He poured the water into his mouth. It splashed over his neck and chest, and he let it fall on his face, and when he heard the laugh he choked. When he stopped coughing he turned and saw the figure by the window. At first all he could see was hands held together, the furled drapery of a grey sari from knee to ground. Then in a moment or two he could see her. She was thin, very young. She wore no ornaments, not a bangle, no earrings. The eyes were large, there was a thick plait falling over a shoulder, and now she looked down and put a hand over her mouth. Shiv put the ladle back in the matka, and it dropped with a rattle into the water. He backed to the door, edged through it, blushing, and then stood on the platform wiping his face.
“Who is that in there?” he asked Frankie Furtado, whose face lit up at the question. Frankie was really a movie star trapped by his railway father and railway grandfathers and various railway uncles in Leharia, which he always called Zinderneuf. He had explained with shining eyes the sentimental possibilities of desert forts, marauding Bedouin, stolen jewels, and violent death. Now he was bright eyed about chance meetings while whistles echoed.
“Second class passenger,” Frankie said. “But I put her in first class because she is very beautiful.”
“Yes,” Shiv said. Actually she was rather plain, but Frankie was dedicated to romance.
Frankie ran his finger down a list on a board. “Mrs. Shanti Chauhan,” he said.
“Fine,” Shiv said, unaccountably irritated. He walked down the length of the platform, trying to find again his imperturbable velocity of a moment ago. At the end of the platform he waited, sitting on a green bench. He fanned himself with a folded Times of India and tried not to think. But as always the images skipped and skittered at the back of his head. He spread the newspaper across his knee but then was drowned by the vast turbulence of the world, its fires and refugees and ruined cities. A letter-writer called “Old Soldier” wrote, “Whether these men of the so-called Indian National Army were prompted by a version of patriotism, or gave in to fear of unspeakable persecutions by the Japanese, is scarcely to the point; that they took up arms against their former comrades is certain. They betrayed their vows to their units and their army and their king, and a soldier who is false to his namak can expect only two things: court-martial and the ultimate penalty.” Shiv saw them falling, their bodies riddled and holed. He shuddered. So he shut his eyes and with a slow twist of fear in his stomach gave himself up to the uncertain currents of memory. Then Shiv’s nostrils were full of Hari’s smell, the slightly pungent aroma of life itself, cotton and perspiration and flesh, springing muscle, the same hair oil he used himself but sweeter on Hari. Now Shiv opened his eyes and his face was covered with sweat. There was a whistle, softened by distance.
He stood up and waited. He felt very small now, and under the huge sky he waited for the two events to come together, the busily grinding three-thirty from Lucknow and himself. He could see them moving closer to each other, the loco on its tracks, and his life, brought to each other in a series of spirals. He took a step forward and now it was a matter of another one to the edge. He could see the train, a black circle, huffing smoke and getting bigger. He began to think of calculations, of the time it would take to put one foot in front of another, of velocity and braking distance. He noted the red fragments from a broken khullar next to the tracks and determined that he would jump when the shadow of the train fell on them. That was close enough. The train came faster than he had thought it would, and now the sound enveloped him. He felt his legs twitch. He watched the red clay and then at the last moment turned his head to look down the platform. He saw in the swirl of colours a grey figure, motionless. He jerked his head back, felt the huge weight of the engine, its heat, and began his step forward, seeing the black curve of the metal above him, slashed in half by the slanting sun, the rivets through the iron, and then he staggered back, pulled himself back, an arm over his head.
Shiv found himself sitting on the ground, knees splayed outward. The bone at the base of his spine throbbed. He picked himself up and hurried past the first class compartments as the train screeched mournfully. She was stooping to pick up a small brown attaché, and he was sure she saw him coming. But she turned her face away, an expression of anger on her face, and walked resolutely towards the door of a carriage, where Frankie Furtado stood with his clipboard. She went past his smile with her eyes downcast, into the carriage, and afterwards sat in a compartment with half-lowered shades. Shiv stood outside, wondering at himself. He could see her arm. Twelve minutes passed, and then Frankie waved a green flag, leaning suavely to one side, and quite suddenly the train was gone. Leaving only a black wisp fading, and Shiv with his questions.
