Bhowani Junction (27 page)

Pater came out of the Stationmaster’s office, his red bandanna on his head and the tin box with food and a thermos flask in his hand. I ran to him and threw my arms round his neck.

Pater put down the box and patted my shoulder awkwardly.

He stood a bit away from me and said sadly, ‘You are still glad to see me? That is good, anyhow. What is your name now?’

I wiped the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand and answered, ‘Victoria Jones. Oh, Pater, I was frightened.’

Pater’s eyes grew and grew and became blurred and watery. He put out both hands, caught mine, and pressed them, but could not speak. The driver from the train came and stood beside us. Pater turned to him, and they talked. The other man handed over a small box and a book and walked away.

I said, ‘Pater, I must get away from here. I’ll go and stay with the Roviras in Gondwara for a few days. Let me come with you. In the cab.’

He said, ‘In the cab, girl? Oh, I wish you could, but I would lose my job. This is Ninety-Eight Up, man, not a night slow goods on the branch!’

I knew it was useless to argue, although at that moment I wanted nothing in the world as much as I wanted to be on the engine with Pater, rushing noisily away from Bhowani and the Sikh congregation and the new name beginning with K, which had bright new iron chains hanging from it.

Savage came up to us. He said, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Jones. I’m coming down to Gondwara on this train. I’m coming in the cab as far as Shahpur—military duty’—he winked—‘a personal reconaissance of the rail, from the engine driver’s point of view.’

‘In the cab?’ Pater said. ‘On military duty? Why,
that
is the answer! My girl here has just been asking to come in the cab with me, and I had to say no. But if you
order
her, on military duty, no one can say no, eh? She is going to Gondwara. And—oh, Colonel I must tell you. She is out of this damned nonsense about becoming a Sikh. I am so pleased, and
I bet you are too.’

Savage said to me, ‘You’re going to Gondwara?’ I waited for him to ask nastily who gave me leave to go anywhere, but he didn’t. He said, ‘Consider yourself so ordered. And you didn’t have time to change into uniform.’

Pater pulled out the big railway watch from his trouser pocket. ‘We must get a move on. You will dirty that nice uniform, sir. You ought to wear old chothes for this job.’

‘It’s an old set,’ Savage said. ‘After you.’ He followed Pater and me up into the cab. Pater picked a piece of dasootie out of a box and began to rub his fingers through it. From then on he did that all the time. He settled himself on the jump seat, put on a single glove, and told the fireman to hose down the footplate.

A pea-whistle shrilled down the platform. I saw Mr Glover, the conductor-guard, his white uniform glittering like a jewel as he stepped out into the sun from under the shade of the platform canopy. He waved a green flag. The Stationmaster passed on the signal to Pater.

Pater said, ‘We are quite a crowd in here, aren’t we? But I have had more than this, when half a dozen of those damned inspecting officers want to see why the drivers are using so much coal.’ He laughed delightedly, grabbed the whistle-cord, which stretched in a tight loop over his head, and tugged sharply. ‘Show me the key, Mothi,’ he said.

The first fireman reached down the bamboo hoop with its slotted steel ball from its place. Pater began to explain to Colonel Savage what it was for.

‘You only have to use these on a single line?’ Savage asked, handing the key back. It was good to hear him asking silly questions. I didn’t understand how any grown-up, educated person would not know at least that much.

Pater said, ‘All ready now?’

He slapped the younger fireman on his bare brown shoulder. They were both burly fellows, Hindus, bare to the waist, below that wearing blue dungarees cut off at the knee into long shorts. Each wore a filthy white turban on the back of his head. Mothi was about thirty-five, Tamoo about twenty-five.

Mothi opened the firebox door. The furnace was a deep roaring bed of violet flames. Tamoo shovelled in coal. The safety valve on the firebox crown, a little in front of the cab, burst into a drumming buzz, and steam shot up forty feet into the air.

Pater tugged the whistle-cord again and opened the regulator, which is a long lever.
Whooof!
the platform began to slide back. The safety valve shut down with a click as the steam went into the cylinders.
Whooof!
I saw the Stationmaster writing in a notebook;
whoof
—a man could still walk beside the train;
whoof
—he’d have to run;
whoof
—run fast;
whoof,
whoof, whoof, whoof!

