‘Oh I forgot to tell you,’ exclaimed Ronjon, putting down the tea he was drinking, ‘I’ll have to catch the mail train to Delhi this evening at quarter to nine’

Little, the youngest of the siblings, fell from the sky. “ Catch the mail train to Delhi? In an  hour’s time? Taxis are very hard to get at this rush hour. We may get a taxi yet, but have you got your reservations done?’

‘Frankly, I have not.  But I shall find a way. I shall  find the loopholes.’

‘Yes, I know what you mean, but, where is Boudi going? I see her packing. Is she going with you too?’

‘Not at all, not by any means, at least not now,’ said Ronjon emphatically, and then, as if forced to address her, spoke to the air, ‘I do not know what I am getting into. When I settle there, yes then. Maybe Little, you would bring her over there and stay with us to enjoy the hills for sometime?’

‘Who are you talking about? Me? I am coming with you, and that is final,’ she said stubbornly.

‘Indeed! We shall see about that’, said Ronjon between his teeth. “I will never allow it.’

Yet she got into the taxi unasked, and sat in ominous silence all the way. A gloom fell on the two brothers. Nothing was said any more on the way. The anxiety to reach the station in time was writ over their face. Once in there, Ronjon got two platform tickets and a ticket for himself all the way to the hill station. Then he settled the matter of the bunk with the coolie for four rupees. He had learnt the trick recently. As the train steamed in, the coolie jumped into the running train and quickly spread his gamcha on an empty bunk and held on to it. Ronjon then moved in with his bags and placed one of them on the bunk and spread a sheet on it, after the coolie pulled out his gamcha. The battle had been won; the arrangement for passing two nights on the bare wooden bunk seemed to be complete. He settled down to a seat below. Other passengers got in, jammed the aisle, and the hawkers kept up a steady monotone: chai garam, chai garam.

Little got off the train saying that there was not much time left for the train to start and stood outside on the platform, leaning on the window. But she, stubborn as ever, had already come inside and sat beside Ronjon in grand style for all that Ronjon cared. Speechless in anger, Ronjon almost shouted, ‘you dumb woman! What is the big idea?’ ‘What is the big idea you! Sit quietly or I’ll begin to shout?’ She had smelled victory and now she would not give up.

The scenario could be juicier. Ronjon was at his wit’s end, not knowing what to do with this tigress in sheep’s skin. ‘I have only a suitcase, a shawl, and only a little money’, Ronjon began trying a new tack, ‘What if I do not get the job? What if it does not work out after all? What then? Can’t you see that I have only a little money after all?’

‘You will get the job; no use lying to me,’ said she in a flat voice with a finality that irritated him to no end.

‘It is said in our scriptures that a woman should never accompany her man on an uncertain journey. She should be left home for her own safety.’

‘I do not care for my safety as much as you care for your own. Do not quote scriptures to me. I know them better than you men folk do. I am not staying home anymore. I am coming with you.’

The more he argued with her, the less he made any headway. He felt like chucking her out of the train, but he knew she would hold to the window bar with all her might and that would create a scene. Taking a gulp of the tea brought to them by Little, he reasoned for the last time, “But you have not got a ticket and there is no time to get a new one. For the train would begin to move in a minute. You cannot be on this train with nothing better than a platform ticket. The checker would throw you out of the train, maybe in some unknown station and then how would you come back from there at the dead of night, huh?’ ‘Let him. I do not care,’ said she, catching hold of the window bars, as if about to resist ejection.

All right, if that is what you want, but don’t ask me for help. It is your own doing and you must pay for it.’

Someone blew a whistle. Little took his leave, knitting his brow in anxiety, yet perhaps relieved to be leaving or was he? The train began to move. Visitors trying to use up the last remaining moment with their near and dear ones scampered down the train, shouting out their last-minute thoughts. “Do not eat the platform food.”  “Drop us a letter immediately on your arrival.” “Give us a ring.”  The long mail train was at last in motion, snaking out of the platform and its rustle and bustle.

The passengers then settled down to their seats and bunks, some began to spread their bedrolls, others chose to sit up for a while, chewing a pan or smoking a lone cigarette. The train moved heavily on, trying to pick up speed. Every minute Calcutta was dropping away and new suburban stations whizzed by. Ronjon too had climbed on to his bunk, but after a while, he peeked downwards to see what she was up to. No, she had not attempted to jump off the train at the last moment—she was catastrophically there, sitting by the window, stubborn like a mule, tapping her feet from time to time to work out the agitation in her mind. The farther the train moved away from Calcutta the more inescapably did she remain in the train, come hell or high water.

