Artwork by Kaya Joan
The youngsters from the adjacent berth playing the twenty questions game had gotten off at the Mughal Sarai Junction, and the Rajdhani Express was speeding into the ever-growing night to Delhi. The man in the opposite berth—whom Mr. Pal had casually referred to as Sardar ji all evening—proposed, “We should play the game too. You think of something and I’ll guess what it is.”
Mr. Pal and Sardar ji were finishing up their dinners. Mr. Pal’s wife had packed his with the greatest ceremony as she always did when he traveled: fried puris, chole, pickles, and two perfectly even-colored rasgullas. He ate these delicacies out of a multi-tiered stainless-steel tiffin on the newspaper sheets she had not forgotten to pack. Stained with oil from the puris, the sheets had become translucent, their headlines already a matter of yesterday. Sardar ji, on the other hand, had ordered his dinner from the train pantry: a box of chicken biryani, which he complained had so little chicken in it that they might as well have sold it labeled as fried rice.
Other passengers in the compartment had started turning their lights off and going to sleep, covered from head to toe in blankets and white sheets they had borrowed from the train’s goods coach for twenty-five rupees. Mr. Pal was lost in thoughts that flashed through his mind like the small islands of light in the sea of darkness outside his window. It was in this state that Sardar ji’s proposal to play the game caught him, arresting a single image unshakably in his mind.
He smiled. “Why not?”
Sardar ji slapped his thighs excitedly. “Now you’re talking!” he exclaimed and then, without stopping to think, asked, “Is it a celebrity?”
“No.”
“A film?”
“No.”
“A song?”
“No.”
Most of the youngsters’ questions had been about such things. Finding himself in uncharted territory, Sardar ji now stopped to think before asking his next question. Mr. Pal thought, too. There was a film that had come out the year he had graduated college. He had watched the doomed romance between two brilliant college students at a theater with his friends, after which, on many nights, he had waited for the film’s title song to play on the radio.
“Are you thinking of home?”
“No,” Mr. Pal answered, but Sardar ji’s question made sense to him. A man riding the train away from home thinks of home more than he thinks of the destination. But when Sardar ji mentioned home, his mind went to his father’s house, where he used to daydream to the songs aired on the Vividh Bharati station, pretending to read from his college textbooks when his mother brought him his nightly glass of milk. “Turn the radio off—at least at this hour,” she would say.
“Children?” Sardar ji asked.
The question startled Mr. Pal. He had forgotten all about the game for a moment. But remembering the next moment, he said, “Yes, I have two lovely daughters. But I’m not thinking of them now, which is as long as a father can afford to not think of his daughters.”
“I have a daughter myself—I understand,” Sardar ji replied and smiled suggestively. “Well then, are you thinking of bhabhi ji?”
The scent of Pond’s talcum powder penetrated Mr. Pal’s nostrils. His wife sprinkled herself with it generously every morning before praying and devoting herself to household chores. He could see it in the folds of her skin, in which the powder settled like a child’s outline of a drawing in a bright marker. He had come to associate the scent with his domestic life.
Mr. Pal felt that Sardar ji had not been tactical. He could have simply turned the questions about his wife and daughters into a single question by asking him if he was thinking of his family. But it seemed that he prioritized teasing him by asking about his wife.
“No, I’m not thinking of her,” he said.
“Offo!” Sardar ji slapped himself again, this time only one of his thighs. “Is it a person?”
“No.”
“Is it a thing or a concept?”
“Thing.”
But the dichotomy was false. Don’t all things, with time, also become concepts? Mr. Pal was pleased by the neatness of the thought but immediately checked himself. Philosophizing was also a kind of daydreaming, and he had come to adopt his father’s maxim, one he had once scoffed at: that a man who daydreamed was a fool of a man. Besides, wasn’t Sardar ji breaking the rules of the game by not sticking to only yes-or-no questions? But wasn’t he himself just thinking that this dichotomy was false? How could it then be answered with a yes or no? To keep things simple, he repeated again, as if rebuking himself, “It’s a thing.”
“Is it a thing on this train?”
“No.”
“Is it a thing you own?”
“No.”
But on second thought, it occurred to Mr. Pal that only he owned it. So he cautiously added, “I kind of do.”
“Is it the train blankets and sheets?” Sardar ji asked excitedly.
“No! I already told you that it’s not on this train. But there goes your eleventh question.”
“Right, right,” Sardar ji slapped his thighs, but this time gently and with a dejected sigh. “Is it a tree around your house?”
There was a gulmohar tree in the backyard of his father’s house. It was planted by his father’s father. Mr. Pal’s father himself had planted several trees: a guava, a lemon, a pomegranate. Someday, he would retire from his job to his father’s small-town house, locked up and dusty at present, and himself plant a tree. It occurred to him that in planting a tree in his backyard what a man was really doing was planting roots firmly in the present to save himself from falling again and again into the past. He would plant a semal tree. But he did not tell this to Sardar ji and instead said, “No. I live in the government quarters through my job. There’s not a tree around that I could call my own.” Quietly, in his mind, he added, “That’s why I always fall into the past.”
“You said you live in government quarters. Perhaps you also have a government car? Are you thinking of your car?”
