadron saw it last weekend – he said the girl is too good, ya!’
‘You close your eyes,’ his wife says grimly. ‘What will you do watching a Freesia soap ad? You bathe with Lifebuoy.’
But they all keep their eyes wide open. Expensive, frivolous ads are a rarity in strictly socialist India.
A breathy female voice croons la … la-la-la-la … la-la-la-la-la … and the hall comes alive with wolf whistles. A pair of slim bare legs flash on the screen and click playfully at the ankles, sending a spray of water droplets onto the screen.
And then, as Shaanu, Raka, Juhi and Maddy watch open-mouthed, sandwiches forgotten, a slender golden-brown girl in an emerald-green bikini prances joyfully under the waterfall, black hair mantling her shoulders, skin aglow. Her teeth do chatter slightly under the cascading water in the close-ups, but she still manages to convey innocence, energy and a great sense of fun.
The boys approve of her, immediately and whole-heartedly, but hold back from vocalizing this, very aware of Juhi sitting between them.
‘No shame,’ Juhi declares finally.
‘C’mon, Juhi, she’s charming,’ Maddy protests.
‘I think she has a certain jaa ne say qwa.’ Raka grins, mispronouncing atrociously.
‘Because she’s got qwater of her clothes on,’ is Juhi’s tart response. ‘Quarter ka bhi quarter!’
‘I like her.’ Maddy sticks to his guns. ‘She doesn’t simper.’
‘Well, she should,’ Juhi says hotly. ‘She has no business being itna comfortable while exposing so much! And she’s so kaali! Baaz is fairer than her.’
Shaanu looks like he hasn’t heard a word anybody has said. ‘I like her,’ he says slowly. ‘Very much!’
It isn’t till the end of the ad, though, when the girl flashes a grin in a particularly impish close-up, revealing two little dimples in her cheeks, that he sits up abruptly, his feet slamming down hard on the linoleum tiles.
‘Oooooohhh teeeeri!’
The other three ignore this Haryanvi exclamation, their eyes riveted to the screen.
Somehow, Maddy and Raks don’t seem to have made the same discovery he has, making Shaanu wonder if he’s imagining things. But the other two had been sitting in the front of the Jonga, he recalls. And they’d spent much less time with the runaway than he had.
By the time a photo of Freesia soap slaps onto the screen and a deep voice declaims Come alive with the freshness of Freesia, Shaanu is sure of it.
The girl under the waterfall is the girl from the train.
The one with the red bandariya skirt, the slender brown thighs, the dead brother, the bossy father and the put-an-end-to-war agenda.
And suddenly (maybe all it took was the sight of her in her emerald-green bikini?) Shaanu is sure that she’s filter and he’s tobacco, and they’re perfectly matched. Not that he smokes or anything.
Tehmina Dadyseth.
What the hell has she been doing with her life?
FOUR
The Howrah Mail is an iconic train, sixteen bogeys long, travelling from Dilli to Kalkatta over a period of one night and two days. It slices across the Gangetic Plain, the rocking rhythm of its wheels conspiring to create a cosy intimacy in which passengers share innumerable cups of tea, food from every corner of independent India and the occasional tube of toothpaste. Rishtas have been fixed on the Howrah Mail, lifelong friendships established, the nation’s politics discussed threadbare and the nasty nature of many a mother-in-law lamented over.
Today, the topic in the second-class bogey is the civil war in Pakistan. As the train khata-khats its way briskly across rural Haryana, the occupant of 27C holds centre stage. He is a paunchy, hairy character, poured into a straining sando-cut vest with several small holes sprayed delicately across the front, rather like a sprig of daisies.
‘Bhaisaab, all this problem started at the time of independence only!’ he declares. ‘The British carved up the subcontinent in such a foolish way! One long, big India in the middle with one small-sa Pakistan hanging to the right of it and one small-sa Pakistan hanging to the left of it…’
‘Like a pennis with two balls,’ remarks 30A from behind a newspaper.
The men gathered in the bottom berths guffaw loudly.
‘Mind your tongue, bhaisaab!’ admonishes a voice from an upper berth. ‘Ladies and children are present!’
‘Sorry, behenji,’ 30A says placatingly. ‘No bad this-thing intended! Point is ki these two pieces of Pakistan have nothing to unite them – one speaks Punjabi, another speaks Bengali, their culture vagehra is also ekdum different, even their Islam is not the same type.’ He pauses to shudder. ‘Not that I claim to understand Islam. And they are separated by 1,600 kilometres of Indian territory. Naturally, they are fighting! And then saying ki we are the ones who are causing the fight! Batao!’
There is a murmur of general agreement.
After a quick look around the bogey to establish that it is safe to speak, the clerkish-looking fellow in 28B leans forward and says in a lowered voice, ‘Ji, it’s all because of eating non-veg. Cow and goat and what not! It makes them violent. That’s why they are killing each other.’
‘There is a kahawat, na,’ says a thin, elegant old man in starched kurta pyjama, ‘ki let sleeping dogs sleep. To that I add today a kahawat of my own. Let fighting dogs fight!’
