Q & A

If you were to search for me in this crowded maze, where would you look? You would probably try to find me among the dozens of street children stretched out on the smooth concrete floor in various stages of rest and slumber. You might even imagine me as an adolescent hawker, peddling plastic bottles containing tap water from the station’s toilet as pure Himalayan aqua minerale. You could visualize me as one of the sweepers in dirty shirt and torn pants shuffling across the platform, with a long swishing broom transferring dirt from the pavement on to the track. Or you could look for me among the regiments of red-uniformed porters bustling about with heavy loads on their heads.

Well, think again, because I am neither hawker, nor porter, nor sweeper. Today I am a bona fide passenger, travelling to Mumbai, in the sleeper class, no less, and with a proper reservation. I am wearing a starched white bush shirt made of one hundred per cent cotton and Levi jeans – yes, Levi jeans, bought from the Tibetan Market. I am walking purposefully towards platform number five to board the Paschim Express for Mumbai. There is a porter trudging along by my side carrying a light-brown suitcase on his head. The porter has been hired by me and the suitcase on his head belongs to me. It contains a few clothes, some old toys, a bunch of Australian Geographic magazines and an electronic game for Salim. The suitcase does not contain any money. I have heard too many stories about robbers on trains who drug you at night and make off with your belongings to take the chance of keeping the most precious cargo of my life in the suitcase – my salary from the Taylors. The manila envelope full of crisp thousand-rupee notes – fifty of them – is therefore with me, hidden in a place where no one can see it. Inside my underwear. I have used the remaining two thousand to finance the trip. From it I have paid for my clothes, my ticket and the game for Salim, and now I will pay the porter and buy some food and drink. I take a quick look at the loose notes in my front pocket. I reckon I will have just enough to take an auto-rickshaw from Bandra Terminus to Salim’s chawl in Ghatkopar. Won’t Salim be surprised to see me arrive in a three-wheeler instead of the local train? And when he sees the game, I hope he doesn’t faint from happiness.

Platform number five is more crowded than Super Bazaar. Hawkers are out in as much force as touts outside a government office. Passengers hunt for their names on the reservation chart with the same fervour as students scanning examination results. I find that the railway department has completely mangled my name, making it T. M. Ram. I am happy, nevertheless, to see that I have been allotted lower berth three in coach S7.

The coach is almost at the end of the long train, and the porter is tired and sweating by the time we enter it. I settle down on my designated berth, which is right next to the door, and arrange the suitcase neatly in the space underneath. I pay the porter twenty rupees. He argues for more, points out the long distance from the station’s entrance to the coach, and I tip him a further two rupees. Having disposed of the porter, I survey the scene around me.

My cabin has a total of six berths. One above me, two in front of me and two on the side. Sitting on the lower berth opposite me is a family of four, a father, mother and two children – a boy, around my age, and a girl, slightly older. The father is a middle-aged Marwari businessman dressed in the trademark black waistcoat and black cap. He has bushy eyebrows, a pencil moustache, and a stern expression on his face. His wife is of a similar age and is equally grim looking. She wears a green sari and a yellow blouse and looks at me with suspicious eyes. The boy is tall and gangly and looks friendly, but it is the girl sitting next to the window who draws my attention like a magnet. She is thin and fair, wearing a blue salwar kameez with the chunni pulled down over her chest. Her expressive eyes are lined with kohl. She has a flawless complexion and lovely lips. She is the most beautiful girl I have seen in a long time. One who demands a second look. And a third. I think I can lose myself in those bewitching eyes of hers. But before I can reflect on her beauty any further, my attention is distracted by a baby who starts crying loudly. It is a baby boy, just a few months old, sitting on the side berth in his mother’s lap. The mother is a young, morose-looking woman wearing a crumpled red sari. It looks as if she is travelling alone. She tries to calm the baby with a rubber pacifier, but the baby continues to wail. Finally she pushes up her blouse and offers a breast to the baby’s lips. He suckles contentedly and she rocks him to sleep. From my seat I glimpse the underside of her plump brown breast and it makes my mouth dry, till I catch the Marwari businessman looking directly at me and I shift my eyes to the window behind her.

