Part 2 – Railway chai
The girl woke up as soon as the train screeched to a slow stop. She sat up at once with panic, her dad wasn’t in the bed. She peeped low to look out the window, she could see the grey platform of a railway station and she could make out that it was dark outside. The faint chatter of whiny midnight men filled the silent bogey. A little boy ran past the window selling hot tea to uninterested travelers. The train was still en route to Ooty, and the girl understood that this was just a midnight stop somewhere along the way. But where was daddy?
From somewhere in the distance, the locomotive blew its tremendous whistle into the night and announced the train’s present departure. And almost immediately the bogey jerked ever so slightly and the platform outside the window began silently sliding by. The train was moving and the girl worried more and more about him. She just hoped he hadn’t been left behind on the platform at the station. Knowing very well that she couldn’t climb down the bunks on her own, she kept one foot down and pried for a support and while doing so she slid her body over the bed precariously. Suddenly she found that her arms could no longer support her hanging body and the foot had still not found a landing on the bed below, she tried her best but her arms gave up and she fell thud on her back, from around six feet in the air. Her first solo adventure without daddy had gone terribly south.
She whirled to her side instinctively from the breathless few moments after the fall. Catching her breath, and focusing her teary eyes, she could see daddy running towards her with the Ticket Collector in tow. Daddy had a plate of samosas in one hand and a small cup of steaming railway chai in the other.
Presently, they sat face to face at the tiny table cantilevering from the bogey wall next to the windows. Nobody had spoken, the Ticket Collector sat staring into the window’s view next to them. The girl was swinging her legs and happily munching on the hot samosa. The dad was sitting silently, sipping the ruminative tea and thinking about something behind his fixed eyes.
The girl knew that her father was deeply pissed and hurt even deeper. She felt sad at the incident that was all her doing and she felt afraid of the probable reproach that her father’s silence usually followed. She wished he wouldn’t scold her this time, at least not during the one vacation they had had since as far back as she could remember.
‘How are the samosas?’ Daddy spoke after a while and the train was by now speeding through the jungles.
She dint reply, she simply made a ‘superb’ hand sign and continued with finishing the last bits of the fried flour soaked in splashes of red chutney.
‘Will you sleep now, at least?’
‘No. I want to listen to the Doodhsagar incident. Will you tell me soldier?’
She instantly realized how unpropitious that last sentence of hers was and looked down as daddy continued to stare at her with some anger.
‘Okay I will sleep now’, she said finally and took a sip of the warm chai from her daddy’s almost empty cup.
After tucking his daughter in her top bed, and assuring her that he would go nowhere but stand near the bogey door and talk to the Ticket Collector as he had being doing so when she had fallen, the father and the Ticket Collector started for the door.
Cough. Cough. Two back to back horrendous coughs, this time it felt more like he was retching, as though his lungs and guts were trying to spew out from his mouth, but only a bit of blood splattered his kerchief and nothing else. The sound of his coughs went clearly noticed by the curious daughter, who was spying from beneath the layers of blanket over her. ‘He had promised me that he had stopped doing that smoking’, she thought all to herself. And seeing her daddy and the Collector leave, she went right to sleep and she dreamt of her mother. Although she had no idea what she looked like, she imagined her with what little idea of a mother figure her father had provided all these motherless years of her life.
While she slept, once again, soundlessly but still reeling from the pain of the fall, the father and the Collector were standing by the door of the fast moving train and in the darkness of the panning moonlight, they were discussing something.
‘Three more hours to Udagamandalam I suppose?’
‘Oh yes. We should be on time.’ The Collector replied.
‘No. He’s a bit fast. We will reach ten minutes early unless he makes up by slowing down as we near the steeps.’
‘Hmm. He’s a new fellow. Let him learn Saab.’
Noticing the shift in the father’s expression, the Collector asked concerned,
‘What’s wrong Saab?’
No reply from him but he continued to watch and apparently listen to something. It seemed as though he had found something amiss about the train or the tracks or the speed, the Collector couldn’t be so sure. But he could tell that the father was worried about something. Was the train going too fast or something? Or was there something off about the steep tracks? The father was known for his godlike instincts in the mountains so what had he sniffed out tonight?
—End of Part 2—
This story is now available in audio format for free on Spotify!
Intriguing read🙂