“Oh, the comings and goings when he was single and living at home – his madcap film friends, even famous actors! They’d be there all night! Such a racket, so much coffee, so much food cooked for hours and gone in seconds. Once . . .”
Surely anyone could see the young woman wanted to be left alone! Sometimes one’s friends were so obtuse, yet however old the friendship there were things you could not say out loud for fear of offending. “Did you bring me that Dick Francis to read, Vidya?” Latika said. “Or did you forget?” Diversion tactics, her husband would have called it. Tact, that’s what she called it.
The girl used the interruption conspicuously to return the earphones to her ears and go back to her book. Vidya stopped speaking mid-sentence, snubbed. She busied herself with a sheaf of blank cards that she took from her bag and placed on a book, the one Latika had asked for. She always brought herself back to an even keel with work. She began to write on the cards. She noticed Latika did not ask for the Dick Francis again. She hadn’t wanted it in the first place, Vidya knew that, not right then.
Now, just outside the city, the train sped past slums that flowed down the banks of the railway lines. People had settled into their seats and taken out magazines, munchies, packs of cards. The boy who had been torpedoing through the aisles had been stationary for a while. Now he started his motorbike again and soon afterwards crashed into a woman coming the other way. “Whose child is this?” the woman shouted. “Why don’t you keep an eye on him?” The boy lay prone on the floor at the woman’s feet. Then after a whimper followed by a full-blown sob, he began to howl with rage. A man’s voice said, “You go get him.” A woman said, “Always me!”
“What a pest that child is, I’m sure it’ll cry all night,” Latika said. At once they chorused, as if at an old, shared joke: “Badly brought up!” Even Vidya had to laugh. She went back to writing in careful block letters, but now she had a smile on her face.
“What are you doing, Vidya?” Latika said, relieved the silence had been broken. “You’re always so busy.” Forty years in the bureaucracy and a preoccupied self-importance was now Vidya’s natural way of being. She did not lift her head until she had finished inscribing her set of cards. Each one said:
GOURI GANGULY, STAYING AT SWIRLING SEA HOTEL, JARMULI,
TILL 14 FEBRUARY 2006. PHONE 697565437.
PERMANENT ADDRESS: TARINI APARTMENTS,
13A/5 HAZRA ROAD, CALCUTTA.
“I want you to put a card into every pocket of your handbag, Gouri,” Vidya said. “If you drift off and can’t remember where you are, it’ll be easier for someone to bring you back to us.”
Her voice exuded wisdom and forethought. Everyone who knew Vidya admired this about her: she thought of everything, and for everyone. She had a square, broad face in which eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth, everything was in proportion and the right shape, yet the sum of it, inexplicably, did not go beyond symmetry. Her crisp cotton sari, her neat bun, the modesty of the plain gold studs in her ears all spoke of her habitual efficiency and practicality. She wore the waterproof sandals she had bought the day before specially for this trip to the seaside and in her bag was a bottle of hand sanitizer, a packet of rose-scented wet wipes, and phials containing basic homoeopathic medicines. After packing these she had sat for a full five minutes of quiet next to her luggage, to run through in her mind a list of the many things she and her friends might need that had not yet gone in.
Gouri, head against the train’s window, was humming a bhajan under her breath. Her eyes slid over hutments, pylons, shops, drains, restive huddles of people at level crossings, and an advertisement repeated on every wall the train flashed past. It was painted in such tall black letters that she could not look away from it: HARD IN A MINUTE, PLEASURE FOR HOURS.
She turned her gaze to dogs rooting around a garbage heap. Soggy hovels of plastic, brick and mud in ditches of stagnant water. Forests of T.V. antennae on their roofs. A glimpse of a rice field and then it was gone. Only at times, for rushing seconds, she spotted silhouettes of mud huts and shining surfaces of ponds and thought of the village where she had climbed trees with her cousins and chased them through riverside grass gone cloud-white with flowers in the autumn, grass so high they lost each other, called out, held hands when they found each other again.