*
Frankie had an alphabetical list of names: “Madhosh Kumar, Magan Kumar, Nand Kumar, Narendra Kumar …” He read from these every evening when Shiv visited him in his room behind the National Provision Store, in his desert lair, his lonely eyrie festooned with pictures of Ronald Colman. Frankie was the handsomest man Shiv had ever seen, with his gently wavy hair and his thin moustache and fair skin, and they were trying to find a screen name that would encompass and radiate all the mysterious glamour of his profile. Usually Shiv enjoyed the distraction of holding the name up to imaginary bright lights, of writing it into the magazines which Frankie collected and hoarded with incandescent seriousness. “Nitin Kumar Signs with MovieTone,” or “Om Kumar Dazzles in Mega-buster” were all tried, tested and classified and estimated and measured, and found wanting in the analysis. This discussion took place always on the little chabutra in front of Frankie’s room, with the spokes of Frankie’s bicycle glinting in the moonlight. There were a few bedraggled bushes at the bottom of a brick wall, and a chameli tree overhanging the wall from Lala Manohar Lal’s garden. The Lala’s two daughters were of course in love with Frankie, but tonight even the sight of them hovering on the rooftop across the way like two bottom-heavy nightingales took nothing from Shiv’s enormous yearning.
He was filled with a longing so bitter that he wanted all over again to die. He felt as if he was gone from himself. This was not the numb descent towards an inevitable stillness, no, not that at all. Now, in the darkness, Shiv felt a quickening in the night, a throb like a pulse that moved far away, and he was acutely aware of the smallness of the chabutra and how tiny Frankie’s room was, with its one sagging charpai and the chipped white plaster on the walls and the crudely shaped green windows that could never completely close. Even the moonlight didn’t hide the dirt, the dishevelled ugliness and cowpatties of a small mofussil town one step away from a village.
“Have you seen her before?” Shiv said. His voice was loud. He was angry, and he didn’t know quite why.
“Yes,” Frankie said. He stood up straight, alive with pleasure. “Twice before. She comes through every two or three months, I think. Looking so beautiful and so alone.”
“Going where?”
“I don’t know. She catches a tonga outside the station. I think to the cantonment. Her attaché has stencilling on it.”
Four miles from the station there was a brigade headquarters and, further away, an aerodrome.
“She’s married,” Shiv said. “Probably going to visit her army husband.”
“Air force,” Frankie said. “And why would she be visiting instead of staying in a lovely air force bungalow? And when she showed me her ticket I saw that she had others. Connections to all over the country, man. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Shiv snapped back. “I don’t know. And why would it matter to you and me anyway? She’s a married woman.”
Frankie raised an eyebrow. He put a hand on his hip and his shoulder rose and fell in a long exaggerated shrug. Shiv saw that it was a gesture too large for life, impossible in its elegance, but in the silver light it was entirely conceivable and exactly right, as if the world had suddenly changed, moved and become just a little larger, just enough to contain Frankie Furtado. Frankie, who swept his hair back now and turned majestically away, r
idiculous and beautiful. Shiv shut his eyes, pressed on them until he felt pain.
Frankie sang: “Kahan gaya ranchor? Duniya ke rahane valon bolo, chcheen ke dil mera, kahan gaya ranchor?” His voice was good, light and yet full of intensity, and ample and rounded with its delight in its own skill. Shiv fled from it.