A tea vendor enters the compartment. I am the only one who asks for a cup. He dishes out tepid tea in an earthen receptacle, which tastes vaguely of mud. He is followed by a newspaper boy. The businessman purchases a copy of the Times of India. His son buys an Archie comic. I buy the latest issue of Starburst from my fast-dwindling change.

The train gives a final whistle and begins to move off, an hour and a half behind schedule. I glance at my watch, even though I can clearly see 18:30 displayed on the platform’s digital clock. I shake and twist my wrist, hoping that the others, particularly the girl, will notice that I am wearing a brand new Kasio digital watch, made in Japan, with day and date, which cost me a whopping two hundred rupees in Palika Bazaar.

The father immerses himself in the newspaper, the son in his comic. The mother starts making arrangements for the family’s dinner. The other young mother has gone off to sleep, the baby still glued to her breast. I pretend to read the film magazine. It is open at the centrefold, which displays the latest sex symbol, Poonam Singh, in a bikini, but I have no interest in her vital assets. I keep casting furtive glances at the girl, who is looking abstractedly at the urban scenery rushing past the window. She doesn’t look at me even once.

At eight pm a black-waistcoated ticket examiner enters the compartment. He asks for all our tickets. I whip mine out with a flourish, but he doesn’t even read it. He simply punches it and returns it to me. As soon as he has gone, the mother opens up rectangular cardboard boxes containing food. Lots of it. I see shrivelled puris, yellow potatoes, red pickles and dessert. The mouth-watering aroma of home-made gulab jamuns and barfees fills the compartment. I am beginning to feel hungry too, but the pantry boy has still not come to take orders for dinner. Perhaps I should have picked up something from the station.

The Marwari family eats heartily. The father gobbles puri after puri. The mother polishes off the golden-yellow potatoes, taking a juicy chilli pickle after each bite. The boy makes a beeline for the soft gulab jamuns and even slurps up the sugary syrup. Only the girl eats lightly. I lick my lips in silence. Strangely enough, the boy offers me a couple of puris, but I decline politely. I have heard many stories of robbers disguised as passengers who offer drug-laced food to their fellow travellers and then make off with their money. And there is no reason why boys who read Archie comics cannot be robbers. Though if the girl had offered me food I might – no, I would – have accepted.

After finishing dinner, the boy and girl start playing a board game called Monopoly. The father and mother sit side by side and chat. They discuss the latest soaps on TV, something about buying property and travelling to Goa for a holiday.

I pat my abdomen gently where fifty thousand rupees in crisp new notes nestle inside the waistband of my underwear, and feel the power of all that money seep insidiously into my stomach, my intestines, my liver, lungs, heart and brain. The hunger gnawing at my stomach disappears miraculously.

Looking at the typical middle-class family scene in front of me, I don’t feel like an interloper any more. I am no longer an outsider peeping into their exotic world, but an insider who can relate to them as an equal, talk to them in their own language. Like them, I too can now watch middle-class soaps, play Nintendo and visit Kids Mart at weekends.

Train journeys are about possibilities. They denote a change in state. When you arrive, you are no longer the same person who departed. You can make new friends en route, or find old enemies; you may get diarrhoea from eating stale samosas or cholera from drinking contaminated water. And, dare I say it, you might even discover love. Sitting in berth number three of coach S7 of train 2926A, with fifty thousand rupees tucked inside my underwear, the tantalizing possibility which tickled my senses and thrilled my heart was that I might, just might, be about to fall in love with a beautiful traveller in a blue salwar kameez. And when I say love, I don’t mean the unrequited, unequal love that we profess for movie stars and celebrities. I mean real, practical, possible love. Love which does not end in tears on the pillow, but which can fructify into marriage. And kids. And family holidays in Goa.

I had only fifty thousand rupees, but every rupee had a technicolour dream written on it and they stretched out on a cinemascope screen in my brain to become fifty million. I held my breath and wished for that moment to last as long as it possibly could, because a waking dream is always more fleeting than a sleeping one.