Ronjon peered through the window and saw only a gleam of light here and there on either side of the train. The countryside had fallen asleep with the train echoing in their dream. The train picked up speed, shrieking now and then as it passed through small stations, covering great distances before stopping in big stations. It would run like that for 24 hours to Delhi and after a long, long wait, resume its journey from there towards the foothills of the great Himalayas. Meanwhile Ronjon had fallen asleep on the bunk turning his back. Inevitably, the ticket checker appeared on the scene in the full majesty of his worn out black coat and tapped him awake. Then the ghastly man turned to her. ‘Your ticket Ma’am, show your ticket please. Are you with someone?’ He hesitated a little. She held out her platform ticket.

‘No, this won’t do. You have to have a regular ticket. You don’t have any? This is illegal. You can’t travel without a ticket.’

‘Ask him,’ said she simply, pointing to Ronjon.

‘She has a ticket; don’t say she does not have a ticket. Only a platform ticket, you say? No harm, change it into a regular ticket and that solves the problem, doesn’t it? She will pay, or someone else will for her. But you have no right to cause hardship to a woman.’ The checker saw that the woman in distress had allies after all; so, he brought out his cashbook and asked. ‘Where do you want to go? Delhi? That would come to 40 rupees.’ Ronjon sloshed out four ten’s and gave him another five to smooth out things. She won again, thought Ronjon, but there was no use arguing with her any longer.

Chai, chai, gurum chai.The hawkers ran up and down the platform crying incessantly at the top their voice, as if their life depended on it. Ronjon woke up to find that the train had stopped for some minutes in a big station. He looked down and saw that   she had dozed off, leaning against the window. The darkish shade under her eyes made them look like a raccoon’s eyes. He came down from the bunk, sat beside her, and nudged her awake.

‘What’s the matter now? You cannot sleep?’ she asked after staring at him curiously for a while. She always did that, staring at him with her great big eyes, before she said anything. This was infuriating. After a while he softened a bit and said, ‘It’s difficult to sleep long on wood. Anyway, I had my turn. You go up now and sleep for some hours. There’s a lot of journey ahead, we’ll have to take turns.’

She stood up stoically and tried to climb on to the bunk, but it was not meant for sleepers and had no ladder to it. She was heavy and he pushed her up by the main force, hugging her close to him in the process. The wild scent of her hair oil filled his nostrils. Insensitive in sleep, she even began to snore the very minute she stretched on the bunk.

It was not too bad at the window seat. A cool night breeze greeted him. Ronjon peered through the window and saw only a gleam of light here and there on either side of the train. The countryside had fallen asleep with the train echoing in their dream.

In the next station, a hawker poured steaming hot tea into an earthen cup at a slight nod from him and then even gave a refill. Afterwards he had a pan to kill the taste of sugared tea off his mouth. Other passengers were mostly asleep, finding whatever small space they could manage to squeeze their bodies into. Their curled and contorted bodies resembled a limbo. Some slept on the floor spreading a blanket, some on the steel trunks placed one after the other lengthwise. Ronjon remembered the Bengali saying: Hunger does not fight shy of cold rice, or sleep of a muddy bed.

‘Say can you hear me? I say, can you hear me’? (she never called him by his name).  Ronjon woke from his doze. ‘What is it now? Go right back to sleep. I am fine here.’

‘O are you? That’s good. Could you hand the water bottle to me? I am very thirsty. Please.’ There was no anger in her voice now. She took a long gulp, the way Bengali wives do, pouring the water into the mouth rather than sipping directly from it, so that there is no lip contact. Satiated she said, ‘ah, you saved my life.’ Then she went back to sleep, leaving Ronjon holding the bottle.

She fell asleep contentedly; her bosom went up and down; she seemed not to have a care in the world. The train was then racing like a horse to its next stop, passing by shadowy hills in the distance. After about what seemed to Ronjon to be an hour, he again heard her addressing him in that peculiar manner again, ‘Do you hear me, say do you hear me?’ ‘Yes I hear you perfectly. Just tell me what it is that you want now.’ ‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ she declared. ‘Big deal! who is stopping you? Go right ahead.’ Reluctantly, he stood up supporting her weight helpfully. She slid down him, brushing her ample bosom against him. He looked out a little to be sure that she got through the crowded aisle all right. ‘You can go up now, and get some sleep, I had enough sleep’—said she after returning from the bathroom, and wiping off the water drops off her face with the end of her sari. Contentment reigned on her chubby face, which seemed to say it is nice to be on this journey, nice to leave home and head for a new one. It is nice to be with a man, nice to care and be cared for. Wherever he goes, go I with him; wherever he lives, live I with him, in a palace or under a banyan tree.

