Dead Water (7 page)

The cow’s assumption seems to have done very little damage to the locomotive and the driver and his engineer marvel at the ease with which the animal has given itself up to the machine’s appetite, almost as though it had been standing there pre-boned, cut up into living chuck and loins, ready for the instant of collision.

They shunt the train back a few yards, steeling themselves for the shovel-work to come. Perhaps they can throw a few coins to the locals and save themselves the labour. People are running over now: fieldworkers and ditch-sleepers thrown out of their dreams by the squeal of brakes, and even businessmen in suits and ties, driving home, the worse for wear from drinking dens and roadhouses. They have abandoned their cars by the side of the Sher Shah Suri Marg to join the gathering crowd.

The locomotive moves off smoothly enough. Gingerly, the driver tries the brakes. The train rattles and lurches to a ragged halt. The driver looks at the engineer, and the engineer looks at the driver. There is damage after all: their brakes are shot.

The cacophony that erupts from the spectators – the trade in opinions, speculations, criticisms and even gobbets of philosophy – is more constructive than it might seem to an outsider. Living and working beside the low-level atrocity that is the Sher Shah Suri Marg, these people are used to accidents. They react promptly and well to emergencies. In barely a minute, and with their bare hands, men have scoured the rails, bringing to the driver and his engineer anything that might belong to the innards of the train. Others have worked their way underneath, into the stinking, tripey rain dripping from axle and driveshaft. Still others, frustrated by the ambiguity of reports coming from the scene, work instead from theoretical principles. How should a train’s brakes work, and what might make them fail? ‘In my car...’ they begin. ‘When I was a boy...’

In the cab, the driver and his engineer argue disconsolately over the meaning of the lights chasing each other across their dashboards. Cascading electrical failures have left the train’s systems impossible to unpick. Dare they drive on with bad brakes? This would be extremely dangerous, but they are stalled on one of the busiest stretches of line in the Lucknow region. It cannot be long before another train is due.

And here it comes. The Purushottam Express: 1,300 sleeping passengers bound for New Delhi on a train twice as heavy as any on the Kalindi service and twice as fast.

In the rearmost carriage of the Kalindi Express twin six-year-olds, the Nankars’ boys, sit neat and proper, one on each side of their overseer, the kiln-owner Vinod Yadav. On the way to the station, crouched in the back of the truck, Vinod cowed them with soft, deadly mutterings and sharp, professional jabs of his heavy fingers under their sternums and into their groins. These unfamiliar tactics, meant to wound more than to control, have convinced the boys that they are in the presence of something hungry and unpredictable. They would no more ignore him than you would turn your back on a snarling dog.

Why has the train stopped? Abhik Nankar leans forward, wanting to see out. Vinod cuffs him back in his seat. Abhik studies the scene reflected in the eyeglasses of the man opposite. Sparking in each glass, right to left: headlamps. The train has come to a halt near a road – but which one?

Abhik’s brother Kaneer has his eyes closed. Another move. Another compound. Another foreman. Another gang of big boys they must learn to avoid. It’s happening again. Kaneer was not cut out for this life. He wants his mum, Samjhoria. He wants their little brick house in the Chhaphandi works and his dad, Manjit, always complaining about his back. He wants to sleep on familiar foam, smell familiar sewage, he wants to feel the old clay setting under his nails. This is not the first time the twins have been carted off without their parents, in this truck or that, only to be reunited with them half a day later, hungry and frightened, in the shadow of this kiln, that barn. It happens – but never before like this. They have never been put aboard a train before. He wants his mum. He must not cry. He wants his dad.

News of the train’s collision with a cow spreads through the train in a human shock wave. Suddenly everyone is standing. Here and there people are opening doors. They jump out of the carriage, into the dark, and (Abhik leans forward to see) they vanish! Even their heads disappear! Abhik has never been on a train before: who would have thought they were riding so high off the ground? Vinod pulls him roughly back in his seat, where there is nothing to see. Abhik has seen enough. The embankment, the sweep of headlights: they have halted beside the Sher Shah Suri Marg! They have only to time this well and they can make a break for it. With the road to guide them they can find their way home! He must get a message to his brother, but how? Vinod is sitting between them. There is a metal panel beneath their bench. Abhik kicks his heels against it: bang bang, rattle rattle. He waits, half-expecting Vinod to cuff him again, the way he cuffs their mum. But Vinod, stuck in his seat with the boys, is distracted: he is straining to hear the gossip. An accident? A collision?

