Other Peoples’ Journeys II

I didn’t ask his name, and I didn’t speak to him. He was lying on the upper bunk in the third class sleeper carriage across the aisle from me.

The Northeast Express to Delhi rolled on into the afternoon, clackety-clack, clackety-clack. We had been late out of New Jalpaiguri the evening before when the sun had been a punchole of blood over the tracks and the train was crowded. A mob of Sikh boy soldiers lounged in their boots among packing cases at the end of the corridor. Heat and cold came in strange moments and the sickly yellow light from the weak bulbs beside the broken fans on the grimy curve of the ceiling had shone all night. It was raining outside.

We passed onwards: Patna, Varanasi, Allahabad. I saw strips of cold water, and sodden slums, and white village platforms where stationmasters stood dripping under broken umbrellas and thin men with grey moustaches squatted under coarse blankets to watch the train pass. There was a fat lady in a green sari on the lower bench. She chewed great clods of paan and pushed her face up wearily against the rain-wriggled window, sighing in long, sad breaths. Opposite her sat a fat student from Guwahati who bought hard boiled eggs with salt and cumin, and channa massala, and puri sabzi and peanuts and bananas and sweet-spiced tea in plastic cups from every vendor that shuffled up the aisle, swinging their loaded bucket or their heavy tray. I talked to him when I grew bored of my books and when he wasn’t eating, and at Allahabad I stepped out onto the rain-slicked platform for a few minutes and shivered at the February chill as I ate stewed potatoes and onions with fenugreek and a little stack of puffed breads from a tiny bowl of dried leaves.
But mostly I lay on the cracked and pick-holed upper bunk, reading Graham Greene with my feet on my backpack.

I didn’t speak to him. He was young, and he lay curled on the bunk with a pile of someone else’s luggage at his feet. He had a weasel-buzz of black hair and a bristle of short moustache on his upper lip. He wore a black t-shirt and a pair of combat trousers and hadn’t taken his boots off. He had the kind of body that people from poor families earn when they join the army and get fed well and worked hard: his arms were wired with muscle but his chest was thin and standing up he would have barely reached my shoulder. I don’t know his name.
Mostly he just lay there, curled up, his eyes swivelling very slowly in his head, his mouth slung half-open. I thought he was mentally deficient. After one station-stop one of the Sikh soldier-boys – tall and thin with a tight turban and only yet a sparse beard – gave him a leaf-plate of vegetables and three limp chapattis; he ate clumsily, spilling sticky droplets of yellow sauce onto the surface of the bunk and struggling to break the bread. The senior officers of the Sikh regiment were sitting on the bunks behind me, and once he raised his head swimmily and called in a slurred voice: “Major-sahib, water!” and the bull-chested major with the coal-black beard gave it to him with weary sympathy. After he drank he curled again, hugging his knees, and when I looked across a little later I saw that his eyes had turned red and filled with tears.

The train was running late and I slept into the afternoon, and woke when I heard the paper-wallah coming along the aisle: “Awwwww paper-paper-newzzzpaper! Hindi-Angreezi-Bengali!” I swung down from the bunk and bought the Times of India and The Hindu, and sat cross-legged beside the lady in the green sari to read them. The fat student was furiously shelling peanuts and he grinned and passed me a handful.
“Actually I am feeling restless now,” he said. “Already more than 24 hours since departing Guwahati. I believe the train is very much delayed.” He grinned again and handed me more peanuts then pointed up to the young soldier, still huddled on his bunk, still watching with the blank gaze of idiocy. “You have seen this man?”
I nodded.
“He is most unfortunate man. Actually I am feeling very sorry for him, but he is lucky these men, these Sikhs, they are caring for him.”
The young soldier came from Delhi; he had been serving with a regiment in Gujarat but was going home on leave to be married. He took the train from Ahmedabad, and along the way, as they rattled over the cactus-lined fields and yellow hills, he took some food offered by a man and woman in the same compartment. The soldier did not wake up at Delhi.
“Maybe he is sleeping more than one day,” said the student. “Can you believe? The man and woman are giving him drugs so they can commit a robbery and he is sleeping until after Patna.”
The Sikhs, going back to barracks in the Punjab after a tour on the Bangladesh border, found him vomiting and insensible on some station platform, with no memory of having travelled half the breadth of India. They bought his ticket and were taking him back to Delhi.
“It is because his brain is disturbed by the drugs he is seeming stupid at the moment, but actually he is normal man – like you, like me. Later he will be improving.”
When he boarded the train in Gujarat the soldier had with him a cheap aluminium case, bolted with a small padlock. Inside it were bundles of rich cloth, worked with sequins and real gold thread, for the wedding. There were thousand-rupee notes – long months of soldier’s salary – in damp bundles and other important things for the family and for his new wife. The case was gone now, and so was the cheap wallet from his pocket.
“This is one very sad story,” said the fat student, “like a tragedy. Please, please, eat more peanuts.” When I looked up the young soldier was crying again.

It was long after midnight when we creaked and lurched into Delhi. The train had been silent for the long, resigned hours that fill the end of a delayed journey, but when we stopped it was all noise and chaos and I went quickly through the dusty halls to the street outside.
A bitter wind was running in from the north, carrying Himalayan ice on its breath. The lights had failed in the jumble of buildings across from the station and the rickshaw drivers were huddled in doorways, sleeping under hairy blankets. I crossed the dirty street and cracked pavements into Paharganj. Main Bazaar was empty and scuffed with scraps of paper and broken wood splinters. I had gone a hundred yards before I remembered the soldier. I didn’t see if there was anyone to meet him at the station.

© Tim Hannigan 2008