After several hours, a woman started screaming that she felt cockroaches crawling on her back. She had been sitting in the corner on the opposite end of our compartment, next to a young couple and their two sleeping toddlers. Startled by the woman’s screams, both boys began to cry.
Their mother soothed them and then helped the other woman flick the roaches off her dupatta. The boys’ father offered her a newspaper to spread out underneath her. She thanked them and checked the floor again for any new insects. The boys stopped crying and sniffled themselves to sleep on their parents’ shoulders.
“How old are they?” the woman asked pleasantly, probably feeling bad for waking them.
“They are twins, both two years old.”
They looked alike, with their floppy hair and long eyelashes. I saw their breathing sync up—one would breathe in as the other breathed out—and wondered if it was like that for all twins. I wondered if they too would one day realize having each other sometimes felt like the best feeling, and sometimes like the worst. Or that having each other was the only feeling at times, everything else dissolving, since it was the truest connection to anyone they’d ever know.
Asya and I fell asleep hugging one another. Despite the heat, I still loved the warmth of my sister’s body, the way we always fit perfectly into one another. Mummy sometimes would find us hugging that way when we were small girls, since we used to share a big floor bed, all four of us, before we moved homes. She said that is how she imagined we slept in her stomach, clinging to each other, heartbeat to heartbeat.
I don’t know how long we slept, but it felt like we rolled night to day to night to day as the train carried on. The rain was relentless, pouring down over the windows and dripping through holes in the ceiling of the compartment. When the train jerked to a stop, a conductor yelled through the compartment, and we felt Didi hit our shoulders.
“Wake up, wake up; they are letting us off. The tracks ahead are flooded.” It was the first time we’d heard her speak, I realized. Even during the night, she had handed us a bottle of drinking water without speaking. Her voice was surprisingly raspy, and since we were so close, I saw her yellow, protruding teeth.
We exited the car onto a station platform facing large cement fields of unfinished buildings. The smog was so thick and rain so heavy that I could barely see past the tracks. We stood on the platform with the rest of the passengers, crowded together in the only covered area to avoid the rain.
Raspy-voiced Didi spoke again. “We must wait now for the next train. I don’t know when it will come.”
I had to use the restroom, but then Asya let go of my hand and moved her face into the raindrops, closing her eyes and letting the drops fall onto her tongue, hands, hair. It made me smile, and I let the image of her this way seep into my mind, like a photograph I would never forget. I felt better seeing Asya carefree, like maybe it would work out; I was just being anxious about the changes before.
We waited for hours. The dampness on the concrete platform started to feel cold, despite the warm, thick air. When the rain finally settled down, we saw men working the large buckets on the submerged tracks, clearing out whatever water they could.
Someone had urinated near where we sat, and the stench was horrific, but there was nowhere else for us all to go, so I covered my nose in Mummy’s green dupatta scarf. It still had hints of her smell. Jasmine talc powder. Roti flour remnants. The odor of the wood basin she washed our clothes in.
I was scared that in time I would forget her smell or the things that felt so real to me still. The way her slender fingers felt in my hair, the three small creases near her eyes that appeared when she smiled, the warmth of her body when we hugged.
Sadness rose in my throat as I thought of Mummy, and as much as I wanted to let it out, I swallowed it all down. Crying now wouldn’t help anyone. Instead I waited for our new life as the second train approached the platform.