A silent stream of thought flowed in Ronjon’s mind too, but in the opposite direction: She would probably be a drag on me, holding on to my coat-tails, when I would need to establish myself there at my new job. She would be nagging me, grumbling and complaining, making no distinction between love and possession. ‘She just wants a man to be around her, that’s all, loving or not loving,’ he almost shouted out his thought. Ronjon fumed within, but the long journey began slowly to take the heat off his brain. In the morning, the long train steamed gently into Mughalserai, indeed a Mogul of a railway station. On the long platform, hawkers lined up to pour hot tea into earthen cups. Puris were being fried in boiling ghee and then served to eager passengers in sal leaf plates with curried potatoes on top.

‘Delicious!’ she said of the puris that he brought her and then she drank tea noisily to let the world know of her relish. Ronjon bought cigarettes and the famed Benarasi pan, and then brought her another leaf-plate full of vegetable cutlets, with two fierce looking green chilies on the side. He pretended to walk away from the window along the platform and then got in through the other door when the train began to move. She peered anxiously around for a moment before she saw him getting back to his seat. Everybody geared up for the second half of the long journey, twelve hours of run through the northern plains. The train picked up amazing speed as stations in between became fewer and sometimes it did not stop for two hours or more at a stretch.   

 Finally, the train huffed and puffed into the red stone station of Delhi, seen in movies throughout the land. Most passengers streamed out, but the train stayed put in the station for a very long time, as if tired of the thousand-mile run. Having negotiated fresh berths, they fell asleep, before the train started to move again. The night became cool. She remained curled up in sleep, unworried, covering her head with the end of her sari against the cool night breeze. The farther the train went north, the cooler it became. At that time of the night, very few new passengers came in. Ronjon felt relaxed enough to fall into a deep sleep.

They began their last lap of their journey in the little hill train that chugged along its winding way leisurely as ever, but the air was becoming purer and soon the pines came into the sight. She sat at the window, looking more like thinking than viewing the landscape that was changing at every turn of the train, sometimes pine forests, sometimes terraced slopes, one upon the other, with a cottage or two here and there, their tin roof glistening in the morning sun. The train whistled in and out of numerous tunnels, darkening the inside of the train completely then emerging again into the daylight. The pine trees became taller on the sides of the hills as the train crawled up like a caterpillar. Then came the deodars, an evergreen forest, but on approach, each a mighty giant, erect and tall, mocking the law of gravitation. Above the green lines of the deodars, there stood still higher peaks, but ash-gray and bare, behind which the majestic Himalayas were still to be an undiscovered bourn.

It was past noon when the train emerged from a long tunnel into what may be described as a picture post-card station. A red roofed bungalow with a concrete yard at the bottom of a steep slope. No hoards of coolies, only a Kashmiri, trussing up on his frail back what seemed to be at least as heavy as himslef; the load factor increased far by the climb uphill.

‘I say,’ Ronjon cleared his throat, ‘we have nowhere to go yet with our luggage, so, why climb up and down. Better, you stay here. Meanwhile I go up and bring news about the arrangement of our stay. It may take a while.’ She threw an untrusting look at her and finally decided to obey with a faint murmur of protest: ‘How long can one wait alone in an unknown place like this? Come back soon.’

Nearly dying of thirst, as he climbed up the steep hillside, Ronjon finally huffed and puffed into the office. It was indeed nice to hear the officer say, ‘Mr Roy you are welcome to the Himalayan heights of this newly founded organization. We received your telegram and we have been expecting you. Have you reported yet?’ ‘O no, not yet, I have just arrived. But what do I have to report?’ ‘No, no sir, not that way,’ the officer sounded important. ‘There are formalities, as you know before joining. Come on to my desk and write a report that you have joined this university as of this forenoon. You got it Mr. Roy? Please don’t forget with effect from this forenoon.

Just like that! He joined and in the forenoon too.  He began to mentally calculate the days left for the month to be over. The officer explained that way he would remain senior to whoever would come after this hour! How considerate of you! I appreciate your help. Now, if you would excuse me. I need to rush back to the station to—

‘Yes, yes, your luggage, that is. Our driver Mangi Ram will pick up your luggage, but where have you kept it? In the station?’

