Bhowani Junction (28 page)

But I was safe. I opened my eyes and made myself breathe. Savage relaxed his grip, but his hand still lay, weightless, in the crook of my elbow.

We climbed up through the yelling darkness. As a test I made myself pick out, from all the clanging and grinding and shrieking of steel, the slow
whoof, whoof, whoof
of the blast. Each beat threw a pattern of light on to the roof of the tunnel.

The boiler burst out into daylight, and the air was ice cold. I stood up, trembling, to let it play over me. I was soaked in perspiration, and the clammy sari was clinging to my body. Savage went slowly back to his own side.

Pater ran one finger across his forehead and down each cheek, dashing a river of perspiration to the footplate. He said, ‘It is always hot coming up, Colonel—because of the cut-off being high and the regulator open. One hundred and sixty-seven degrees; a fellow took the temperature once in there in his cab. But that was three o’clock in the afternoon, with a coal train. Now we are over the top, and there is Shahpur.’

The fish-tailed distant signal was on. Pater closed the regulator with a heave. The steam pressure rose quickly. The safety valve lifted with a pop, and steam hissed out and blew back in a thick cloud over the cab roof. Pater opened his vacuum brake ejector slightly and closed it again. The engine heaved, the brakes sighed, the wheels sang a slower tune.

I saw the platform: Up Home, clear; Up Starter, on. Pater eased the brakes on. All down the train the wheels sang louder and slower. The platform swung out to meet our buffer beam, missed, and slid by. The wheels set up a low, quiet scream. That died, and with a last heave the footplate was still. The steam rose in a tall straight column from the safety valve; the smoke gathered in a grey pall above the boiler.

I turned my head slowly because my neck hurt. I heard the bustle and murmur of people, sounds which grew louder as my mind focused on them. There
were
other people in the world then, and there was my Pater standing on the platform beside the engine, a long-nosed oilcan in his hand. I saw him bend over the connecting-rod and touch the back of his other hand to the ends of the axles. The water tower, white-painted, stood high over the station buildings on its steel stilts. I read the name painted in huge black letters on it:
SHAHPUR
. Colonel Savage had gone.

I climbed carefully down to the platform. The engine had beaten me all over my body with rubber and steel rods. I went to my father and asked, ‘Where is Colonel Savage?’ I ought to ask Savage for leave. He had been nice not to make a fuss in Bhowani in front of Pater.

Pater looked up, a drip from the oilcan falling on his trousers. He said, ‘Didn’t you see? You must have been in a daze, girl. He went back to his compartment. He said he’d see you in Bhowani.’ He looked at me with concern, his eyes screwed up. I understood so well now the reason for that habitual tightening round the eyes. My own eyes were half closed, and I did not want ever to open them wide again. There was too much light if you did. ‘Are you all right, girl?’ Pater asked anxiously. ‘Was it too much for you, then?’

I said, ‘No, Pater. I’m all right. It was hot in the tunnel though, wasn’t it?’

He said, ‘It is always hot in the Mayni Tunnel on up trains. Look, you had better be going. Tell Jimmy Rovira I am sorry not to see them. It has been a long time. You have got a compartment? The train is full.’

I said, ‘Yes. Thanks for letting me come on the footplate. It was wonderful.’

He said, ‘Don’t thank me, Victoria. It was the colonel’s
doing. He is a fine gentleman. We would make a good driver out of him if he ever wants to leave the military department. You tell him that. Yes, you tell him that!’ He chuckled delightedly. Then he said, ‘And Victoria, I can’t tell you how pleased I am about the other thing. It would have been all wrong. But there, you found that out for yourself.’ He bent over the piston-rod and ran his eye along the heavy grease-shining steel of the guide bars.

I walked down the platform, threading slowly through the crowd. Dogs searched under the train for scraps. One had only three legs. There were always plenty of those—dogs that had not learned while they were puppies when to move out from under the wheels. I had not had time to reserve a place in the train, and I wondered why I had told Pater otherwise. I walked down the train, looking in at all the windows. The third-class passengers, jammed into their long, uncompartmented carriages, stared back at me without curiosity. Showers of peanut shells flew out of the windows, and occasional sharp jets of betel juice added to the spattered red stains on the stone. All the second-class compartments were full of prosperous Indians or British warrant officers. As an Army officer I could travel first class for second-class fare, but I didn’t have the proper forms.

I found an Anglo-Indian family of three in a second-class four-berth compartment. I did not know them. I hesitated in front of the compartment because I had been up and down, and except for this the train was full up. The husband stood in the doorway and said, ‘Don’t come in here. Our little girl has the whooping cough. You will never get a wink of deep.’ He spoke in Hindustani with no attempt at sympathy or politeness. His little girl looked very well. There were black stains on my sari, and my feet were dirty and sore.