After a while, the brother and sister tire of their board game. The boy comes and sits next to me. We begin talking. I learn that his name is Akshay and his sister is Meenakshi. They live in Delhi and are going to Mumbai to attend an uncle’s wedding. Akshay is excited about his Playstation 2 and his computer games. He asks me about MTV and surfing the Internet and mentions some porn sites. I tell him that I speak English, read Australian Geographic, play Scrabble and have seven girlfriends, three of them foreign. I tell him that I have a Playstation 3 console and a Pentium 5 computer and I surf the Internet day and night. I tell him that I am going to Mumbai to meet my best friend, Salim, and I will be taking a taxi from Bandra Terminus to Ghatkopar.

I should have known that it is more difficult to fool a sixteen-year-old than a sixty-year-old. Akshay sees through my deception. ‘Ha! You don’t know anything about computers. Playstation 3 hasn’t even been released. You are just a big liar,’ he mocks me.

I cannot resist it. ‘Oh, so you think it is all a big lie, eh? Well, Mr Akshay, let me tell you that right here, right now, I have fifty thousand rupees in my pocket. Have you ever seen so much money in your life?’

Akshay refuses to believe me. He challenges me to show the money, and the prospect of impressing him is too tempting for me. I turn around, push my hand into my pants and bring out the manila envelope, slightly damp and smelling of urine. I surreptitiously take out the sheaf of crisp thousand-rupee notes and flutter them before him triumphantly. Then I quickly put them back and deposit the envelope in its former resting place.

You should have seen Akshay’s eyes. They literally popped out of their sockets. It was a victory to be savoured for eternity. For the first time in my life, I had something more tangible than a dream to back up a claim. And for the first time in my life, I saw something new reflected in the eyes that saw me. Respect. It taught me a very valuable lesson. That dreams have power only over your own mind. But with money you can have power over the minds of others. And once again it made the fifty thousand inside my underwear feel like fifty million.

The father goes to sleep straight away – I can hear him snoring. The mother turns on her side and pulls up her sheet. I crane my neck to catch a glimpse of Meenakshi, but I can only see her right hand, with a gold bangle on her wrist. Suddenly she sits up in bed and bends down in my direction to drop her shoes. Her chunni has slipped and I can clearly see the top of her breasts through the V neck of her blue kameez. The sight sends an involuntary shiver of pleasure down my back. I think she catches me watching her, because she quickly adjusts her chunni over her chest and gives me a disapproving look.

After a while I, too, drift off to sleep, dreaming middle-class dreams of buying a million different things, including a red Ferrari and a beautiful bride in a blue salwar kameez. All with fifty thousand rupees.

Akshay, Meenakshi and their father are prodded similarly and made to climb down from their berths. They are groggy and disoriented. When you are woken up suddenly in the middle of the night, the brain takes some time to respond.

We are all sitting on the lower berths now. Akshay and his father sit next to me, and Meenakshi, her mother and the woman with the baby sit opposite us. The baby is getting cranky again and begins to cry. The mother tries to soothe it but the baby begins crying even more loudly. ‘Give her your milk,’ the dacoit tells her gruffly. The mother is flustered. She pushes up her blouse, and instead of one, exposes both breasts. The dacoit grins at her and makes a show of grabbing one of her breasts. She screams and hastily covers it. The dacoit laughs. I don’t get titillated this time. A loaded gun pointed at your head is more riveting than an exposed breast.

Now that the dacoit has everyone’s undivided attention, he gets down to business. He holds aloft a brown gunny sack in his left hand, with the gun in his right. ‘OK, now I want you to hand over all your valuables. Put them in this sack. I want the men to hand me their wallets and watches and any cash in their pockets, the ladies to hand me their purses, bangles and gold chains. If there is anyone who does not comply with my instructions, I will shoot him dead instantly.’ Meenakshi’s mother and the young mother scream simultaneously when they hear this. We hear cries coming from the far side of the compartment. The dacoit’s partner is, presumably, issuing similar instructions to passengers on his side.

The dacoit takes round the open sack to all of us one by one. He starts with the mother and child. With a terrified expression she takes her brown leather purse, opens it quickly to remove a pacifier and a bottle of milk, then drops the bag into the sack. Her baby, whose breastfeeding has been interrupted momentarily, begins wailing again. Meenakshi looks stunned. She takes off her gold bangle, but as she is about to put it in the sack, the dacoit drops the sack and grabs her wrist. ‘You are much more beautiful than a bangle, my darling,’ he says as Meenakshi desperately tries to escape the man’s vice-like grip. The dacoit lets go of her wrist and makes a grab for her kameez. He catches her shirt by the collar, she pulls back, and in the process the shirt almost tears in half, exposing her bra. We all watch, horrified. Meenakshi’s father can take it no longer. ‘You bastard!’ he cries and tries to punch the dacoit, but the man has panther-like reflexes. He releases Meenakshi’s shirt and hits her father with the butt of his pistol. A deep gash opens up instantly on the businessman’s forehead, from which blood starts oozing out. Meenakshi’s mother starts screaming again.