‘Actually my wife has been sitting there with the luggage. I came here to know where to put up, Mr. Ram ( Is everybody here has the same surname, he wondered); it has been quite a while, my wife must have gone crazy by this time ,waiting in an unknown station for so long.’ He did not realize that it would be so long.

‘O Mangi Ram run, drive the jeep to the station below and fetch Mrs. Roy. No Doctor Saheb, you need not go, she will be brought here in a few minutes. Please complete the other formalities, so that you are paid this month’s salary with effect from today. Here you have written forenoon, as I advised you. That’s fine. Now let me do my job.’ Ronjon felt overwhelmed by such courtesy. Indian bureaucracy, where is thy sting? ‘I am so grateful to you for your help—

‘Not at all, Mr. Roy, not at all,’ said Mr. Ram and looked at the same time appreciative.

She became visible in the jeep that came up, or rather the end of her blue silk sari flying in the air. When they were in the jeep going to the Guest House, she spoke out half in rage, half in tears, ‘Leaving a woman like that all alone in that station for two hours!’ ‘It was not two hours, only an hour and a half. Walking up here took nearly half an hour and then going through the formalities and asking them to send a vehicle to bring you up. At least you did not have to walk up the hill, if you want to look at the brighter side of it.’

But she did not see it that way. He did not want her to accompany him. And all this she communicated by her look rather than by words. Ronjon braced up for more rough time inside the Guest House. The sight of the house, however, and the room they were ushered in pleased her—huge glass doors and windows, carpeted floor, a dressing room, and a huge double bed, snugly blanketed. Through the glass panes could be seem the white peaks rising above blue hills, enchanting the soul. ‘Wonderful! One can see the gods’ abode without having to get up from the bed,’ he spoke to her without getting a response. ‘Well, I am going out to see if any lunch is available at this hour. If it is, I will have it sent to you.’

He heard no response. As he went out, he looked behind his shoulders. She was still sitting with her back toward him, swaying her knees slowly from side to side, and keeping her head down, as if trying to control some emotion within her that she was unable to express in words. ‘To hell with her’, Ronjon almost thought aloud and stood gazing at the white peaks behind the blue hills, as he walked on. ‘Nothing in the world can compare with this heavenly sight,’ said he to himself, as was his habit when alone.

The room smelled of rice and curry, the stuff he had asked the boy in the canteen to bring to her. She had eaten a little of it, perhaps not liking it very much or perhaps as a way of protest for having to eat alone. ‘I ate on the run, going through the formalities. There was not enough time for me to come back and take you there.’ Ronjon felt angry with himself for having to explain. But she kept on sitting on the edge of the bed swaying her knees from side to side, keeping her head at a tense angle. He knew that a tender touch at moments like this leads to a great outburst. ‘A penny for your thought’, said he, but it did not cut any ice. And he knew now that this is what turns a guy mad, a gloomy silence, one of the weapons God gave to the weaker sex. ‘I am afraid,’ he went straight to the point therefore, you would have to be alone for long stretches of time, for I would be away doing my job downtown. That is why I had tried to make you believe that it would be better for you to come later, when I would have settled down a bit.’

He hit home. Or, did he? She bristled up, but said nothing, only her eyes darted fire at him. That was her way of showing anger. He turned away from her. Love was not in his heart. He did not know its language and he knew that he did not know the language. He closed the doors behind him as he came out and headed towards the sitting room upstairs with its huge bay windows. The sun was disappearing behind the mountains in an absolute riot of colours, first red, like vermilion, a little later, deep orange, and still later, purplish. There was plenitude in nature; his heart filled up with joy again.

It felt cold after the sunset. Swirls of cold worked their way up his legs. Ronjon returned to see how she was doing in the room below, but the picture there had not changed much, except that the dolorous dame, feeling cold, had put on her short wheat-coloured coat. He shuffled around for some time, looking sadly at the cold fireplace in the room. At last he broke the uneasy silence, ‘Come, we shall eat now, whatever is ready, and hit the sack. But for this cold weather, I would have collapsed on my feet.’ She got up slowly without a word. ‘Are you cold?’ asked Ronjon. ‘Why should I not be? Am I a bear that I would not feel the cold here?’ she spoke as if lodging a complaint.