“Why must she carry so many cards?” Latika’s voice broke into Gouri’s reverie. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?” She rummaged through her bag for a hairbrush, stealing a look at the girl. Did that hair ever need brushing? How did people manage with braids and beads and thread in their hair? Latika’s own was cut into a crop that tended to fly around, but it was always clean, and it framed her fine-boned face nicely and set off the tortoiseshell glasses she wore. It was coloured to a glossy burgundy. She had agonized for weeks before settling on the shade, yearning for the simplicity of times when hair was either black or white, no shades in between, but was secretly pleased with herself for throwing caution to the winds and going for something bold.
Vidya’s attention had not wavered. “Gouri needs many cards. She forgets where she’s put what. Remember how we missed the first ten minutes of that film because she couldn’t find the tickets in her bag?”
“That could have been any one of us,” Latika said, “I can never find anything in my bag.”
“Well, I just want to be prepared since we’re going to be in an unknown place, that’s all. Especially when she’s even forgotten to bring her phone.”
Did she sound too harsh? Vidya gave Gouri a nudge. It was meant to be affectionate, to show she meant no criticism, but her friend – she could not help thinking this – wobbled away from her. Every year that passed seemed to make Gouri more plump. Vidya wondered how she and Latika would manage her. Her limbs were spindly, but her torso was a mound, a pumpkin perched on matchsticks. It was a small miracle she didn’t topple. Her mind was on the edge as well. Over the last two years it was as if her brain had termites tunnelling through it. She repeated herself, she forgot where she put things, she forgot names. She would even forget that she had eaten and begin serving herself again. Gouri was usually meek, but now she needed handling. When she took offence she became combative: “No, you did not phone me yesterday,” and “Of course not, I haven’t yet had a fish roll.” Vidya often woke at three in the morning and stared into the darkness. Those creatures turning Gouri’s brain to dust might be biding their time for me. They must be there. Waiting.
“It’s not so bad,” Gouri said from the corner she had retreated into. “I just take a little longer with things, that’s all.” She wished they wouldn’t discuss her this way, not in front of that young thing in the opposite seat – what was her name? Had she told them her name?
Gouri turned towards the window and saw that rainwater had rippled the glass. The countryside was now a barely legible shadow. A sagging face – her own, she realised – looked back at her. Behind her she could see Vidya, eyebrows arched, mouth opening to gather breath for more admonishing words. The deepening shadows outside had turned the train’s windows into mirrors. Gouri noticed something and put her hands to her earlobes, wondering what she had done with the pearl studs she thought she had worn. She had taken them from the cupboard, put them on her dressing table last night, of that she was certain. Or had she? She leaned her forehead on the rain-flecked window, cupped her palms to shield her eyes from light, and peered into the early night. There was nothing to look at, but she kept her face there, staring into the void.
“Suppose you forget the name of the hotel. And you can’t remember your home phone number. What then? What’s the harm? These cards aren’t heavy!”
Gouri picked up her handbag. The zips whined open and shut one after the other. She put a card into each of the compartments of the bag. When she finished she looked up without a word and Vidya turned away saying, “I’m sure I packed some of those sweets, you know, those chutney ones everyone used to eat on trams.”
The train picked up speed and the awkwardness pa
ssed. They began to talk of neighbours and family, the drudgery of daily living. “She has to juggle a hundred things to come and see me,” Latika said of her daughter who lived in Florence and came home every other year with her husband and their children. “But if she knew how many grey hairs each visit gives me! You know I’m not the greatest housekeeper in the world. Of course, I love seeing my grandchildren – and my son-in-law – but the amount of mineral water I have to stock up! Sausages, pasta! And cheese! The children eat nothing else.”
In their own homes, surrounded by family or servants, they could never gossip this way, but here they didn’t have to worry about being overheard. The girl was half dozing against her window now, book abandoned, her head and shoulders occasionally swaying to the music being pumped into her brain.
