“The Kangra Valley Railway remains an outstanding example of technological ensemble, and it illustrates a significant stage in human history. It was constructed in harmony with the beauty, serenity, and grandeur of the surroundings.
“Today, it is a heritage symbol of our region and it is responsible for the social, cultural, and economic creation and development of the settlement of the Kangra valley. More than ninety years after it was built, the track remains impeccably maintained. The stations are the elegant originals, as are the chhotey trains. Nothing about the railway is ordinary.”
Joan wonders if the stationmaster will take a breath before launching into detailed descriptions of the first views Joan will see from those nine hundred and ninety-three bridges. Then the Kangra Valley Railway train sways into the station and shivers to a stop. The train is chhotey indeed. It is a tiny train, a toy train, a train meant to be played with by little boys who will upend it from its tracks, watch it fall over the steep precipice of an unused Ping-Pong table, and do it again and again until, in the midst of repeated wreckages, they are called for dinner.
“Please, I will help you,” the stationmaster says. “The steps are narrow and it is easy to slip.” He sets Joan’s bags gently into the stairwell, then takes her left hand, and together they walk forward, as if they might start to dance, the stationmaster on the platform, Joan mounting the steel steps, until she is at the train door.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Eka acchi yatra hai. Have a good trip.”
The stationmaster does not care why Joan is here alone at Chakki Bank, or where she is headed. His second bow, deeper than the first, tells her, more than all his words have done, who he is, and what he wants from her, something simple and prized, that she enjoy and respect the train he loves dearly.
The gears mesh in a quiet gnarl. When the train slowly moves away from the station, the stationmaster doffs his cap, steps back, and flings his arms wide, not at Joan, who waves again as she passes him, but at his beloved leaving him behind. Right then, the train sends out the choo-choo of a toy.
*
Joan is astride a worn red leather seat in the shaky chhotey train throttling itself hard up the Kangra valley. There was no space or room to breathe outside of her sleeper car last night, but in this carriage, she can spread out. The passengers are few. There is a young mother and her two little girls, all dressed in Crayola-bright dresses, with long ribbons of hair, smooth as melted chocolate, trailing over their shoulders, the mother between her daughters, holding their hands. All three are looking out the windows. Two old men, their necks bent like swans, converse rapidly in what sounds to Joan like a high-pitched song, with a call and a refrain. And a woman, older even than Vita Brodkey, wears a cobalt-blue sari covered in crystals. When the sun strikes the crystals they dash rainbows against the roof of the carriage. The old woman keeps turning around, but her milky, cataracted eyes make it impossible to tell whether her smile is aimed at Joan, the voluble men, the bright mother and her girls, or reflects instead her happiness at being alive and aboard the Kangra Valley Railway.
Beyond the windows, the countryside is alien and lush. Below, steep gorges fall away, a perilous descent to a bottom out of sight. Ahead, in the distance, jagged mountains rear up like magnificent marbled statues, awesome and godlike. The land falls away and the train rattles across the first bridge. Nothing but unblemished blue sky all around. Joan imagines her decades as wife and mother dropping thousands of feet to where the mountainous water flows. She need not settle for her old life, she could toss away her grave losses, say goodbye to a son, a husband, the life she once knew at home. Love was never critical to her, she could let it all go, and up on the bridge, it feels that easy.
Back on solid ground, the engine gathers rumbling power and streams forward. The momentum stirs Joan up, shakes questions loose in her mind, forces her to consider the implications in choosing to bring herself to India, headed to the very place where Eric now resides on some temporary basis, at the foothills of the Himalayas, in the state of Himachal Pradesh, North India.
Why isn’t she on a train in some other equally distant place where, at the end of the line, she will find no one to whom she is related? Because Martin never wanted to come here, she thinks. And she did, always has, and now she is here, a conscious and unconscious return to her youngest self, making good on her girlhood promise when she read all those novels and short stories set in India. She sees herself at her desk in her parents’ house, serious and thirteen, opening up her notebook labeled Quotes I Like. She remembers clicking the pen and writing down R. K. Narayan’s words about being a writer in India: The writer has only to look out the window to pick up a character and thereby a story. She wonders if Narayan’s words will prove true for her.
The train rockets through a pass of boulders and foliage and wind-stunted trees at angles, and Joan thinks there is nothing to do now about traveling forward, where one son is at her destination when she has left the other behind. She made Martin promise not to reveal her whereabouts to either. Eric won’t know she’s in Dharamshala until she decides to make herself known. Daniel does not know she has gone and that’s the way she wants it. Martin knows where she is and, considering she doesn’t really know where she is, that’s sufficient, maybe even too much.
*
The trip up the Kangra valley takes several jostling hours. When the train comes to a halt, the young mother says to Joan, “This is your stop. Kangra Valley. Get off now.” Joan grabs her suitcase and her carryall, and looks back before she steps off. That small feminine family, all bright colors and chocolate, are laughing at Joan from behind their hands.
Metal steps to packed ground, her rolling suitcase behind her, her carryall strapped across her back. The sign on the platform might be in Hindi, Joan can’t tell, but people are yelling in English, “Kangra, Kangra. Bus. Taxi. Here, here,” so she is where she is supposed to be, which seems astounding. But where Kangra is in relation to the rest of the world, or, more specifically, where it is in relation to Dharamshala is unclear, and what comes next for Joan seems indeterminate.
Several men are pedaling their rickshaws around the train stop and one man halts his in front of Joan. “Let me show you around, you can get off whenever you want.” His voice has the sweet trill she already associates with India. His head nods gracefully while he speaks, and although Joan doesn’t know what the nodding means, she knows it means something. The rickshaw driver’s face glows, his black eyes sparkle with kindness, his black hair is thick and looks as soft as an animal’s pelt.