Absolute exhaustion hung very close over me. I had to sit down soon, or I would fall down. I started to walk back up the train.

A voice said close to my ear, ‘Did you run away in such a hurry that you forgot to book a place?’

Colonel Savage was sitting in a cane chair by the open win
dow of a first-class coupé. Beyond him I saw Birkhe putting out a hairbrush and a comb and a bottle of whisky on the little table. The top berth was folded up and the bathroom door open. A round plaster covered part of Birkhe’s forehead near his eye. Savage had taken off his boots and socks and opened his bush shirt. A Penguin book lay open in his lap. His face was clean and newly washed. Beads of fresh perspiration were forming to run down the clean face, and his hands and fingernails were clean.

I said shortly, ‘Yes, sir.’

He said, ‘Come in here.’

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I muttered, ‘I can’t do that, sir.’ The weaving footplate was under my feet. I saw the breathing fire and heard the bell-dang of the long-handled shovel and felt myself rolling where I stood.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said. ‘Come in. You can hardly stand.’

My palms were slippery wet. I could find Mr Glover, the conductor, and ask him to get me into the train somewhere. But that meant more walking about, more searching. I wanted just to stand there and cry. Mr Glover’s pea-whistle blew peremptorily from somewhere miles away. The hubbub on the platform rose to a continuous, unfrightened shriek.

Savage put down his book, came to the door, opened it, and stepped down. He took my arm and helped me up into the compartment and pulled the door shut bebind him. The engine whistle blew. Mr Glover’s whistle blew. I stood in the narrow space between the lower berth and the wall, looking down at the brilliant blue-spangled border of my sari. Why had I ever put that on? How long ago had they given me sugar and water to drink and stirred up my insides with a two-bladed dagger?

The platform noise rose sharply, and the train jerked and began to move. I sat down suddenly, my knees turned to milk. A man clasping a hot chupatti, throwing it from one hand to the other, ran furiously alongside the train, shouting, ‘Open the door, brother.’ He disappeared. Birkhe had disappeared. Savage had disappeared.

I heard the tinkle of running water, and Savage came out of the tiny bathroom. He stood over me, holding with one hand to
the edge of the upturned upper berth, swaying to the lilt of the train as it picked up speed. He said, ‘Get in there and have a shower now. I’ve left all my things. The towel’s a bit wet. Here.’

He gave me his hand, pulled me up, and pushed me into the bathroom. I locked the door carefully, testing it twice, and began to undress.

I took off my sari and looked down unbelievingly at myself in panties, girdle, and brassiere. What had I put a girdle on for? As a last line of defiance, to prove to my skin that I was not really a Sikh? It had left ribbed lines on my behind, and it was soaked with perspiration. I washed out my pants and then leaned over the basin and closed my eyes, pressing my forehead against the cold mirror in futile exasperation, because I had remembered that I had no others. The day was not ended even yet. I had no place to sleep until I got to the Roviras’, God knew when. I opened the window and hung the pants out to dry in the wind, jamming them under the glass, then turned to the shower.

Afterwards I wanted to clean my teeth. I ground them together, and the grit grated like sand between them. I sniffed Colonel Savage’s toothbrush. It was supposed to be a terrible thing to do, but I needed it. He had used it, so he would not notice if I did. He might hear through the door. No, the train was making too much noise. He couldn’t kill me even if he did smell toothpaste on my breath. I took the toothbrush, put on a lot of paste, and began to scrub and rinse.

When I came out of the bathroom I felt clean except for the stiffness in the sari. Being clean changed the sort of tiredness I had. Before, I’d had a nervous headache, a kind of restless exhaustion. Now my legs and eyelids were heavy and my body was calm and my mind turning over very slowly. I sat down carefully on the lower berth.

Savage said, ‘You still look as if you’d been under a steamroller—but you’re clean, at any rate.’

He put down his book, got up, and poured a lot of whisky into each of two tumblers. He rummaged under the berth and dragged out a tin box half filled by a single huge block of ice.
Three bottles of Murree beer and half a dozen bottles of soda water lay on the ice. They had melted forms for themselves, like hares, and the dirty water was sloshing about in the bottom of the box with the labels floating in it. Savage jerked open the cap of soda bottle on the metal opener built into the bathroom door, and began to pour. ‘Say when,’ he said.

I said, ‘When, sir.’

He took his own glass, slumped back in the chair at the bottom of the berth, and put his bare feet up on the wall opposite. He said, ‘When are you going to stop playing hare and hounds with your WAC (I) commission?’

I drank, and answered automatically, ‘I don’t know what you mean, sir.’

He said, ‘For Christ’s sake stop calling me “sir” for a few minutes and answer a question honestly.’

I knew why he was being abusive to me. He wanted me to get so angry I would say more than I meant to. But I was too tired.