Pater twirled a small wheel under his hand to shorten his cut-off. The exhaust settled down to a steady tramp, two beats a second—
whoof-whoof-whoof-whoof-whoof
. I could see a section of the boiler through the little forward window. The boiler was long and black and had three stainless steel bands round it between the front of the firebox and the back of the smokebox. The engine had a short thick funnel. The smoke and steam jerked up in exact time with the trampling beat. The boiler, the bands like steel girths, searched like a huge animal for its way among the maze of rails. Out in front of us the rails stretched like a hundred tangled snakes between the yards and the Loco Sheds, but we found our own path under the gantries. The sun had put out all the green and red eyes, so that the signals were like a page of semaphore for us to read, their drunken arms giving us the message. It was a book I had learned to read without being taught, the way I had learned English and Hindustani. I muttered the messages of the signals to myself, hugging myself with pleaure to be here, even in a sari, and not there in the gurdwara: Branch Line Crossover, clear. Up Yard Approach, clear—that was interlocked with the next one—Up Loco Shed, clear. Up Repair Shop Junction, clear. Up Yard Exit Junction, clear. In banks and rows and separate stands the arms fell back.

Number 4 Collett Road passed by. Our little house sat quietly there in its semi-detached compound behind the straggly hedge. Then there was nothing but the tramp, tramp,
tramp of the engine, then a level crossing, and tongas waiting, and lorries waiting behind the gates, and fifty men and women waiting.

Pater opened the regulator a little wider and spun the small wheel. The engine beat changed from a tramp to a hurried, less forceful breathing. My own breathing eased with the engine’s. I felt that my nerves and muscles were slowly relaxing and settling back into old, well-worn places, and it was the jerk and heave of the footplate under my feet that was doing it.

Mothi opened the firebox door. Tamoo stood braced against the violet, near-white glare and threw in his first shovel loads to the full extent of the six-foot handle—two at the far back of the fire, one right, one left. Then with a short overarm twist of his wrist he let the coal fall off the shovel just inside the opening.

We passed Minoli Up Home signal. It was clear. As soon as he had seen it Mothi had nodded across to Pater. Hunched in his corner, Pater had nodded back.

In Minoli station we threw out the key for the section from Bhowani to Minoli, and picked up the one from Minoli to Babrotha. It was all done at speed, a projecting arm on the engine side whipping the new key off a post beside the line.

Minoli, Babrotha, Bijai. The sun beat down on the cab roof, and my head began to ache.

Khajaura, and Pater turned his little wheel, and the beat shortened and quickened as the train flung down the bank to the Karode bridge. Then we slowed heavily and rode out on to the bridge. All the time the engine hunted like a dog, swinging its nose from side to side as it rushed forward. This was the bridge someone had tried to blow up, or pretended to try to blow up, the night the ammunition train was looted. K. P. Roy. The wheels of the train made a long clamour, sometimes almost a tune, under the arched steel girders. The river was very low and small in its wide bed.

Mothi opened the firebox door. I shielded my eyes with my hand.

Karode. Pater heaved up the regulator again and lengthened
his cut-off, and the exhaust dropped back into the same deep thunderous tramp as when we had started from Bhowani. The sides of the cutting rose in slabs of reddish jagged rock. Yellow grass clung in the crevices, and there were jackal holes level with the cab, so that I could see into them a little way, and some bright small yellow flowers there on the thorn bushes.

The engine had taken me away from the five Loved Ones, but now it was beginning to punish me. The hollow thunder and the ceaseless pound and heave began to pull me apart. I had never been on an express, never been more than ten miles in the cab of any engine. I should not have come here for this test, so overwrought and frightened and tired. I began to be sure that some great catastrophe was coming to meet us, or lying in wait for us, some point of explosion that would bury the five Loved Ones and the sari and my weeks of nervous effort. It would be appalling, but it would have to come, as a sort of expiation.

Pater yelled, ‘Now we have up grades, but easier than this, all the way to Mayni. Twenty-three-miles.’ Gradually but definitely our speed increased until we were going steadily uphill at about thirty-five or forty miles an hour.

Pater settled back and lit his pipe. He sat like a sack on the jump seat, jolting heedlessly with the engine.

Pipalkhera Up Distant—on! Pater put up his hand, and the whistle screamed. Half a mile ahead the notched yellow arm of the signal nodded down. The firebox glared open.