*
A cut on the palm of a right hand. Small, not too large, but ferocious in the straightness of its edges, in the geometry of its depth. Another on the left forearm, from the same straight edge. This is what Shiv remembered. As he walked home along a dusty lane he remembered the dark pearls of blood frozen on the pale skin. In the morgue he had found the cuts unbearable to look at, this damage, these rents in the surface and the lewd exposure of what lay underneath. Now he clung to the still shape as the only reality. It was the world stripped of all its fictions, this dead body on a grey stone slab, the smell. In only a minute or two, in a lane off Chandni Chowk, a whole life came to merely this, all of Hari’s idealisms, his Congress membership and his Nehru-worship, his belief in change and the careful asceticism of his three khadi kurtas and his blushing appetite for mangoes, all of it gone to an odour of rot. All of it ready for the fire. Shiv held out an arm in the darkness and took careful steps with his fingertips on a wall. In the memory of the dead body of his brother there was a certain safety. There was a certain logic there, a brilliant lesson about the nature of the world. This Shiv knew. In Frankie’s falsities, in his fantasies about the past and the future, there was certain disaster. To believe Frankie, to believe in him, that he could exist in Leharia, Shiv knew, was to risk an unfolding in his own chest, an expansion of emotion that would let in, once again, a certain hell of hope and remorse. He had left this behind.
“Did you have a good evening?” Shiv’s brother-in-law, Rajan, liked to sit in an armchair in the courtyard of their house after dinner. Shiv could see the curve of his bald head, and the rounded shapes of his shoulders.
“Yes,” Shiv said, and shut the door to his room behind him. He knew Anuradha akka would hurry out of her bedroom in a moment, and want to give him food. He was unspeakably rude, and they were used to this. They had patience. But Shiv lay on his bed and wrapped death around himself. He could hear a bird calling outside, solitary and plaintive. Shiv knew that finally the bird would stop crying out, his sister and her husband would stop whispering to each other and sleep, the house would settle into a late silence, a quietness that would echo the slow creaking of trees into his head. He would feel his self, his soul turn and turn inwards, again and again, until it was as thin-drawn as a wire, shiny and brittle. It was not a good feeling but he knew it well, and it was better than everything else. He waited.
*
He found that he was waiting for her. As he cycled around town, from one tuition to another, he anticipated each turn in the rutted lanes, even though on the other side of each corner there was always the same pool of stagnant water, the same goat leaving a trail of perfect black pellets, the same two familiar dehati citizens of Leharia with their flapping pajamias and “Ram-Ram, Shiv Bhaiyya.” At the station, Shiv sat on platform number one and watched the trains. Frankie smiled fondly and hummed Mere piya gaye Rangoon under his breath every time he strolled by. Rajan believed that Shiv had at last and only naturally succumbed to the charm of steam, that he had become a lover of the black beauties that raced across the horizon, an aficionado of their hulking grace and their sonorous power. He came and sat beside Shiv often, in the quiet moments of the day. “Beyer Garrat loco, latest model, 1939. Used only on the express. Look at that! The total heating area, including the superheater, is more than four thousand square feet.”
Shiv listened to the tales of the trains, and imagined the tracks arrowing across the enormous plains to the north, and to the south across the rocky plateau, and hairpin turns over vertiginous ridges, and through black deserts. He thought of her sitting by a half-closed window, her hands in her lap, and wondered what she was doing. Who was she? Where was she going? Why did she return? As the questions came he understood that everything had changed. Now, at night, instead of long wakefulness and empty, tiring slumber for an hour before dawn, he found a twisting, sweaty, dream-ridden sleep. He saw long visions of childhood, fantastic and drenched with blood, and also adventures in forests, and unspeakable seraglios in which apsaras with long black hair twisted against each other. He was hungry all the time, and ate his sister’s uttapam with a relish that made her beam and write gladdened letters to his parents. And one evening in August he actually asked Frankie Furtado to sing Kahan gaya ranchor. Frankie tilted himself against the wall next to a window, a slim streak of white against the black, black clouds, turned his face to the light, and sang as the rain billowed over the green fields.
Shiv believed that he would know, somehow, when she came back, that he would sense her presence in the twisting lanes. Even as he laughed at the Frankie influence on his thoughts he believed this. But when she came he missed her entirely. He was unfastening the cycle-clips from his calves outside the station when Frankie came running out and found him.