‘Shut up,’ the dacoit growls, ‘or I will kill all of you.’

These words have a sobering impact and we all become absolutely still. A lump of fear forms in my throat and my hands become cold. I listen to everyone’s laboured breathing. Meenakshi sobs quietly. Her mother drops her bangles and her purse into the sack, her father puts in his watch and his wallet with shaky fingers, Akshay asks whether he should put in the Archie comic. This infuriates the dacoit. ‘You think this is a joke?’ he hisses and slaps the boy. Akshay yelps in pain and begins nursing his cheek. For some reason I find the exchange rather funny, like a comic interlude in a horror film. The dacoit berates me. ‘What are you grinning at? And what have you got?’ he snaps. I take out the remaining notes and change from my front pocket and drop them in the sack, leaving only my lucky one-rupee coin. I begin to unfasten my wristwatch, but the dacoit looks at it and says, ‘That is a fake. I don’t want it.’ He appears to be satisfied with the haul from our cabin and is about to move on when Akshay calls out, ‘Wait, you have forgotten something.’

I watch the scene unfold as if in slow motion. The dacoit whirls around. Akshay points at me and says, ‘This boy has got fifty thousand rupees!’ He says it softly, but it seems to me the entire train has heard it.

The dacoit looks menacingly at Akshay. ‘Is this another joke?’

‘N-no,’ says Akshay. ‘I swear.’

The dacoit looks underneath my berth. ‘Is it in this brown suitcase?’

‘No, he has hidden it in his underwear, in a packet,’ Akshay replies, smirking.

‘Ah ha!’ the dacoit exhales.

I am trembling – I don’t know whether from fear or anger. The dacoit approaches me. ‘Will you give me the money quietly or should I make you strip in front of all these people?’ he asks.

‘No! This is my money!’ I cry, and instinctively protect my crotch like a footballer blocking a free kick. ‘I have earned it. I will not give it to you. I don’t even know your name.’

The dacoit gives a raucous laugh. ‘Don’t you know what dacoits do? We take money which doesn’t belong to us, from people who don’t even know our name. Now are you giving me the packet or should I pull down your pants and take it out myself?’ He waves the pistol in my face.

Like a defeated warrior, I surrender before the might of the gun. I slowly insert my fingers into the waistband of my pants and pull out the manila envelope, sticky with sweat and smelling of humiliation. The dacoit grabs it from my hand and opens it. He whistles when he sees the crisp new thousand-rupee notes. ‘Where the fuck did you get all this money from?’ he asks me. ‘You must have stolen it from somewhere. Anyway, I don’t care.’ He drops it in the gunny sack. ‘Now none of you move while I meet the other folks in your compartment.’

I just stare dumbly and watch fifty million dreams being snatched away from me, dumped into a brown gunny sack where they jostle with middle-class bangles and wallets.

The dacoit has moved on to the next section of the compartment, but none of us dares to pull the emergency cord. We remain rooted to our seats, like mourners at a funeral. He returns after ten minutes with the sack on his back, its mouth tied, the gun in his right hand. ‘Good,’ he says, hefting the sack to show us it is full and heavy. He looks at me and grins, like a bully who has just snatched someone’s toy. Then he looks at Meenakshi. She has covered her front with her chunni, but through the gauzy fabric the white cloth of her bra is visible. He smacks his lips.

The dacoit’s partner shouts, ‘I am ready. Are you ready?’

‘Yes,’ calls our dacoit in reply. The train suddenly begins to slow down.

‘Hurry!’ The other dacoit jumps down from the train.

‘I am coming in a second. Here, take the sack.’ Our dacoit sends the sack – and fifty million dreams – spinning out of the door. He is about to jump down, but changes his mind at the last second. He comes back to our cabin. ‘Quick, give me a goodbye kiss,’ he tells Meenakshi, waving the gun at her. Meenakshi is terrified. She cowers in her seat.