Again, then: bang bang, rattle rattle. Kaneer does not respond. Abhik scowls in frustration. Is his brother asleep?

Unable any longer to ignore the drama engulfing the train, Vinod stands. The boys turn and blink at each other. Vinod steps towards the carriage door and Abhik slips behind him, aiming for the door opposite. Once they are outside the boys will have the train between them and their jailer. They are small enough to scamper at will under the carriage, so they can cat-mouse this lumbering bully all night if they want, before losing themselves in the dark. They will be free! Abhik does not doubt he can communicate all this in an eye-blink and as he rushes for the door he glances at Kaneer, beckoning him with his eyes.

Kaneer follows all right.

With the full force of the Purushottam Express at his back, propelled from nought to sixty miles an hour by a wall of superheated vapour, Kaneer the human bullet traverses the shuffle-space between him and his brother faster than human nerves can carry the news into Abhik’s uncomplaining brain.

Knees first, a rider in mid-air, Kaneer catches Abhik’s torso between his legs. Coupled at the groin, the boys’ heads whiplash against each other, into each other. They are, by fractions of a second, the first victims of the second-worst rail crash in Indian history.

The boy’s skulls do more than shatter on impact: they explode. Their brains are liquid haggises whose meningeal skins are lacerated to chaff by shards of frontal and maxillary. The ballistic paths of a thousand bone fragments agitate the spewing and unbounded broth: a formula in which what was Kaneer can no longer be distinguished from what was Abhik.

Once, each boy’s brain was a forest, magical and sparkling. Each brain cell was a tree, with a taproot for incoming news and branches spread to pass its ‘I am’ to its neighbours. Now both forests fall through the same chipper and out the end comes something new: a turbulent spew, self-blending, a seething soup of single cells. The force of the blast has sent each brain cell spinning. Each cell is a brush, rapidly whirling, a Tesla device, a friction-maker, a halo of spinning bristles. The cells revolve and touch each other, and as they contact, they spark. Something new is being made here. The boys’ minds, sea-changed, spin and whirl into a second life.

As one they bloom; as one they see. They see Vinod hurled the length of the carriage. He tumbles like a doomed parachutist. His left hand strikes a wire luggage rack. With his full weight behind it, here’s force enough to spit his fingers into the air – onetwothree! – as though he’s plunged his hand into a mincer. The bulk of him, ballistically driven, passes over the rack. His arm, firmly snagged, buckles in a hundred places before it comes away, waving and spitting like a different order of life, an anemone browning in the hot vapour of collision.

The carriage, punched into the air, turns end over end and for a split second it seems as though Vinod is stationary: the tumbling car’s centre and pivot. Then the carriage collides in mid-air with the car in front of it and everything buckles. The illusion is broken. Vinod is sucked into a bench-seat as it folds and the halves of its frame scissor his flailing stump. Heat washes through the carriage, cauterizing the wound. The carriage splits in two and Vinod’s half plunges end-on through the roof of car number eight, instantly killing half a dozen. Slowly the carriage topples over, crushing almost everyone else in the car. Cloud-borne, the Nankar twins marvel to see how Vinod, encased in the seat, survives the impact.

(Vinod, enveloped by the sandwiched seat, smells seared meat. The disaster is barely seconds old: too new for his mind to register. As far as Vinod is aware, the train is still becalmed outside Firozabad, the Nankar twins are seated on their bench, and he is standing before the open door, looking out at the night, the embankment, the road. It seems to him that a great, scratchy tongue has curled out of the dark and wound him into a hot, close, savoury space: the mouth of a cat.)

The twins’ bodies are chopped wreckage by now: smoke-curls and fragments of char, roiling in a spinning metal maze. Theirs is a bodily annihilation so abrupt, so comprehensive, it leaves the boys agape at their own extinction. But who needs flesh? Not Kaneer, not Abhik. They are literally disembodied: interpenetrating clouds of pink steam. A nova seen double through a gravitational lens. They bob and tremble on the edge of a shock wave that even now hurls them out of the open mouth of the sundered carriage and into the night.

Vaporous, expanding constantly, the twins flow through new conductors, race each other down whipping wires, dance thillanas through a businessman’s mobile phone, play demolition derby round the looped infinity of a pair of spectacle frames, and trace the rills and saddles of a foil sandwich wrapper. Distributed and dispersed, they comprehend the disaster around them in all its fullness, while the maimed and the dying have barely had time to notice anything amiss.