“Yes, the mineral water – cartons and cartons – each time my nephew from New York visits,” Vidya said.
The ticket-checker arrived and his frown sobered them. They were all travelling on senior citizen concessions. The checker demanded proof that they were over sixty. Gouri and Latika obediently held out identity cards. Vidya rummaged through her handbag muttering, “I’m sure it was here, of course it was.” Eventually she emptied everything onto the seat in a cascade of tissues, medicines, pens, safety pins, and rubber bands, but she could not find the driving licence she had thought would do the job for her.
The ticket-checker waited with a look on his face that said he was trying to be patient, but it was hard. His white uniform was stretched tight over his belly. The draughts from the airconditioning vents were icy yet his nose shone with sweat and he had to push his glasses back up every now and then with his fore-finger. “There will be a fine if you can’t give me proof,” he said.
“You used to have an identity card from your office . . .”
“It’s years since I retired, Latika!”
Gouri blinked at the man through her glasses. A sweet muffin with raisins for eyes, that’s my Dida, her grandson always said. “Can’t you see we are white-haired ladies, old enough to be your mother? Even her hair – ” Gouri smiled at him and pointed at Latika. “Even her hair’s not really that colour.”
The ticket-checker’s eyes wandered to Latika’s head for a moment, then he turned to a careful study of the tip of his pen. Latika was appalled. She stuffed her hairbrush into her bag, seething. She had felt dubious about this outing from the start, she should have trusted her instincts and stayed at home. If they hadn’t travelled together before, the three of them, there must be good reason: they would probably feel fed up in half a day together. Across the aisle she saw a couple sitting pressed against each other, staring at something only they could see. If only. In an earlier time, when her husband was alive, there was always someone to go on holidays with. So what if he had never sat like that with her, not even as a young man.
The train clacked over a bridge; a steward walked past thumping stacks of sheets and blankets onto empty berths. Vidya was hunting in yet another bag now, but something in the way Gouri had spoken had melted the man and he said, “Alright then.” The clipboard arm relaxed, the tapping ceased. He wagged a finger at them as if they were errant schoolgirls. “This time I’ll let you off. Don’t try it on your way back. You’ll have to pay double.”
He turned to the girl next, and stood for a moment observing her. Nomi’s shoulders and neck were twitching to her music. Her eyes were shut.
“Madam?” the ticket-checker said, making the word sound like an insult. He rapped the formica counter that jutted out from the wall between the facing berths. “Ticket!”
She sprang up at the noise and pulled out her earphones. Drowsy and confused, she unzipped first one trouser pocket, then the other, then a third. At length she prised out a sweat-damped, dog-eared piece of paper and sat back with a sigh of relief. The checker held it between his fingertips, as if it were too grubby to touch. “Nomita Frederiksen, Female, age twenty-five.” He tallied the name on the ticket with the one in his chart, peering over his clipboard to look at her. Then, to show that he was merely doing his job, he turned back to her ticket and checked the details on it a second time.
The girl kept her eyes on the landscape outside the window which flared now and then with flashes of light from the villages and stations they sped through. When the checker at last gave her ticket back, she put it into her rucksack, pushed her earphones in again and once more shut her eyes. Bare, toe-ringed feet on the berth, chin resting on knees that she hugged close to herself, she occupied no more space than a curled-up dog might, and appeared to be just as self-contained.
*
An hour, perhaps two, had gone by when they stopped at a station. Lights glowed outside, white neon dimmed to a sickly yellow by the train’s tinted windows. People surged towards their coach, suitcases and bags in hand. Just outside their window was a tea stall. A tattered woman hung around near it, hoping for food. She wore a grimy sari petticoat and a too-big man’s shirt buttoned wrong. Her shapeless rags and matted hair somehow intensified the raw beauty of her face. Latika wanted immediately to get out of the train and rescue her before she came to harm.