‘You don’t want to give me a kiss? OK, then take off your chunni. Let me see your breasts,’ he orders. He holds the gun with both hands and snarls at Meenakshi. ‘Last warning. Quick, show me some skin or I’ll blow your head off before I leave.’ Meenakshi’s father closes his eyes. Her mother faints.

Sobbing and weeping, Meenakshi begins to unfurl her chunni. Underneath will only be a piece of white fabric. With two straps and two cups.

But I am not seeing this happening. I am seeing a tall woman with flowing hair. The wind is howling behind her, making her jet-black hair fly across her face, obscuring it. She is wearing a white sari whose thin fabric flutters and vibrates like a kite. She holds a baby in her arms. A man with long hair and a thick moustache, wearing black trousers and a white shirt approaches her. He points a gun at her and grins. ‘Open your sari,’ he barks. The woman begins to cry. Lightning flashes. Dust scatters. Leaves fly. The baby suddenly jumps from the mother’s lap and leaps at the man, clawing at his face. The man shrieks and pulls the baby away, but the baby lunges at his face again. The man and the baby roll on the ground while the woman in the sari wails in the background. The man twists his hand and points his gun at the baby’s face, but today the baby is blessed with superhuman powers. With tiny fingers he pushes at the barrel of the gun, reversing its direction. Man and baby wrestle again, going left and right, rolling on the ground. They are locked in a death struggle. At times the man gains the upper hand and at times the baby appears to be winning. The man finally manages to free his gun-carrying arm. His fingers curl round the trigger. The baby’s chest is directly in front of the barrel. The man is about to press the trigger, but at the last moment the baby manages to twist the gun away from himself and towards the man’s own chest. There is a deafening explosion and the man rears back as if hit by a powerful blast. A scarlet stain appears on his white shirt.

‘Oh, my God!’ I hear Akshay’s voice, like an echo in a cave. The dacoit is lying on the floor, inches from the door, and I have a pistol in my hand, from which a thin plume of smoke is drifting upwards. The train is beginning to gather speed.

I have still not quite understood what has happened. When you are woken up suddenly in the middle of a dream, the brain takes some time to respond. But if you have a smoking gun in your hand and a dead man at your feet, there is little room for misunderstanding. The dacoit’s shirt is suffused with blood, the stain darkening and expanding all the time. It is not like they show you in the movies, where a bullet produces an instant little red patch and it remains like that till they cart away the body in an ambulance. No. The blood doesn’t even come out at first. It begins to seep out very gradually. First there is a tiny red dot, no bigger than a thumbtack, then it becomes a circular patch the size of a coin, then it grows as large as a saucer, then it expands to the size of a dinner plate, and it just keeps growing and growing till the flow becomes a torrent. I begin gasping for breath and the whole compartment is about to drown in a red river when Akshay’s father shakes my shoulders violently. ‘Snap out of it, I say!’ he shouts, and the redness lifts.

I sit on my berth with a crowd of people around me. Virtually the entire compartment has come to see what has happened. Men, women and children crane forward. They see a dead dacoit, whose name nobody knows, lying on the ground with a dark-red patch on his white shirt, a father with a gash on his forehead, a terrified mother from whose breasts every drop of milk has been squeezed by a famished baby, a brother who will never read Archie comics on a train again, a sister who will have nightmares for the rest of her life. And a street boy who, for a brief moment, had some money, and who will never have middle-class dreams again.

The yellow light in the cabin seems unusually harsh. I blink repeatedly and hold the gun limply in my hands. It is small and compact with a silver metallic body and a black grip. It says ‘Colt’ in chiselled letters and has a picture of a jumping horse on either side of the inscription. I flip it over. On the other side of the muzzle it says ‘Lightweight’, but it feels ridiculously heavy. The pistol has some letters and numbers engraved on it which have become faded. I make out ‘Conn USA’ and ‘DR 24691’.

Meenakshi glances at me furtively. She looks at me like Salim looks at film stars. I know that at this moment she is in love with me. If I propose to her now, she will marry me. Happily have my children. Even without the fifty thousand. But I don’t return her glances because everything has changed. I look only at the pistol in my hand and the face of the dead dacoit, whose name I don’t know.

