But he had become an utter stranger in just seconds. He turned his back on her and pushed the curtain aside and was gone. She did not even hear the sound of his footsteps, a noiseless departure, another vanishing. From being a big persuasive presence he had become small and finally left without a sound, swallowed up.
That was what was most foreign to her now, the way people came and went, as they did in dreams. Indian vanishings, of which the elephant blocking the road had been an example. If the elephant hadn’t been there, she’d have gotten away. Always it seemed insulting and disorienting, with dream-like irrationality—people showing up when she least expected them, people dropping from view.
Alice felt cheated again. It was worse than an interruption. It was first an intrusion, and to make it worse, the man had turned his back on her and seemed to flee—another abandonment.
She slumped and put her head in her hands, heavy, bereft, sorrowful in the empty room. She had never felt farther from home, and the India she had known slipped away and became not just unfamiliar—ruins and shadows—but hostile.
When she heard a sound, the rings on the curtain rod scraping again, she lifted her head and was startled to see a woman, a nurse, the one she’d spoken to earlier, and behind this woman a man in a khaki uniform. They stood just outside the privacy curtain, holding it open, peering in, the man holding a briefcase.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked.
“No,” Alice said.
“The inspector wishes to speak with you.”
“It won’t take long,” the man said.
Alice saw on the man’s face a look of pain. He seemed awkward, even sheepish, unwilling to step beyond the curtain.
“All you’ve got are questions,” Alice said. “How about some answers?”
“I will be as quick as I can,” the man said. He entered the room and took a seat at the table while the nurse stood to one side. He opened his briefcase and slipped out a pad and pen. He said, “We have requested a fast-track hearing. It can be held in Bangalore, in the first instance, if you approve.” He clicked the pen and stuck out his elbow, as left-handers often did. “How well did you know the accused?”
“I’ve just told you,” Alice said.
“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”
“I told your man.”
“What man do you mean?”
“The other policeman. The young one. That just left here.” The inspector turned accusingly to the nurse and said something fierce—it might even have been English, it certainly was a reprimand, but it remained incoherent to Alice. Yet she could tell that something had gone wrong, that there was tension between the policeman and the nurse in which her own misfortune, her pain, did not figure.
“I don’t get it,” Alice said.
“We have no other man. I am assigned to your case.”
“So who was I talking to just a little while ago?”
The policeman had been facing away from her all this time, staring at the serious face of the nurse. He was still looking at the nurse, and now she looked appalled.
He said, “Let’s pray it wasn’t one of these journalists.”
The story appeared the next day in the Hindustan Times. The policeman who accompanied her to the station handed the paper to her, folded, but why would he give it to her if there was nothing in it? Alice saw the story on the third page and began to read it. When she came across “I met him in February on the train in my compartment,” she averted her eyes and turned the paper over on the seat so that she would not have to look at the headline: “Alleged American Rape Victim Knew Her Assailant.”
She sat in the Ladies Only coach with three other women and two children. One of the children was a chubby boisterous boy who tugged at his mother’s sari and then climbed onto a seat and jumped noisily to the floor, clamoring for attention. Alice disliked the fat boy and disliked the woman for her placidity. The big pale mothers indulged the spoiled child, taking no notice of the small girl, who sat wincing at the boy’s disruption.
Only a few days before, Alice would have struck up a conversation with the women; she had believed such women to be strong, holding India together. She now saw them as complacent and hypocritical, bullies and nags to everyone except their sons, allowing them to rule. My mother calls me Bapu. It means Dad.
These women had betrayed her. That selfish pushy boy would grow up to be a tormentor.
“Katapadi,” one woman said, seeing a station platform appear at the window.
Skinny sharp-voiced food sellers hovered at the open windows, calling to the women, holding teapots and trays of nuts and cups of ice cream.
The fat boy wailed for an ice cream and got one. He had a devilish face, and though he could not have been older than six or seven he seemed to Alice like a wolf child, with a shadow of hair on his cheeks, a low-growing hairline on his forehead, and a slight mustache. His fingernails were painted pink—Alice could see that they were chipped. His legs were hairy too. He sat down with a thump next to her and poked her with his elbow.
Alice felt violent toward him and wanted to poke him back, slap his hairy cheek. She said, “You’re dripping ice cream on my bag!”
She knew she’d made an ugly face and shouted for effect, to insult the mother. The boy scowled at her and lapped at his ice cream.
“Rupesh,” his mother said, calling him wearily.
He went to his mother, who nuzzled him and hugged him. The other women cooed, as if to soothe the boy.
The women were opposite Alice in the six-seat compartment, occupying the three seats on one side, the children dawdling at their legs. And they stayed there, facing Alice in the corner seat on her side, two empty seats beside her. An invisible frontier ran down the compartment, not a racial barrier, Alice told herself, but a cultural divide.
She crouched, feeling wounded, hating the journey, sorrowing, feeling like an amputee. A cleaner entered the compartment with a whiskbroom and a sack for rubbish. The Indian women tossed in the ice cream wrappers and used tissues and orange peels. Alice twisted the Hindustan Times and tucked it into the sack of garbage.
Later, Alice was grateful for the women ignoring her. She slept soundly for short periods and was awakened only when the train screeched and halted at stations. Then she dozed again as the train continued into the afternoon.
She said nothing when the women and children pulled out their bags, turned their backs on her, and got off at a station where more boys were shouting. Aching with fatigue, she found she could not wake up properly, so she locked the door by working the bolt. She pulled down the tin shutter and slept deeply for a period of time, an hour perhaps, and was jolted awake—alarmed, gasping—when the door slid open.
“Bangalore City,” the conductor said.
She went tentatively to the ashram, where she was welcomed in a subdued way, gently, almost obliquely, as though she were fragile and had been injured. Alice thought, It shows on my face, it shows in the way I walk, in my whispers.
All topics unrelated to the assault seemed frivolous, and only Priyanka and Prithi dared ask about her experience. They seemed excited by her story. While seeming to commiserate, they wanted details.
“I have to see Swami,” Alice said, as a way of deflecting their curiosity.
In the past he had rebuffed her, but now it seemed that he too knew what had happened to her. Perhaps everyone knew. The devotee at Swami’s gate did not ask her name. He nodded, made a namaste with his hands, and said, “You may pass.”
Touching Swami’s feet, Alice knelt before him. He placed his fingers on her head covering and murmured prayers. He was smiling when she sat back and clasped her hands.