The woman was sidling up to the people on the platform, tugging a shirt in passing or nudging an arm, as though she thought that their revulsion at her touch would make them cough up a rupee or two. Everyone sidestepped her as she edged closer. When she went up to a stocky, thuggish-looking man and put a hand out towards him, wheedling him with a smile, Latika shut her eyes. She didn’t want to look. She would never know anything more about this ragged woman in the murky haze of this platform, what became of her on it. Their train was just a parcel of people rushing through a landscape they had no connection to. Already too many snatches of other people’s lives were stored inside her, the built-up sediments from which bits and pieces floated up at times, into her dreams.
When she opened her eyes she had lost sight of the woman and the girl in their compartment was standing up. She hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder.
“Where are you going?” Vidya asked her.
“Just to look around? Everyone’s getting off anyway.” The girl gestured at the aisle, the people walking up and down, leaving the train, some coming back with bottles of fizzy drinks.
“But there’s nothing to look at. How long will we stop here? Already so much of the stopping time is over.” Vidya peered out. “I can’t tell which station it is. Do you think it’s Kathalbari? Then it’s not a long halt.”
The girl had disappeared into the aisle before Vidya was finished. They saw her reappear a minute or two later, on the platform. Separated by window glass and distance, she looked even more a foreigner. Gouri, who had just finished her evening prayers, put away her beads and opened her eyes. “What a thing to do,” she said. “Getting off a train! Is she buying food? I’d rather starve than take these risks.”
Latika laughed at the improbability of chubby, rosy-cheeked Gouri either starving or taking risks. “That would be the day! I’m sure you’re thinking of dinner already.”
The girl went towards the stall, jostled by crowds. Everyone was pushing at each other to get on the train or buy food at the stall before the train left. She was surrounded by men ogling her braided hair and ringed ears and the curves outlined in turquoise by her T-shirt. Inside the train, the women were shielded from all the noise and shouting on the platform, but they could see her lips move. She looked smaller and slighter among the men, and had to stand on tiptoe to be seen by the vendor. She waved a fifty rupee note over her head. The man reached out, took her money, gave her a long look, plucked a packet of bread rolls from his rack and handed it to her. Then a plastic cup of tea.
“Why doesn’t she come back?” Vidya said. “She’s got what she wanted, hasn’t she? I should never have let her go. A foreign child!”
“She was hardly asking your permission,” Latika said. “It feels long, but it’s only been . . .” She checked her watch. “Two minutes.”
They saw the girl walk past
them on the platform with her tea and bread. When she veered left, to where the ragged woman had reappeared, they realised she must have bought the food for her. The girl went up to the woman and held out the packet. The woman did not notice her, so the girl tapped her elbow.
Latika noticed the famished gaze on them of two men idling on the platform. She drew a sharp breath, shook her head to dismiss her sudden sense of foreboding, told herself not to be melodramatic – then saw one of the men sidle closer to the girl. He was leering and saying something to her. She paid him no attention. As if by mistake, still grinning, he brushed an arm against her breasts. The girl stepped backward and in a single move that appeared to take no more than a second, she thrust the bread at the woman and flung the hot tea in the man’s face. She kicked his shin and his crotch as his hands flew to his face. The man stumbled, fell to the platform.
All of a sudden, as if watching a silent film, the women in the train saw the food-stall outside starting to slide backwards. The lamp-post by the stall moved two feet back, then three. They saw the girl turning around to see her train moving out of the platform, the girl running towards the train, very fast despite her backpack, running as if her life depended on it, the second of the two men running after her. The crowds on the platform obliterated them for a moment, then they reappeared. They saw them falling further and further behind and Gouri let out an anguished cry. “What is she going to do, what is she going to do?”
“Pull the chain! We should pull the chain!” This was Latika, who had jumped out of her seat. They looked above their heads to where the emergency brake pull should have been and saw that it was hanging loose from the wall, its spring broken. “TO STOP TRAIN PULL CHAIN,” a sign in red said below the broken chain. “Penalty For Use Without Reasonable and Sufficient Cause. Fine Up to . . .” The rest was obscured by graffiti.
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