Meaning, You’re not clever at all. But Stella, with the pretty girl’s deafness to irony, took it as a compliment.
“Maybe we can hook up somewhere,” Stella said.
“You’re on your own now, girlfriend,” Alice said.
She had to summon all her strength to say it, because she knew that Stella was taken care of. As soon as she spoke, she was breathless.
Seeing that the foreign women had become more conversational, with lowered voices, the Indian men lost interest and wandered away, down the platform where people were pushing to enter the train. Suitcases were being hoisted through the windows of the coaches, families were hurrying to board, red-shirted porters carried boxes in wheelbarrows.
Now a man approached with a clipboard and sized them up. He said, “Boarding time.”
Alice showed her ticket and said, “She’s not coming. She found another friend.”
Stella began again to cry. She hugged Alice and said, “I love you, Allie. I have to do this. I can’t explain.”
“This is a bad movie,” Alice said, and broke away.
After she boarded and found her seat, she saw Stella outside, gaping, looking cow-like. Stella leaned and waved and remained watching until the train pulled away. She was still tearful, but she was meeting Zack and staying at Zack’s fancy hotel, and it was Alice who was on her own.
But no sooner had the train pulled out of the station and was rumbling past the tenements and traffic of the Mumbai outskirts than an unexpected feeling came over Alice, glowing on her whole body: she was alone and liked it. Free of Stella, she felt stronger and more decisive. She could do whatever she wanted without consulting her fickle friend. Just fifteen minutes into the twenty-four-hour trip, she realized that Stella had been a much bigger burden than she’d imagined. Now Stella was at risk and it was she who was happy in the swaying train, like being in the body of a bulgy creature that protected her while plodding forward in the heat.
With the whole day ahead of her, she sat by the window and watched India slip by in a stream of simple images—women threshing grain on mats, men plowing with placid oxen, children jumping into muddy streams, clusters of houses baking in the sun, here and there a level crossing where a blue bus or a man on a bike was stopped by a passing train. These human sights became rarer, for after Poona there were only fields or stunted trees or great dusty plains to the horizon, an India Alice had not seen or read about before, and because she was not sharing it with Stella it was all hers, a secret disclosed to her, a discovery too that India was also a land of empty corners.
And so all that hot day in the hinterland of Maharashtra Alice marveled at this revelation of big, yawning India. It was the antithesis of crowded, damp, and noisy Mumbai, the words “critical mass” as a visible image. She liked what she saw now for being unfinished and unpeopled. Stella knew nothing about it—might never know, for Zack harped on about being a city person, talked importantly about setting up a movie, and you could do that only in a big, stinking city.
“You can have him,” Alice said clearly, still at the hot window.
She was startled when a voice said, “Pardon?”
The seat where an elderly Indian woman had been sleeping wrapped in a thin sheet just a moment ago—or so it seemed—was now occupied by a young Indian man. He was fat-faced and bulky, with big brown eyes, a lovely smile, and wore a clean, neatly pressed shirt. He was sitting cross-legged, barefoot, where the old woman had been, and both his posture and his face conveyed the assurance that he was harmless, even if a bit innocent and fearful. He sat with his chubby fingers locked together in a patient posture of restraint.
“I was just thinking out loud,” Alice said.
“Talking out loud,” the young man said.
“Not exactly,” Alice said. “The thought was in my head but it somehow got turned into some words.”
“Something worse?”
“No. Some words. The thought became a statement.”
“Thought in head becoming utterance.”
Now “utterance” was one of those words, like “miscreants,” “audacious,” “thrice,” “ample,” and “jocundity,” that some Indians used in casual conversation and Indian writers used in sentences, in the same way that out the window the Indian farmers were using antique sharp-nosed hand plows pulled by yoked oxen and women carried water jars on their heads. India was a country of usable antiques.
Alice kept a list of these Indian English words in her notebook. Comparative linguistics was a subject she had thought of pursuing in grad school—what else could an English major do?—but first she wanted to take this year off after graduation, the trip with Stella—who had slipped into thin air, just bailed, selfish bitch. But Alice smiled to think that here she was, enjoying herself in this adventure to Bangalore, while Stella and Zack were sneering at Mumbai and discovering how shallow each other was. It gives me no pleasure to think that you’re unhappy, Alice thought, and smiled, because it did.
“You are ruminative,” the young man said.
“Ruminative,” Alice said, thinking, Write that down. “That’s me.”
“Cudgeling your mind.”
“The expression is ‘cudgeling your brains,’ only I’m not.”
“You are indeed thinking out loud.”
“You learn fast,” Alice said. “Where are you going?”
“Bangalore,” he said.
He was going the whole way in this sleeping compartment?
“Job interview,” he said. “Eye Tee. Bee Pee Oh.”
“A call center?”
“Can be call center or tech-support center. Voice based or computer driven. Wish me luck.”
Alice was touched by the fat young man’s saying that. She said, “I really do wish you luck. I hope you get the job. Maybe I’ll call the tech support line someday and you can help me fix my computer.”
“It would be my pleasure. You are smiling.”
“Because we’re in this train. India out there, rolling along. It’s so Merchant-Ivory.”
When Alice glanced out the window, she saw that dusk had fallen and they were pulling into a station. It was Gurgaon. Many people got on, and just as the train started again, a woman entered the compartment with two suitcases. She did not offer a greeting but instead concentrated on chaining her luggage to a stanchion by the door. Then, muttering, she claimed the lower berth and sent the young man to the upper berth and out of sight. It was as though a chaperone had intervened, for he was at once both obedient and less familiar. While he appeared to read—Alice heard the rattling of magazine pages—the woman made her bed and lay down to sleep. Alice was reassured by the woman, whom she saw as not an intrusion at all but a typically bossy Indian woman who would keep order.
A man came by with a tray of food—dhal, rice, two puris, a pot of yogurt, the sort of meal that Stella had begun to call “the slimy special,” but Alice found delicious. And after she ate it and the tray was collected, she lay down and read a Sai Baba pamphlet, “The Meaning of Love,” in preparation for the ashram, but had hardly turned a page when she fell asleep, rocked by the train.
In the morning a coffee seller came by. She bought a paper cup of coffee, and some bananas from a woman with bunches of them in a basket, and she sat in the sunshine, feeling on this lovely morning that a new phase of her life was beginning.
“Can you please inform me, what is your good name, madam?”
She looked up and saw the tubby young man smiling at her, sitting in a lotus posture. She had forgotten him.
“Sure thing. Alice—Alice Durand.”
He was now leaning over, his arm extended. “My card. May I obtain yours?”
“I don’t actually have a business card,” Alice said. “But I’m sure I’ll see you around. We’re both getting off at Bangalore.”