Philipose indicates he’s impressed. His seatmate beams and proffers a bony hand. “Arjun-Kumar-Railways.” He opens a tiny, engraved metal box that explains the strange scents, takes a pinch, and sniffs, expertly absorbing the instantaneous double-sneeze. He settles back, noticeably calmer.
The young lady with the scarf sitting next to Arjun who had allowed the porters to store his baggage on her berth removes her sunglasses and leans over. “May I see?” she says politely. Her fingernail traces the etched leaf-and-bud-pattern engraving. It’s unusual for a single woman to initiate conversation. Philipose is struck by the delicate vein arching over the back of her hand, tributaries gathering from between her knuckles. Her hands look capable, like those of a tailor or a watchmaker.
“This is such fine engraving!” Her voice is striking for its low timbre. She turns the box over and squints at the lettering, worn away by use. “Do you know what it says?”
“Yes, I am knowing, Young Miss!” Arjun-Kumar-Railways giggles and swallows, his eyeballs magnified by his spectacles. She waits.
“And . . . can you tell me?”
“Indubitably I can!”
She and Philipose exchange glances and come to the same realization: for Arjun-Kumar-Railways, anything but a literal answer is as egregious as calling something a “junction” when it isn’t. She smiles. Her scent is fresh, a faint hint of a perfumed soap that Gurumurthy wouldn’t approve of (because perfumes overpower olfaction) but Philipose finds delightful.
“Then would you please tell me what it says?”
“Certainly! It is saying, ‘Don’t swear, here it is.’ ”
There’s a pause before she laughs, a bright, delightful sound.
Arjun Railways is beyond pleased. “You see, Young Miss, snuffing is very impatience! Supposing it is time, and supposing you are wanting your pinch, then if you are not having, swearing will be there, is it not?” His excitable, high-pitched voice is a contrast to hers. “I am having collection of snuffboxes at home,” Arjun Railways says proudly. “My hobby. This one is for travel only. However, just now in Madras I purchased new one. One moment, Young Miss.”
As he searches, Young Miss tears a sheet from her notebook, places it on the snuffbox, then rubs with her pencil to reveal the exquisite foliate pattern. Arjun hands her his newest acquisition, a jeweled box, hand-painted with a fine brush, showing turbaned horsemen riding through a mother-of-pearl desert.
“Art on a snuffbox!” Young Miss says, almost to herself, completely absorbed, tracing the outline with her fingernail.
“Correctly you told, Miss! Every human bad habit generates art! Cigarette cases, whisky bottles, opium pipes, is it not?”
“I read that this is called the ‘anatomical snuffbox,’ ” says Young Miss, arching her thumb back to exaggerate the shallow, triangular depression on the back of her hand between the two tendons that run from the thumb base to the wrist. Philipose is mesmerized by the elegance of that bowed digit resembling a swan’s neck, and by the fine, translucent hairs on her forearm. She looks up at the two men inquiringly. Her close-set eyes slope up at the outer edges, an angle echoed by her eyebrows, giving her an exotic look, like an Egyptian queen. Her nose is sharp, in keeping with her slender face. Young Miss is erasing every woman on earth from Philipose’s head, just as in Shakespeare’s play Juliet displaces Rosaline.
Arjun frowns. “Indubitably, some are putting podi there only and snuffing-sniffing! Pinching is preferable.”
Young Miss looks tall even while seated, with a dancer’s elongated posture. Her scarf has slipped to reveal thick black hair gathered in a simple plait, which she now draws over her left shoulder, an unconscious movement, its tapered end snapping like a whip and reaching her waist. Hers is not a beauty that is easy to grasp, Philipose thinks. (Later, in his notebook he will write, “A woman with unconventional beauty raises the hope that the viewer might be the only one to see it, that in recognizing and appreciating it, he alone has created her beauty.”)
Young Miss says, “Well, now I think we must try it.” Her lips curve up. Her eyes show mischief. She looks directly at Philipose. “What say you?”
If it pleases Young Miss, yours truly will snuff-and-sniff baby scorpions. Young Miss and Philipose each take a pinch, heeding Arjun’s caution to “sniff only! No breath inhaling. Sniiii-fffff-ing gently only to front of nostril! Kindly avoid going to backward compartment. Kindly observe.” Arjun demonstrates and at once, like the recoil of a rifle, he sneezes twice, after which his face relaxes. “Precisely two sneezes will be there. Unless there are more.”
Young Miss and Philipose sniffffff . . . then sneeze in unison, twice. Their mouths are agape as another sneeze hangs there. They sneeze four more times. A duet. Mrs. Yellow Sari bursts into loud peals of laughter and the others join in. The ice has melted.
After Jolarpet, Philipose rocks the infant to sleep as Meena—Mrs. Yellow Sari—repairs to the toilet and her husband readies their berths. Arjun deals cards, teaching Young Miss to play Twenty-Eight. When the sun sets, the tiffin carriers and dinner packets emerge. All class distinctions have vanished in Third Class, C Cubicle. Philipose has food thrust at him from every direction; he’s grateful because he brought nothing. The taciturn Brahmin with winking ear-diamonds and shabby slippers is of course vegetarian and he offers his thayir sadam (rice soaked in yogurt and salt) in exchange for a taste of Meena’s chicken roast. “Not telling wife. Why to simply worry her?” Meena’s eight-tiered tiffin carrier is the size of an artillery shell. Young Miss’s contribution is a tin of delectable Spencer’s biscuits, packed in pink tissue.
By ten o’clock, Meena’s husband and baby are asleep on the middle bunk and the Brahmin snores above. Meena, her mouth red with paan, leans forward to confide to Young Miss (and therefore to Arjun and Philipose) that the man snoring on the middle bunk “is my cousin only.” They’ve lived as husband and wife in Madras for three years. “How it happened, you ask?” Young Miss had not. “We studied together till fifth standard. I liking him and he too liking same. But cousins, no? What to do? My parents married me off. On wedding day only I’m first seeing my husband. Good-looking, fair complexion, like you. But after marriage I find he is child only. Outside, looking normal. Inside, he is ten-year-old. After two years, I’m still remaining innocent. He didn’t know how!” Her in-laws blamed Meena. When her cousin, who had prospered in Madras, came to visit, they fell in love and eloped.
The anonymity of a train journey, Philipose thinks, gives strangers license for such intimate revelations. Or the freedom to invent. If I’m asked who, where, and why, I’ll make something up. If they want a story, they shall have just that. But what is my story?
“Me? I’ve run away too, I suppose,” says Young Miss when Meena asks. This startles her listeners. It’s not surprising that a college-aged girl is traveling unaccompanied. The communal atmosphere of the third-class sleeper is safer than first class (there is no second class), where the individual private cabins have doors that lock, rendering a woman vulnerable to whoever gains entry. “The nuns at college didn’t care for me,” she says. “Perhaps because I didn’t care for them.”
“And your good father and mother?”
“My mother is no more. My father won’t be too happy.”
Philipose is thrilled to realize they are in a similar predicament. Her confession diminishes the sting of his retreat to Parambil. But Young Miss is weathering her return better. He notices the cross on her necklace; she must be a Saint Thomas Christian, though all conversation in this cubicle with passengers from Madras, Mangalore, Vijayawada, Bombay, and Travancore has been in English thus far.
Meena clucks sympathetically. “Why college anyway? A waste. After wedding it won’t matter.”