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.
They turned to look out again but the train had escaped the neon-lit confines of the platform and was already moving in inky countryside. Striped squares of light from the train’s barred window glided alongside as it speeded ahead. It was too late to do anything. They sat back, hollowed out with anxiety. They stared at the empty window seat. It had all happened too quickly. Where was the girl? Had she managed to climb onto a different coach of their train, or had she been left behind at that nameless station? What if that man had caught up with her? What if she had fallen? Onto the tracks?
Latika said, “She can’t have fallen trying to get on. The train would’ve been stopped.”
Vidya peered under their seats. “Is that backpack all the luggage she had? There’s nothing else here. Why did she carry it out?”
“Maybe she thought it would be stolen if she left it,” Latika said. “That’s what they’re told when they come here.”
The train, as if lighter from shedding the girl, swayed and began to move faster. It clattered over bridges, tore through village stations and roared past trains hurtling the other way into their own oblivion. Within the coach a low hum of conversation, boxes snapping open and shut. The boy on the imaginary motorbike had begun booming up and down the corridor again.
The three of them sat motionless, their holiday high spirits snuffed out by the absence of a girl they knew not at all. When the dinner trolleys came around they had to tell the attendant to take away the fourth meal. The man asked no questions. Expressionless, he shoved the unwanted steel tray of rice and dal and vegetables into his trolley and moved ahead. He came back to them a while later to collect the empty trays and saw they still hadn’t opened the foil covering their food.
Later, Latika spread out her blankets and sheets and then hoisted herself to the upper berth. Vidya was already in her bunk, an inert shape on her side, eyes shut. Latika lay in the blue glow of the train’s night light, listening to the rumble of a snoring man alternate with the train’s rattling and clanking. The noise kept her awake all night — or so she thought until she opened her eyes and it was morning, the train had stopped, the sunlight was radiant, and her skin could feel the nearness of the sea. They got off at Jarmuli’s station, saying nothing to one another, each of them searching the busy platform for a glimpse of coloured braids and turquoise.
There is a dream I often have. I am a baby in it, held aloft by a man. He is on his back on a bed, his legs are bent at the knee, he is holding me high above him, my face is above his face, his hands are under my arms, and he is rocking on his back until he almost somersaults. He takes me each time to the brink. Then is still for a second. After that he rocks backward again. I want to beg him to stop, but my voice has died and I can’t say a word. I wake up soaked in sweat.
I knew that the place where I had grown up was near Jarmuli. Although I had left the place as a child, I thought it would all come back. I got off at the station in Jarmuli and on my way to the hotel I devoured the landscape and buildings as if they would fill me with memories. Nothing happened. I waited for a moment of recognition. It never came. When I reached my hotel room I did not pause to unpack, I reread my bunches of clippings to persuade myself I had it right. By afternoon I was tired out. I laid the clippings aside and closed my eyes. It was only after I woke from my old dream of the man rocking me as a baby, with the familiar terror suffocating me, that I felt certain I was in the place the boat had brought me to when I was six or seven.
After we had got off the boat, we travelled a long distance in another van. The road ran by the sea sometimes and sometimes we drove through villages and past ruins. My first milk tooth fell out in that van. I tried to find it under the seat, but when I knelt to look, it was lost in a forest of legs and fallen scraps of paper and bits of food.
In the end the van went through high gates made of metal sheets with a line of iron spikes above. The gates closed behind us. The van stopped and we got out. The woman with us led us further in. We walked down earthen pathways, red and pretty, through gardens in which there were small houses. We were taken to a square building. One by one we were put under a tap and bathed. I saw the other girls in their underclothes, wet like birds in rain. They were thin and knock-kneed. They looked like me. Newly washed, in cotton tunics, hand in hand, the twelve of us were shown into a cottage. The cottage was screened by creepers and trees. Inside, in the room where we waited, the sunlight in the windows had gone pale green and yellow.