“Where were you? She’s here,” Frankie said, clutching hard at Shiv’s shoulder. “She’s here.”
“Where?” There was a solid sheet of water falling from the crenellated roof of the station, spattering loudly against the flowerpots below.
“On the 24 up. She had to wait quite a while for a tonga, all this rain, I suppose. Then finally she left ten, fifteen minutes ago.”
Shiv threw his leg over his cycle and skidded out into the rain. His plastic cap tumbled away and splashed into the mud but Shiv rode on, spraying an arc over the road. He rode hard, leaning against the pedals, feeling the water pull at the wheels in the deep parts. The rain hit him violently in the face, coming straight and parallel to the road, and he laughed. His chest was drenched and cool, but under his raincoat he was sweating. He cycled through the main bazaar, where the little shops looked cozy under the darkness of the rain. Then he struggled against the long slope where the road opened out into the orderly rows of the Civil Lines and the cantonment, and the wind pushed against him, but then he saw the shape of the tonga ahead, sailing on the water. He pedalled madly, and then he came up on it and slowed. He could hear the muffled clip-clop, the swish of the wheels. There were small curtain-like pieces of cloth drawn around the back of the tonga, but he could see her feet on the backboard. Shiv went along now, not near but not too far. He listened to the rain, and the sound of his own breathing, in and out. He had no idea what to do next.
Shiv stopped at a big double gate. There was a wide curving drive leading up to the square white building Shiv knew was the military hospital. He could see, as he blinked his eyes against the sting of the drops, the tonga stopped next to a balustraded entranceway, the dripping horse, her attaché case, and her, as she hurried, head bent, through the doors. Shiv waited, cold now, shivering. Finally, when it was dark and he could only see the rows of lighted windows, glowing and unreadable, he turned and wheeled his cycle home, coughing.
He woke up the next morning with a fever. His sister saw it in his reddened eyes and careful walk, but he burst past her protestations and rode to the station. It was very quiet now, no rain, and the silence was wet and fresh and everywhere green, and he felt himself lost under the enormity of the smooth grey sky. Frankie was waiting for him at the entrance to the station.
“She’s in the waiting room,” Frankie said.
Shiv nodded impatiently. He walked down the length of the platform, past the fire buckets filled with sand and the two coolies wrapped in checked red sheets and a cloud of bidi smoke. Outside the waiting room, he stood for a moment, running hooked fingers through his tangled hair. His eyes burnt drily. He pushed the doors ajar and went in, keeping his gaze on the floor. He found the matka, and as he dipped into the water with the ladle he found that he was really thirsty. He poured into a glass, drank, and turned.
“Hello,” he said.
She said nothing, and looked
solemnly at him. He realized suddenly what it must take from her, how much courage and strength to travel the length and breadth of the country alone, in these times.
“My name is Shiv Subramaniam,” he said. She looked down, and he was then ashamed of persecuting her as many others must have done on her travels, and he edged away toward the door. But Frankie was backing in, carrying a tray with a teapot and cups.
“Mrs. Chauhan,” Frankie said, swooping down on the small table in front of her. “Tea for you.” He laid out the cups with smart little movements. “There. Mr. Subramaniam, who is our esteemed Station Master Saab’s brother-in-law, will serve.” He looked at Shiv. “Please.” Then he bowed to Mrs. Chauhan, and was gone.
For a moment Shiv stood absolutely still. He felt dizzy. Then he stepped up to the table, bent over, and picked up the teapot. He was angling awkwardly at the waist and the teapot felt very heavy, but he poured one cup, and then the other. He put the pot down.
“Sugar?” he said.
“No,” she said. Her voice was oddly husky. She took the cup and the saucer and held it in her lap. Shiv stood stupidly still, and then realized she was waiting for him. Quickly he picked up his cup and saucer, and tried to keep it steady in his trembling hand. He took a sip, and it was very hot and he usually took sugar, lots of it, but he drank rapidly and watched her. Finally she raised her cup and drank.
“You’ve come here before,” he said.
“I go to the hospital at the base,” she said.