“Not like the old days,” the handsome young ticket seller says, calming down after his tirade. “Once, everything was all willy-nilly, everyone scrambling for spots on the trains. Now, seats and berths are reserved much in advance. But madam, you are lucky, because we always keep a few berths open for foreigners. I would suggest the AC1 sleeper for you.”
Joan agrees to his suggestion though she doesn’t understand the difference between AC1 and AC2. She buys her ticket, buys a dozen sealed bottles of water at the station shop, finds a small bench from which she watches the racketing, colorful crowd, listens to the jittering, laughing, high-decibel voices around her. As the hours tick by, she realizes she could wander Delhi a bit, at least around the station, but it seems too effortful to rise and make her way through the horde, to wander as lost as the cows on the platform.
When the train shudders into the station, Joan boards with the crowd. She winds her way through the carriages until she finds the AC1 sleeper car she purchased for the night. Despite what the ticket seller told her, she still expects to find people hanging out of the carriage doors, sitting cross-legged up on the metal roof; she has seen movies where such is the norm. Although no one clambers up to the roof as the train pulls away, no one seems to be settling into their assigned berths. There is a festive boisterousness in the corridors. The tea seller’s cry of “Chai, chai, garam chai,” supplies the refrain that fulcrums all the noises into a song nearly harmonious.
A steward knocks at her sleeper door when the train is thirty minutes out of Delhi. He tilts his head into the door. “Veg or non-veg?” “Veg, thank you,” she says. An hour later, there is another rap on the door, and a different steward hands over a large vegetarian platter, its samplings piled high, but her appetite has vanished. It is the noise and the heat and the waiting all day and the fifteen-hour flight. She sets the tray down and leaves the relative calm of her personal enclosure, locking the door behind her. A human thicket loiters up and down the corridors as far as she can see, smokers puffing away, their heads out the windows, knots of people laughing or arguing in front of other sleeper cars whose doors are ajar. She follows the signs, through several carriages, across the open platforms, until she reaches the bathrooms. Inside, the air is fetid, flies buzz over the toilet. Joan stoppers her nose and unbuttons her jeans.
*
The night sky is solidly black, except for the white discus of moon she sees through the sleeper-car window. It reminds her of the picture she took in Cairo, of the pyramids lit up by a fingernail moon, when she was there for the international book tour for Fictional Family Life. A photograph accidentally great that she paid to have blown up and framed and now hangs on the wall next to all of those windows in Daniel’s … She will not think about where that photo hangs.
She is on one of the flat mattresses hooked to the wall by a thin metal frame, the only thick sweater she brought a cushion beneath her. There is raucous chatter outside her door and the tea seller’s chai perfumes his wake. The train moves smoothly through the countryside as stars pop into the sky, pinpricks of light. She sleeps fitfully, sometimes waking, instantly aware that this moon and these stars are hanging over India. Other times, her eyes flash open in the tinged dark hours, and she fears this trip she has sent herself on. She is awake at dawn, watching the bushes, trees, plains, and hills in the distance assume more natural forms. Then she changes into fresh linen trousers and a loose cotton shirt.
*
Ten hours after departing Delhi, Joan stands on the platform at the Chakki Bank station. She would like to be naked in a cool shower, her hair dripping wet, in a bathroom that smells nice, without flies diving at her thighs. Her lightweight clothes are already lashed to her skin, sweat trickles down her neck, beads her back, and it is just nine in the morning. Her black suitcase is dust-covered, the red ribbon somehow lost. At the far end of the platform is a beautifully maintained miniature dollhouse, a store, but the door is locked, she has already tried, and she wonders what time it opens. She would like a cup of coffee, something other than the granola bars she brought from home, which crumble like dirt in her mouth. Something to charge her back up in this overheated, somnolent, motionless place, something to affirm this particular choice she has made. She leans against a pole on the platform, under a wooden awning.
A trim man with a neat beard paces in front of the shuttered store, his stride jaunty and quick. He seems unaffected by the heat, his black uniform crisp and sharply pressed. He turns swiftly, and she can tell he has registered her presence.
“You are here for the chhotey?” he asks, when he reaches Joan.
“I’m not sure,” Joan says. “Is that the Kangra Valley Railway?”
“Haan, haan. Yes, yes. So you will know in the future, chhotey is Hindi for small, which is what the Kangra train is. I welcome you here. So you know, I am the stationmaster. I can answer all of your questions.”
The stationmaster links his arms behind his back, lifts his face to the low, heavy sun. The light churns up the black in his eyes, softens the cliffs of his face. There is an insistence in his silence when he turns his head to the empty tracks. He loves his chhotey train, Joan realizes, whose arrival she is apparently waiting for, wants her to ask questions about the Kangra Valley Railway. It is too early for a history lesson, but she should graciously give way, as she did with Vita Brodkey, as the big man did with her in Delhi.
“I would love to hear the history of your train,” she says.
The stationmaster bows and says, “Since you have been kind enough to ask, I will tell you the story. Construction began in 1925, under British Colonial rule. In December of 1928, this train station was opened, for freight traffic only. In April of 1929, it became a passenger railway. But this dry citation of dates fails to tell the exciting and true story, how the Kangra valley tracks are an incomparable feat of engineering and their extreme importance to this region.
“Before there were any tracks or train, there was treacherous landscape with which to reckon. The mountain terrain was difficult. Torrential water from the monsoons and from the melting springtime snows in the lower regions of the Dhauladhars flowed far below. Huge chunks of earth had to be detonated. The nineteenth-century construction engineers went to work building two tunnels through the mountains and nine hundred and ninety-three bridges across the water. And after all of that work, tracks had to be formulated for this terrain and laid down. Which they were.