In the kitchen, Ronjon cajoled the boy, a very fair complexioned, but paradoxically short sized Sikh with a turban on his head and almost no beard. ‘Don’t mind yaar, we shall eat whatever is ready, chapatti, dal or sag, and a little pickle. Hai kuch ?’ ‘Kuch kuch hai,’ said the imp. Ronjon’s Hindi amused him. No Bengali ever spoke it well, the boy was daring enough to suggest. The meal, however, tasted well in their hungry mouth and she too ate with content. She tore off large pieces off the chapattis, dipped them in dal, wrapped them around a morsel of methi ka sag, and sent them home, not ashamed to eat noisily. The turbaned cook served hot chapattis straight from the fire and she watched the process with sidelong glances. She began to relax. Life was beginning to be good to her.

Ronjon squeezed under the blanket with his sweater and socks on to fight the bitter cold. As his feet gradually became warm, he fell asleep, dreaming that he was back at the little Mid-Western town in the States, sleeping in a porch by that lake. It looked mystical at night with a blue light gleaming a great distance away on the opposite bank. Some one sitting by the lake sobbed and shed little drops of tears into the lake. He slowly woke up, half asleep, half aware, his heart throbbing a little. Yes indeed someone was moaning in the room like a sad child. He wondered for a while and then became aware that the moaning was coming from the dressing room. A flicker of light escaped through the door kept ajar. Was it a child moaning or a woman crying for her demon lover?

 He felt for her under her blanket, but she was not there at all. It dawned on him at last that she was crying in the dressing room. But why was she doing that? What was the matter with her at this time of the night? Was it some ache? Toothache may be; she had not dared to wake him up. No, she must be doing this to draw attention. Yes now he saw her game. But why should he play her game. Let her weep on, why should he get out of his warm blanket in this cold night? He pulled the blanket over his head and tried to sleep back again. But what if she died of cold? He sat up, tore himself out of the warm bed, and went inside the dressing room.

What he saw surprised him very much, frightened him too. She had put on her wheat-coloured coat, warm enough in Calcutta, but hardly anything of that sort in the mountain cold, and had apparently gone to sleep. A streak of saliva oozed out of her mouth, thrown into relief by her wet eyelashes.

‘What are you doing, eh? What are you doing? Have you gone mad? My God, look at her. Get up, get up, come back to bed quickly, or you’d freeze to death. You are half-frozen already.’ He stood her up and pressed her against himself, trying to give her warmth. Then he heavily walked her back to bed. He put his shawl around her neck and covered her head too in the manner of a cowl. Then he pulled her under his blanket, and put her own blanket on top. He took her hands in his, trying to warm them up. ‘Your hands are so cold and your hair too. You must have been gone for a long while and crying there. What if I had not waked up, you silly woman, you would have died of cold?’ She said not a word, lying still in his embrace, starting up once or twice, from the effect of sobbing for all that long. ‘I see one reason for your coming with me’, trying to divert her mind so that she would stop hiccoughing, ‘we could not keep ourselves warm in this cold otherwise.’

The morning came to consciousness. It was gray as glass and silent all around, the silence of the hills, he thought. The hills never replied to anything except to send the echo back. His eyes rested on the glass doors and through the drawn back curtains, he saw the hand-like branches of the deodars and beyond them the mountain peaks. It looked white all around. ‘Has it started to snow so early in the winter’ he thought. Suddenly it all came back to his mind; he hastened to feel for her in the bed; but she was not there. He jumped to his feet and rushed to the dressing room again. Yes, she was there all right, but sitting before the mirror, trying to tie her hair into a bun with one end of the lace caught between her teeth to let the hands work freely. A red streak of vermilion ran an inch or so up the middle parting of her hair.

‘The boy had brought your tea, but you were sleeping so hard, I did not wake you up,’ she said finishing the bun with a final knot. She looked prim and powdered. The essence she used filled up the little dressing room with the scent of a flower. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said caringly,  ‘I’ll go to the kitchen and heat up the tea for you.’

The snow fell in large flakes outside. The kitchen boy said that the offices would remain mostly closed that day. There was knee-deep snow on the roads. ‘Don’t go outside Sahib,’ said the boy knowledgeably, ‘one can slip on the ice and fall into a gorge.’ Ronjon went back to his bed and kept on gazing at the snow, still falling. The mighty deodars scooped them up from the sky with their outstretched branches, from where they fell again with the wind.

The familiar hair-oil smelled into his nose. ‘Your tea’, she said and handed over the glass to him, which felt nice to hold between the hands. Ronjon drank up his tea sitting up in his bed, while she gazed outside, silent and sitting a little away from him. He put the empty glass down, his hands now warmed nicely. Then he pulled her by the hand, down under the blanket. She was warm now, having come from the fire. He let her warm him up slowly under the blanket and kept gazing at the deodar trees filling up with snow.