There is a hearty chorus of hear-hear followed by a companionable, munching silence. Then a slender girl with short tousled hair gets to her feet. Pulling a scarf from her bag, she wraps it around her head, covering her hair, neck and ears. Then she kneels down in the aisle, holds up her hands and begins to pray.
A hush falls in the bogey. 28B sits back, consternation writ large on his face, and even 27C looks shamefaced.
‘Haw,’ gasps a young matron surrounded by three sleeping children. ‘She’s Mohammedan!’
The praying girl smiles, tiny dimples blooming in her cheeks. She opens one bright eye, then the other.
‘No, I’m not,’ she says calmly. ‘But supposing I was? All of you would have been pretty embarrassed, na?’
&n
bsp; The young matron looks confused for a moment before letting out an appreciative peal of laughter. The rest of the bogey stare at the speaker with uncertain, hostile eyes.
‘Oversmart.’
‘Trying to show us down.’
‘I’m sure she is Muslim only, pulling a double bluff.’
‘I’m Parsi, actually,’ the girl says amiably to the group at large as she scrambles back up to sit in her place. ‘Tehmina Dadyseth.’ She removes the scarf from around her head and stuffs it into her bag. ‘Namaste!’
The gathering isn’t mollified.
‘What were you trying to prove, waise?’ 27C says belligerently. ‘That you are a very great secular?’
Tinka, for it is she, rumples her short hair thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘I just thought that if somebody sitting in this bogey was a Muslim, they’d feel so upset but be too intimidated to admit it and would have to sit silently while all of you said ill-informed, bigoted things about their religion and their way of life.’
This is met with a tense silence.
‘You are too young, beta,’ the lady from the upper berth says finally, with maddening condescension. ‘You have not seen what we have seen, suffered what we have suffered…’
‘Oh, please don’t start off about the Partition again!’ Tinka entreats. ‘If Muslims did terrible things then, so did Hindus.’
But this is too much for her audience. They start to whisper to each other, their mood swinging firmly back to hostile again.
‘All these minorities are the same.’
‘Parsi, eh? They’re all mad.’
‘I think she’s an actress or something. I’ve seen her somewhere. Acting people have no morals.’
‘Is she travelling alone? Where’s her husband? No brother-father?’
As Tinka’s eyebrows start to rise in comic alarm, the young matron speaks up in a sweet voice. ‘I think Tehmina has a point. We’re all human beings first, nahi?’
The bogey seems ready to argue this point, but just then the sleeping children begin to stir, the muscular toddler sending up a deep-throated wail. People draw away, turning back to their food, their newspapers and their card games.
‘Hello!’ Tinka bends to address the cranky child cheerfully. ‘What’s your name?’
He hides his face but the two young girls with him rub their eyes and sit up, eyeing her with interest.
‘Is that a boy-cut?’
Tinka rumples her hair ruefully. How she misses her long mass of hair. But there had been no other solution. After the Freesia ad came out, people started recognizing her everywhere. At the kirana store, on Marine Drive, once even at a funeral. Men whistled the la … la-la-la tune whenever she walked by, while women whispered and pointed. After being blown a particularly lascivious kiss by a grandfather from a BEST bus, she’d walked down to the beauty parlour in Colaba and got what the girls there described as an ‘Audrey Hepburn Roman Holiday pageboy bob, which will really set off your ingénue features, madam’.
‘I guess so,’ she says. ‘It’s new. I’m not sure I like it … do you?’
‘No.’ The younger of the two girls speaks up first. She looks about ten years old, round and fair, dressed in a green-striped sweater over a salwar-kameez, her eyes lined fearsomely with kajal. ‘You look like a boy.’
The other girl, thinner and taller but equally kohl-eyed, shakes her head at her sister. ‘I think it’s nice. We have an LP of an Amaarikan lady singer, and on the cover her hair is short too. Where did you get it cut?’
‘In Bombay,’ Tinka replies. ‘What are your names?’
She smiles as she asks this question, and the three children smile back – Tinka’s smile has that sort of quality. She’s dressed in a tight black poloneck, emerald-green cord pants and scuffed leather brogues. There is a complicated-looking camera slung around her neck, which she now removes and places carefully in a leather case. To their young eyes, she seems incredibly exotic.
‘I’m Sulochana Faujdaar,’ says the elder one. ‘She is Sarita Faujdaar. And this’ – she pats the gap-toothed toddler who has stopped wailing and is staring at Tinka with his fingers in his mouth – ‘is our nephew Jaideep Singh. He’s Sneha didi’s baby. We’re going to visit our Shaanu Bhaisaab.’
Tinka doesn’t know it just yet, but this last name is one she is destined to hear many many times tonight. It is always pronounced with capital letters clearly implied, as if one were speaking of royalty.
‘Shaanu Bhaisaab’s a very big pie-lutt in the Air Force,’ Sulochana continues, clambering to the upper berth and dangling her sandalled feet right in front of the nose of the elegant gentleman who wants to let fighting dogs fight. ‘Posted at Kalaiganga. He’s a fighter pie-lutt. They’re the best.’
‘How nice,’ Tinka responds politely.
