A tailor in Jew Town has the ready-made clothes they want, while from a dry goods store they purchase a metal trunk, bedroll and bedding, leather sandals, blue laundry soap, white body soap, and toothpaste. “No more green-gram shampoo or powdered-charcoal toothpaste, my friend!” Uplift Master says cheerfully, trying his best to buoy the younger man’s spirits.
Big Ammachi’s fervent wish had been that her son would study medicine; his saving the life of the boatman’s baby was God showing him his calling. But Philipose felt God was showing him quite the opposite: that he had no stomach for sickness or for disease. He’d been squeamish before that event, but ever since he would faint at the sight of blood if he didn’t quickly sit down. It didn’t help Big Ammachi’s argument that the boatman’s baby died six months later from a diarrheal illness. If her son had a calling, had one passion, it was for words on a page, and the magical way they could transport him and his listeners to faraway lands. “Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I’ve lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, Queequeg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.” It bordered on blasphemy, but he had her blessing to study literature. He had applied to the prestigious Madras Christian College—the place Koshy Saar studied and taught—and he had the old man’s letters of support. He was ecstatic when he was admitted. But in the two weeks preceding his departure, Big Ammachi and Uplift Master noticed that Philipose’s excitement gave way to apprehension; he seemed withdrawn. Uplift Master had tried his best to reassure him.
At three in the afternoon Uplift Master and Philipose take a rickshaw from their lodge to the train station. The Cochin heat and humidity are so stultifying that houseflies lose altitude and tumble to the floor. Shop boys sit heavy-lidded after lunch, as unmoving as the cement barriers in the harbor. The city will come to life again only in the evening, when it is cooler.
But on the platform of the new Ernakulam South station, the imminent departure of The Mail creates its own whirlwind. Porters wobble down the platform with headloads of luggage, their faces strained. A Romeo, garland in hand, hurdles over a cart, sprinting to say his goodbye. The Anglo-Indian engineer, a toe on the footplate, leans out to examine his smoke plume with the eye of an artist mixing colors, and in anticipation of pulling the release chain.
“First whistle,” says a cheerful Uplift Master. He stands on the platform outside the bogie, looking wistfully through the bars into the third-class sleeper. Philipose, seated inside by the window, was first in his compartment; the seven other passengers are settling in.
Uplift Master whispers, “By the time you reach Madras tomorrow morning, you’ll be one big happy family, I tell you.” Philipose doesn’t hear him and raises his eyebrows quizzically. Master speaks louder. “I said, I’d give a lot to come with you the whole way. Big Ammachi offered . . . but Shoshamma . . .” He pushes aside the memory of her frown. “You’ll have so much fun!” He thumps the side of the carriage as if it were a beloved bullock. “You know I never slept better than on a train.”
Uplift Master is in pants and a collared shirt—Philipose has never seen him in this formal garb—with a handkerchief folded into a rectangle and parked inside his collar to protect it from sweat. “Second whistle is late,” the older man says, checking his watch. Just then, they hear the crunch of hundreds of boots, and the platform is soon thick with Indian soldiers marching past, rifles and kit in hand. The silent, tanned, fierce-looking men barely register their surroundings. A third of them are bearded, turbaned Sikhs. The Fourth Infantry’s Red Eagle insignia is stenciled on the trunks in the carts that follow. “Aah, no wonder,” Uplift Master says. These men were rushed to British Sudan and fought for the liberation of Abyssinia from the Italians; they have seen death and brought it about. The Fourth is headed to Burma, where the Japanese are advancing. The war that seemed so abstract in Parambil is suddenly all too real, etched on the faces of these brave men.
Uplift Master strokes his mustache with his thumbnail. He sees Philipose unconsciously imitate him, though in his opinion the nineteen-year-old’s downy shadow is better off shaved than shaped. But who can blame him? A man without a mustache is exposed and vulnerable, like an unbaptized child, the soul still in jeopardy.
“By the way,” Uplift Master says, “keep this letter just in case. It’s to my friend Mohan Nair. He’s the man to see in a pinch. He runs Satkar Lodge, near Egmore Station.” Philipose puts it away. Uplift Master sighs. “Oh Madras . . . how I miss it! Marina Beach, Moore Market . . .”
Philipose has never heard this note of regret before. “Why did you leave?”
“Why indeed, eh? I had a good job, pension fund . . . But doesn’t every Malayali dream of coming home? My father had no land to give me. When Shoshamma inherited the Parambil property, it was our dream come true. A blessing.”
“For us too,” Philipose says quietly. “My mother always says so.”
Uplift Master waves this off, but he’s pleased. The carriage jerks. Master reaches in and squeezes Philipose’s shoulder. “We’re all so proud! Someone from Parambil going to Madras Christian College. You’ll be the very first in our family to get a degree! It’s as if we’re all going with you on this train. God bless you, monay!”
Master walks alongside; the carriage is moving at a snail’s pace; he’s chagrined by the look of dread on Philipose’s face. “Don’t worry, monay. All will be well, I promise!” He waves long after his ward’s hand is no longer visible.
Uplift Master wants to weep, wants to run after the train. His being feels fractured in two and it has nothing to do with Philipose. One half, the better half, pines to jump on that train and resume his life as a clerk in What-Was-Once-The-Old-East-India-Company. The other half, a solitary figure with slumped shoulders and pants that he can no longer button, stands despondent on the deserted platform, only a stray dog to keep him company, unable to imagine going home.
When he closes his eyes, he can smell the leather binding on the ledgers of What-Was-Once-The-Old-East-India-Company (a name he prefers to “Postlethwaite & Sons,” which knots his tongue). For a poor fisherman’s son, educated only to high school, to have been a clerk there was a towering achievement. He and Shoshamma were happy in Madras. Like all Malayalis, they fantasized about buying a property back in God’s Own Country one day, returning to the lush green land of their birth, with a backyard bursting with plantain and kappa. On Fridays he and Shoshamma would go to Marina Beach, sit on the sand, lean on each other, and even hold hands. When the lottery vendor’s cart came by, they bought a ticket and said a prayer. Inevitably, once they got home, they’d make love, Shoshamma’s hair smelling of the salt breeze and jasmine.