A woman without legs flies by, clutching beaded bags. It is Pali, Rishi Ansari’s wife, off to New Delhi to promote her district’s bangles and kangans, chandelier ornaments and cut-glass figurines. Of course, Kaneer and Abhik do not know who she is. They are not yet gods. They see only a determined businesswoman, her mouth scrunched with disappointment, her hands tight around the handles of bags which are themselves samples. See the finish! Feel the quality of the stitching! But the blast has ripped through her wares as comprehensively as it has ripped through her thighs, and her treasures spray out behind her through smoking rents: rivers of glass.

The Nankar twins watch the rivers twine and sparkle half-seen against the stars. They stare and, staring, lose themselves in toils of reflected light, refracting and recombining as the hot and close-packed shards smash into each other, rendering themselves down to powder. Pali’s bangles, her district’s labour, the bitter fruit of whip-backed hours, the pride of eyes gone yellow from the scarring of a hundred thousand glass flecks – it is a rainbow, or it would be, were there light enough to see.

The boys hang in the air, holographed in glass: their new home. The rainbow flexes. The rainbow lives. The rainbow wriggles through the air like a snake. It runs like a blindfold across Pali’s eyes as she tumbles, scraping her corneas to a fine translucence: she does not see the tangle of steaming metal that waits for her as she begins her descent. The rainbow flexes, dashes, roils. Riding the heat of the collision, it surfs away from the railway, the Kalindi and Purushottam Expresses.

Tacking back and forth, it finds at last a stable cushion of warm air along which to flow. Like a varicose vein, the Sher Shah Suri Marg runs over the land, raised on earth embankments. Warmth rises, even at this late hour, from its metalled top.

Meanwhile, at the Yadav Brickworks outside Chhaphandi, not ten miles away, the Lohardaga girls have gathered, nervous and disoriented, on the edge of the compound. They know nothing of the railway accident: they are being kept awake by a more proximate calamity. The geometry of their home has been disturbed. Where is the Nankar family’s hut? Where are the Nankars? What are these lights in the sky? Above their heads, halfglimpsed in the roiling flash of oil-drum fires, the rainbow skips, agitated, around the perimeter of the work camp. The Nankar twins are looking for their home. They are looking for their mum and dad. Something terrible has happened. What? Fine grains of glass cascade from the sky. The girls, cursing the smoke and embers, wipe their eyes as unseen supernatural forces read the secrets from their frightened hearts.

Beyond the kilns and out towards the river, a fickle tributary of the sacred Yamuna, the criss-crossing tracks and paths of the brickworks give way at last to channelled mud and weeds, cowpats, discarded fence posts and broken kerb stones, screes of woodchip and pebbledash. Among the trash left from the factory’s construction there is a pit, newly dug and newly filled, and overlooking the pit, a saffron-yellow Komatsu. Its engine is warm. The pit is warmer: wisps of labile smoke rise from a crumble of burning tyres.

Even gods would have a hard time sifting evidence from the smeared and crumbled leavings buried here, crushed beneath so much rubble, scoop upon scoop of river gravel and bails of rusted barbed wire. But Kaneer and Abhik smell their kin well enough. They flex as one above the pit in an agony of loss. Mummy! Daddy! The Nankar boys are home.

The rainbow flexes in the air, swelling, stretching, deforming. It haloes the ground, a screaming mouth. Its needle teeth glisten in the dark. It’s only a child. It’s only two children, hugging each other against the dark. They’re lonely. They’re lost. They’re dead. What comfort for them now?

They loop back to the only home they know: mud walls and corrugatediron roofs and dogs. The compound is asleep. Their hut is a disordered, kerosene-drenched heap of mud, straw and ash: very few clues remain here to remind them of their life. The bowl of a frying pan; the handle’s burnt away. Scorched and shrivelled scraps of green polyester: it was their mum’s only good kameez. Potatoes. Now, this is a puzzle. Potatoes? They haven’t seen a potato for days. Round here, and under Vinod Yadav’s vindictive rule, potatoes have been a weekly luxury for the Nankar family. What are all these potatoes doing here? Handsome, fresh, blemishless baked potatoes, their insides soft and creamy, their skins crispy under a smothering of fat – what fat? White fat. Lard. Mummy...