‘Shaanu Bhaisaab has a two-room sweet with balcony and attached bathroom in the Afsars Mess!’ Sulo continues, swinging her legs. ‘And his own personal room bearer to do all his jobs – ironing, washing, shoe-polishing, all!’
‘Good for him!’ Tinka replies.
‘He’s my Mercury,’ Sulo confides.
‘Your what?’ Tinka is confused.
Sulo rolls her eyes in the face of such stupidity.
‘My Mercury! And Sneha behenji is my Venus and Jaideep Singh is my Earth and Sari is my Mars. And Surinder bhaisaab and Shelly bhaisaab are my two Jupiters. And Pitaji I think-so is my Pluto. I don’t like him very much, you know, but one should love their parents. Or maybe he could be my utmosphere or something!’
Comprehension dawns on Tinka. ‘Oh, I see! This is your own personal solar system! You’re the sun, and these are the people – sorry planets – who are closest to you! Why isn’t your mummy your Mercury?’
‘Because she’s dead,’ Sari tells her. ‘Who’s your Mercury?’
Good question, Tinka thinks wryly.
In the sixteen hours it takes to get from Delhi to Kalaiganga, she becomes well acquainted with the Faujdaar brood. Refreshed by their nap and by the puri-aloo Sneha doles out from a huge red mithai-ka-dabba, the children proceed to get extremely boisterous. The other passengers retreat, put off as much by their volume as by Tinka’s and Sneha’s sinister Muslim sympathies.
Tinka and the Faujdaars play games of Donkey and Cat’s Cradle. They giggle at the paunchy-man-with-the-holey-vest’s lusty snores and watch the nasal-voiced lady’s elaborate cleansing, toning and moisturizing routine with open curiosity. As the passing landscape darkens and the cosy blue night light comes on inside, the girls get Tinka to French braid their hair. Jaideep Singh develops a solid crush on this strange new female and spends the night with her on the lower berth, snoring lightly, his red cheeks puffing up every time he inhales.
Sneha can’t get over the fact that Tinka is travelling alone.
‘Aise kaise, how can your family let you go?’ she asks over their morning tea, as the rest of the bogey listens in while pretending not to. ‘Without any gents?’
Tinka’s expression grows airy. ‘Why would I bring my family along on a work trip?’
Sneha’s eyes widen. ‘You work?’ There is wistful awe in her voice. ‘I’d like to work – I could teach, maybe classes four and five, maybe even seven.’
Tinka suppresses a twinge of guilt. Actually, this is stretching the facts a little. She has had a chat with the New York head of WWS, the World Wire Service, and they’ve agreed to look at the pictures she sends – but she isn’t a full-time employee. They’ve issued her a press card, though.
‘You work too,’ she replies evasively. ‘You work very hard, actually. I’ve been watching.’
It is Sneha’s turn to laugh.
‘And you’re travelling without any men as well!’ Tinka continues.
‘Oh, pitaji hain na.’ Sneha gestures vaguely in the direction of the next bogey. Apparently pitaji is too mighty a personage to travel with women and children and has booked himself a separate first-class berth. Clearly, just his presence on the
train is enough to provide protection to his family.
‘Besides, Shaanu Bhaisaab will be there to pick us up,’ Sneha says, her eyes lighting up. ‘Oh, such fun it’ll be. I’ve got some very exciting news for him!’
She looks like she expects Tinka to ask what this exciting news is.
‘What is it?’ she asks dutifully.
But Sneha just gives a mysterious wriggle and shakes her head.
‘What do you do? Matlab, why are you going to Kalaiganga?’
‘Calcutta,’ Tinka corrects her. The Faujdaars seem to think everybody on board the train is headed not for the big metropolis but for the small town that houses the Air Force Base where Fabulous Shaanu Bhaisaab is stationed. ‘To photograph the refugee camps on the outskirts and do some volunteer work with the Missionaries of Charity.’
Sneha looks at her with stars in her eyes.
‘Missionaries of Charity! Mother Teresa!’ she breathes reverentially. ‘You must be such a good person!’
Tinka suppresses another pang of guilt. Because she isn’t such a good person. She’s staying at the luxurious Sarhind Club, for one, and she’s planning to get in a fair bit of shopping too.
‘No no,’ she says weakly.
‘What all photos have you taken that have been published?’ Sneha asks interestedly.
‘Well, I took this one picture of the Taj Mahal that came out in last week’s issue of WWS,’ Tinka replies. ‘With the big dome all bundled up in gunny bags and bamboo scaffolding. It’s been camouflaged because our government is worried it may be bombed.’ She grins at the kids. ‘It used to shine like a big white rasgulla at night, apparently.’
‘Kalaiganga may get bombed.’ Jaideep Singh sounds quite excited at the prospect.
‘Kalaiganga is not the Taj Mahal,’ replies his harassed mother.
‘But it is such a big Air Force ’tation!’ Jaideep Singh looks offended at the insinuation that his uncle’s base isn’t important enough to be bombed.
‘That’s true,’ Tinka says placatingly.
The train stops at Jamshedpur and disgorges most of the occupants of their bogey, including Nasal Voice and Holey Vest. As if lightened of this sour baggage, it starts to practically sing its way down to Kalaiganga.
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