Mr. Pal snorted. “To think the government would give me a car like I’m some VIP. No, I’m not thinking of it because I don’t have one. I never had one.”
“Are you thinking of money then?”
“No, I don’t have money either. Nor did I ever have it.”
“But you see, only those who don’t have money think of money. Perhaps you’re thinking of your job?”
“The same applies here. Only those who don’t have a job think of a job. I’ve had a job for a very long time, and for a very long time I haven’t given it a thought.”
They both laughed, Mr. Pal from his belly, and in that moment he did, in fact, think of his job.
There were only two things he looked forward to on any given workday: when tea was brought to him and his colleagues in little paper cups by the office peon before lunch, and when tea was brought to him and his colleagues in little paper cups by the office peon after lunch. It seemed to him that his days went on and on, like a path without a destination, punctuated only by the two tea breaks.
“Why didn’t I think of it before!” Sardar ji exclaimed. “It’s a keepsake!”
“No.” Mr. Pal shook his head.
There was, however, a keepsake from the day he had gotten his college degree and the juniors had organized a farewell party for his batch. The dress code was kurta-pyjama for men and saree for women. His friend had pinned a rose to the breast pocket of his black kurta. Mr. Pal hadn’t seen that friend in years. Perhaps he, like others, was also planting trees in his backyard now. But Mr. Pal had kept the rose ever since—
“A book?”
“No.”
Yes, he had kept the rose in a book, one of the many books from his college years. At the moment, it was most likely gathering dust inside a box in his father’s home. He had felt so many possibilities when he had carried the books with him, on his person and in his mind, his mind, which now was dust-eaten as well.
“Oh bhai!” Sardar ji opened his eyes wide as a thought descended upon him. “Is it something you had on this train with you but was stolen?” Then, lowering his voice, he added, “Did the youngsters who got down at the Mughal Sarai Junction steal it from you?”
“Oh come on, Sardar ji. You’re letting your imagination carry you away. No!”
Sardar ji’s face dropped.
But hadn’t the youngsters stolen something from him? They had stolen his tranquility. They had stolen the dust that had settled over his books and his father’s house and his mind. They had plucked him from the present and had placed him in the realm of possibilities, possibilities, which, looking back, had closed on him like a mouth and had taken the shape of a regretful smile.
“Are you thinking of a railway station?”
“How did you even arrive at that thought?”
“Public property—you kind of own it.”
“Kind of own it, my foot. Tell me, Sardar ji, does the public really own anything in this country? The politicians elude the public by changing the names of railway stations, while the railway stations remain in a state of decrepitness. They think—” Mr. Pal stopped and added more softly, “What I wanted to say was: I’m not thinking of a railway station.”
The outburst left a strange taste in Mr. Pal’s mouth. He was back in his father’s house again, the ghost of the present in the past, watching his father read a newspaper in his rickety chair and rant against the state of the world. But as the haze surrounding him cleared away, Mr. Pal realized that the face behind the newspaper was not his father’s, but that the eyes behind the thickly framed glasses were his own. When does a man grow old? When does he become his father? Perhaps when he catches himself angry at the world squeezed before him into a rectangle called a newspaper. Perhaps it was just now, this very moment on the train, that his transformation into his father had been complete.
“Is it something I’ve seen or known before?” Sardar ji asked his twentieth, and thus, his last question.
Mr. Pal had set Sardar ji up to lose. There was no way he could have guessed it right, or for that matter, anyone else in the world. It was only him that day, the day of his college farewell, waiting for her, the girl for whom he listened to the songs on his radio. He had intended to give her the rose his friend had pinned to his breast pocket.
“No, Sardar ji. You’ve never seen or known it before.”
“Ah fine, ji. I accept defeat.”
“Tell us now what you were thinking about!” a new voice, from one of the upper berths, asked, and Mr. Pal and Sardar ji burst into laughter. Their game had spectators.
Unable to hand the rose to her or meet her eyes, his eyes had landed on her feet. She was wearing a pair of silver sandals, only slightly bigger than his hands, its straps lined with star-like crystals. He had forgotten the color of her saree or even her face. But whenever he heard her name, which was a common name, the sandals rose to his vision so sharply delineated that he feared his memories had the power to materialize.
“I’m thinking of a pair of sandals.” Mr. Pal smiled.
The man in the upper berth yanked away his blanket and sat up as far as the space allowed, repeating Mr. Pal’s words with indignation, “A pair of sandals!”
“I know!” Sardar ji said, echoing the indignation, “How could one have guessed that!”
But Mr. Pal was already not listening. Those sandals seemed to be everywhere around him: on Sardar ji’s feet and tucked above the Vimal Pan Masala bag that belonged to the man in the upper berth, and when the train stopped at the next station, they were on the feet of every boarding and deboarding passenger. The family members greeting or waving goodbye to these passengers were also wearing them, and so were the hawkers selling tea and peanut cones, racing with the now moving train to finish up transactions with the passengers in the train windows.
But Mr. Pal knew that he would always be a little too late, a little too far behind if he stretched his hands out to touch the sandals. This was life—to yearn for that which cannot be reached, a state of rest, of stasis, even while being on one of the fastest trains in the country.