He said, ‘I suppose I can’t call you a traitor to your king and country, because you’ll flourish your beautiful new sari at me and say that George is not your king and this is not his country.’

It was a short strong whisky he’d given me. I expected it to burn my throat, but it didn’t. Perhaps I didn’t have the energy to react, certainly not enough to argue. He was still trying to make me angry. But he didn’t know that I was glad to be with him because he wasn’t a Sikh, because I understood everything he said, even the abuse. I looked at my empty glass, and he refilled it. I began to say, I haven’t been a traitor, but it seemed a waste of time. The dust whirled away in a long plume, light against the twilight, past the green-tinted windows. It had seemed pitch dark in there at first, but not now. I saw with surprise that the electric lights were on.

I said, ‘I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to be an Indian. Everything went wrong.’

‘Murder is wrong,’ he said.

He said it quite gently. I said, ‘It wasn’t murder, it——’

He interrupted me. ‘They died. Someone killed them.’

I said, ‘Who died? What do you mean?’

He said, Those B.O.R.s in the smash at Pathoda. You saw some of them the, didn’t you? That’s why I made you go up there with me.’

My heart was bumping and the glass slowly shaking in my hand.

He said, ‘I know you are lying about K. P. Roy. I’ve always known. You know something about him.’

I sighed, put down the glass, and slowly wrung my fingers together. Now was the time for me to get free, while the wheels beat
clickety-clack, clickety-clack,
and the dust hung in a pale motionless blur on the darkness, and the electric lights shone reflected in the windows. When I had spoken I would have no place to go at all—in the cantonments, or the city, or the Railway Lines.

I gathered myself and said, ‘But I killed Lieutenant Macaulay.’

Savage carefully put down his glass and said, ‘Tell me.’

I said dreamily, ‘I killed Lieutenant Macaulay. In the yards. There was a goods train passing.’ I told him about it. There had been a goods train while Ranjit stood beside me staring down on the body. It had passed by on the other side of the rows of wagons, easing up opposite us so that the chains clanked and the buffers struck together,
clang-clang-clang
all down the train. The brake van would have stopped just the other side of where we crouched in the black grit, but the signal must have gone off and the light blinked to green, and even now I can hear the strain on the chains and the heave of the train and the slow whoofing from the engine as the driver opened her up to go on north through. Bhowani Junction.

I said, ‘He was trying to rape me. He put his hands on me.’

Savage’s face was cold then, and his eyes brilliant. He seemed short of breath. He said, ‘But you’d led him on.’

I knotted up inside, and my skin began to shiver of its own accord. I said, ‘I didn’t!’

He said, ‘Christ, I
saw
you. The day the battalion arrived you backed your luscious arse into him. In the yards—near
where you killed him.’

I jumped up and stood over him where he sat tensely in the chair. I screamed down at him, ‘In the yards he put his hands on me that day, and I wouldn’t stand it. But I didn’t want to get him into trouble with you, that first time. That is what happened! Then in the Traffic Office it was worse. Ranjit saved me, and I wanted to complain. Patrick complained for me, but you pretended you thought it was Ranjit he was complaining about! You knew all the time who it was. You thought I ought to do what he wanted because I am only a bloody cheechee. I killed him with that fishplate. I found it under my hand when he threw me down!’

I shouted out the whole story. I told him about Ranjit and Ghanshyam. I told him how my fear and shame had changed to pride when the Sirdarni talked to me. I got it all out.

Then I fell back on the berth, picked up my whisky, and drank it.

The train ground to a stop. ‘Timrai Junction,’ Savage said, not looking out. ‘Your father leaves us here to-day.’

I muttered, ‘Yes.’

Mr Glover knocked on the door and came in to look at our tickets. I sat on the berth, thinking miserably of what a mess I was in, while Colonel Savage bought a ticket for me. Mr Glover gave me a curious look as he went out; he knew my family quite well. Birkhe came in with more bottles of soda and a plate of chicken sandwiches. He put them down on the table and asked whether the colonel-sahib wanted anything more for the moment. Savage shook his head. I saw Pater walking down the platform beside the train. He had put his coat on now and taken off the red bandanna. He looked old, tired, and very dirty under the glaring lamps. He saw me in the compartment and made to come forward, but then he saw Colonel Savage and stopped, smiling. He waved his hand and went away.

Birkhe said, ‘Salaam, sahib. Salaam, miss-sahiba,’ and got out, closing the door behind him. The train jerked forward.

When Savage spoke again his voice was quite different. It became conversational, but the kind of conversation people
make when a bigger thing is in their minds and they are bottling it up until it is ready.

He said, ‘Macaulay had it coming to him. And then a couple of days later you appeared in a sari. It was pretty obvious, you know.’