He could have died in any number of ways. He could have been shot dead in the middle of a crowded market in a police encounter. He could have been butchered by a rival gang as he sipped tea at a roadside stall. He could have died in hospital from cholera, cancer or AIDS. But no, he did not die from any of these. He died from a bullet fired by me. And I didn’t even know his name.

Train journeys are all about possibilities. But a hole in the heart has a certain finality to it. There is no more travelling for a dead body. Perhaps to a funeral pyre, but it will definitely not meet any more hawkers or ticket examiners. I, however, am likely to encounter not just hawkers and ticket examiners, but also the police. How will they treat me? As a hero who protected the modesty of a girl and rid the world of a notorious dacoit, or as a cold-blooded killer who shot dead a man without even knowing his name? I know only one thing: I cannot gamble on finding out. And then Colonel Taylor’s words crash into my consciousness like a bolt from the sky. ‘CYTLYT, Confuse Your Trail, Lose Your Tail.’ I know exactly what I have to do.

Just as the train is about to pull into the next station, where, without doubt, a posse of policemen will be waiting for me, I leap out of the door with the gun still in my hand. I race across the track and jump into another train which is about to steam away from the platform. I don’t sit in any compartment; just hang out at the door. As the train passes over a cantilever bridge, I send the gun spinning into the dark river. Then, as the train comes to a stop at the next station, I hop out and find another train going somewhere else. I do this the entire night, moving from station to station, train to train.

Cities go by in a blur. I don’t know whether I am travelling north or south, east or west. I don’t even know the names of the trains. I just keep changing them. The only thing I know for certain is that I cannot go to Mumbai. Akshay might have told the police about Salim and they could arrest me in Ghatkopar. I also don’t want to get off at a dingy, deserted station and attract needless attention. I wait for a station with plenty of light, sound and people.

At nine o’clock in the morning, the train I am travelling in steams on to a bustling, crowded platform. I alight wearing a hundred-per-cent-cotton bush shirt which is torn and has three buttons missing, Levi jeans which are caked with soot and grime, and a fake digital watch. This city seems like a good place to hole up for a while. I see a big yellow board at the edge of the platform bearing its name. It proclaims in bold black letters: ‘AGRA. Height above mean sea level 169 metres.’

‘Two men. Don’t forget how I pushed Shantaram,’ I reply.

‘But what happened in the train was an accident. And you could even justify it on the grounds of self-defence. Anyway, I’ll first find out whether a case was even registered. I don’t think the other passengers would have wanted to implicate you. You rescued them, after all. By the way, what happened to that girl, Meenakshi? Did you see her again?’

‘No. Never. Now let’s return to the show.’

Prem Kumar turns to me. ‘We now move on to question number seven for two hundred thousand rupees. Are you ready?’

‘Ready,’ I reply.

‘OK. Here is question number seven. Who invented the revolver? Was it a) Samuel Colt, b) Bruce Browning, c) Dan Wesson, or d) James Revolver?’

The music commences. I go into deep thought.

‘Have you heard any of these names?’ Prem asks me.

‘One of them sounds familiar.’

‘So do you want to withdraw or would you like to take a chance?’

‘I think I will take a chance.’

‘Think again. You might lose the one lakh rupees you have won up to now.’

‘I have nothing to lose. I am ready to play.’

‘OK. So what is your final answer?’

‘A. Colt.’

‘Are you absolutely, one hundred per cent sure?’

‘Yes.’

There is a crescendo of drums. The correct answer flashes.

‘Absolutely, one hundred per cent correct! It was indeed Samuel Colt who invented the revolver in 1835. You have just doubled your winnings to two lakh rupees!’

I can’t believe it. I have won back my fifty thousand rupees with three times interest. Thanks to a swarthy dacoit, whose name I didn’t know.

There are ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the audience. The signature tune is repeated, but the only sound reverberating in my ears is the relentless piston movement of a train travelling from Delhi to Mumbai, via Agra.

Prem Kumar suddenly leaps out of his chair to shake my hand, but finds it limp and unresponsive. If you are taken by surprise in the middle of a game show, the brain takes some time to respond.