My mouth dropped open. My head throbbed. I waited for the explosion, the derailment, the catastrophe. We ran shrieking through Pipalkhera. The Stationmaster stood on the platform with a flag, and there was a coolie asleep under a small tree, two dogs fighting on glaring yellow sand, the shadowed bars of the water tower across the tracks, our wheels hitting the points with a quick stammering thud-thud, and a cow in the field on the right—and out. Pipalkhera Up Starter, and we ran away into the reeling plain.

Lidhganj.

I looked ahead. The line ran straight, like an arrow, racing forward from under the boiler down the centre of the right of
way. Now low jungle lay grey in the heat on either side. Pater passed round tea. We emptied the thermos, and Mothi made more. Colonel Savage lit a cheroot. I watched the line ahead. There would be a break in the shining ribbon. I would have a second after I saw it to gather myself for what was going to happen.

Taklana.

The line tilted more steeply up, winding to the left, round to the right, round to the left. On the banked rails the engine leaned over the bushes and groaned and clanked, and the pipes drummed, and all the faces of the dials were steady, and the water gauges were steady. The steel plate that covers the join between the engine and tender slid backward and forward, right and left, under my feet. Mothi opened the firebox door, and I covered my eyes. I saw nothing, but I heard, and by then I knew it by heart—the long throws, the scoop and heave of coal from the forward part of the tender, the rustle under the roar as the coal fell, a short heave, and again, and the long shovel scraping on the footplate with a ringing note like a bell. The firebox doors slammed and shut out the suck and roar of the fire. I heard the heavy gurgle of the water swaying in the tender behind me—four thousand gallons. I heard the hiss of the small hose, and, ‘Pardon, miss-sahiba.’ I moved my feet, and Tamoo hosed down the footplate and squirted the coal in the tender. Shiny black chips lay in the shallow water. Steam rose, but in a minute the footplate was again dry and dusty. My feet were burning. I had left my shoes outside the gurdwara. Tamoo scrambled up on to the tender and shovelled coal down from the back to the front. Then he ran down the slope of coal and grabbed up the long-handled firing shovel. Mothi lifted his arm, and the firebox door clanged open.

Savage was shouting something across to me. Unwillingly I opened my eyes to the searing-white, heaving furnace. Savage shouted, ‘I said it would be worth being derailed for this.’

We ran through Mayni. A goods train standing on the passing line made a long clattering blur as we hurried by. Now we had two lines—one up, one down—all the way through Mayni Tunnel and into Shahpur. Pater pointed forward with the
stem of his pipe. ‘Mayni Tunnel. One and a half miles, and climbing all the way. It will be hot.’

Savage stood up and stretched unsteadily. He said, ‘Hot? What do you call it now? It must be a hundred and thirty in this cab.’ Pater chuckled and nodded. The sun was low now on the right, but it had been a burning afternoon, and always the furnace flaming thirstily there by our feet.

The sides of the Mayni cutting climbed higher, became more red, more rocky. They climbed above the sun, and there was shade down on the line, but the heat did not get any less. Pater held down the whistle-cord for a long five-second blast. The mouth of the Mayni Tunnel gaped wide and black and suddenly swallowed us.

At once it was dark, and our world and our train vanished in the shouting of the exhaust, though I knew the headlight was on. But I could not breathe. I could not breathe. The air was too hot to breathe. The firebox door clanged, and I held my eyes open and for a fraction of a second saw blue shorts, a bare and hairy leg, the brown face and the perspiration pouring down and the drops sizzling on the steel plate. Then the heaving white fire swallowed it all. The air hurt my nostrils, bored into my eyes, burned in the back of my throat. I opened my mouth wide. Suffocating, I jumped to my feet. Savage’s blue eyes hung in front of me; his face was dead white in the fierce glare, and his mouth was open. His hand fell on my arm, his fingers dug into the flesh above my elbow. His eyes were amazed, then I saw angry fear, then plain anger, and with a huge effort he sucked in a breath. As though we had only one brain between us, I breathed with him. The fierce light dulled, the long shovel clanked and flew over the face of the fire. Gritty smoke beat back in heavy violent pulses from the tunnel roof, and the smoke was red hot. I closed my eyes again and sat still, breathing the air slowly and painfully, shutting my ears against the terrible, enlarged clanging of the engine. This was the catastrophe that I had been waiting for. My mind was gone, surrendered to the heat. The will that kept me here and made me breathe was not my own. Savage’s hand pressed on my bare arm, telling me when to breathe. Without it, I would
have jumped over the side.