Maya (44 page)

We sped through an endless network of raised pathways dividing the earth into small, sunken plots of land. In the monsoon they would be flooded with water, muddy and lush with grain; in March they were nothing but open graves, brittle tubs of cracked earth. From time to time we passed a cluster of adobe huts squatting in a common yard of packed clay, a single bucket suspended over the low, circular opening of the well, women in saris threshing wheat in the shade of a gnarled tree, a stone image of the village deity installed at its root.

An hour or so outside of Banaras, near Jaunpur, the train slowed at
an intersection, and a group of children gawked, then waved, laughing and pointing at the foreigner who had appeared out of nowhere and was already vanishing into the distance. In the early evening we stopped at Sultanpur, where I purchased chai from a vendor and drank it on the platform. Sometime after dark I climbed up into my berth, opened my bag, and dug out a beat-up copy of the
Rupachandrika
—a compact book containing some seven hundred pages of essential Sanskrit conjugations and declensions. I worked on memorizing irregular verbs and then read a novel Richard had given me. After a while I dozed off. I woke up around eleven o'clock at night, just as we were entering Lucknow.

Lucknow is a large city, and the station was a madhouse. It was impossible to know how long we would stop before moving on, so for people waiting to board, there was no time to waste. Men and women rushed the train, yelling at the porters, who struggled with enormous bags and trunks. We had not even come to a stop and people were already leaping in the door and pushing their way through the narrow aisles of our car. Everywhere children clung to their mothers and whined, babies howled, and vendors hawked their wares. “
Chaaii! Garam chaaii!
” Up and down along the length of the train, people shoved steaming clay cups through the open windows. Peddlers crowded around with an endless assortment of cheap plastic toys and water bottles, stainless-steel tiffins, glass bangles, and colored prints of Hindu gods. One man balanced a straw basket on his head; it was stacked high with freshly severed slices of mango and bright orange papaya that had been neatly arranged in an ascending series of smaller and smaller concentric circles. Another man stood behind a hammered brass tray heaped with unshelled peanuts carefully banked around a small aluminum pot filled with hot coals. He scooped up the dry husks, letting them fall from his fingers into a hand-held scale. Next to him a man in baggy kurta-pajama had transformed himself into a sort of living shop. The red frames of his sunglasses—lenses shaped like two huge hearts—obscured the entire upper half of his face. Several dozen pairs of similar plastic frames were pinned to his hat and every square inch of his pants and shirt. Overhead, loudspeakers buzzed with announcements in English and Hindi while the locomotives groaned in and out of the station.

I hadn't eaten since early afternoon, and I was hungry. I went outside to stretch my legs and stuff down some sabji-puri, being careful to stand outside the window to my compartment, where I could keep an eye on my
bag. The puris were hot and greasy, and I used them to scoop green chilies, potatoes, and peas out of a shallow bowl fashioned of dried leaves that had been stitched together with their own stems. From my left a wobbly, box-like cart approached. An old man, barefoot, bald, and naked except for a scraggly gray beard and a loincloth, leaned heavily against one end of the cart, pushing with every ounce of his strength. It appeared to be all he could do to keep the thing trundling along on its tiny casters. There was an A-frame rack in the center of the cart; on it was fastened a collection of magazines in Hindi, Urdu, and English, all of them bearing glossy photographs of Bollywood movie idols—a gallery of smug, meaty-faced demigods with puffy lips and dazzling white teeth. Eyelids at half-mast, they pouted at the camera, as if to make it absolutely obvious, by such prosaic signs, that they were sated with hedonistic pleasures far beyond anything we mortals could possibly conjure up in our wildest, most intemperate dreams.

I had finished eating all but the last couple of mouthfuls of my meal when I noticed a hairless, skeletal dog hiding under the train. I tossed what was left over the edge of the platform and watched him lick the leaves clean. He looked up hopefully, then spooked and ran under the next car and stood cowering in the shadows. As I was crouching there, attempting to coax him out with a Milk Biki, a peddler walked by lugging a brass bucket filled with ice and bottles of soda. I purchased a cold Limca and downed it in one gulp. When I looked back, the dog was gone. I tossed the biscuit over the edge, then boarded my car and climbed back into the upper berth.

Not more than a foot over my head, a fan attached to the curved ceiling rattled in its metal cage like a trapped rat. The night air was cooler, but I was still damp with sweat. I wrapped myself in a lungi, closed my eyes, and was soon rocked to sleep by the clacking of wheels.

I was awakened by an eerie silence; the train was not moving. A dim light filtered into my compartment from outside, and from the bunk below me I could hear the faint, wheezing sound of a man snoring. At first I thought we were on a side track, as often happens, waiting for another train to pass. But after a few minutes I leaned out of my berth and peered down through the window and saw that we had stopped at a small, rural station. I was wide awake now and terribly thirsty from the sabji-puri, so I decided to see if I could find something to drink. Careful not to disturb the people
sleeping below me, I climbed down from my bunk, slipped on my sandals, and walked quietly along the aisle and out the door.

The platform was deserted. Inside the station house a neon tube hummed faintly, its sterile light illuminating half a dozen small, translucent lizards that clung to the wall. Otherwise everything was silent and empty—not a person in sight. And then I heard someone shout
sahab
and I turned, and there, several hundred feet off to my right, where the platform descended to the ground in a long, sloping ramp, I spotted a ramshackle chai stall. The proprietor—a middle-aged Sikh—squatted under a single electric bulb; in front of him I could see the orange glow of coals. He waved in my direction, beckoning me. If I were lucky, I'd have just enough time to get a chai.

I walked as quickly as I could, holding close to the train in case it should start to move. I had just reached the foot of the ramp when a child emerged from the shadows and came toward me, his hand extended. Judging from the boy's size, he was maybe eight years old; his skin was so pale it seemed to glow in the dim light. At first I thought he was an ascetic; devotees of Shiva often paint their skin with ash gathered from a funeral pyre. But then I realized he was an albino, and I immediately remembered that other child from so long ago, the schoolboy in Agra throwing rocks at a sow and her piglets. The memory made me shudder. The child's head was cleanly shaven and covered with scabs. Thick rivulets of snot had coagulated on his lips and chin. I dug a worn five-rupee note out of my pocket and placed it in his outstretched palm, depositing the tattered paper there among the few small coins he had collected. Five rupees was much more than he could have hoped for from any Indian. We both knew this, and I knew it probably wasn't a good idea, but I did it anyway—perhaps because I wanted to buy him off, to make him go away. I managed to smile as I handed it to him and said something polite in Hindi, one human being to another.

As I turned to go the boy asked for more, his voice a low moan. “
Sahab
. . .
Bhukh . . . Bhukh
. . .” I was a foreigner and obviously had money to burn. And I had spoken to him, a few kind words. I instantly regretted it.

“
Aray
, child. Bas. That's enough.” He moved one hand feebly back and forth between his belly and mouth. I ignored him, turned, and continued to walk toward the chai stand. I hadn't taken more than a few steps when I felt him grab my pant leg.

“
Mat chuuo
!” I swiveled and bent toward him and spoke the angry
words loudly. I was genuinely offended by this patent breach of etiquette: in India, strangers do not intentionally touch. He would never for a moment have dared to make physical contact with any Indian. He did it only because I was a foreigner. In his eyes, I was an ignorant person unworthy of this most basic sign of respect. This sort of thing happened to me often, which only made it worse. Mostly I just let it pass, but this time all my resentment boiled up. I had been living here for almost two years now, and during that time I had worked hard to find a legitimate place in the culture. I was fluent in Hindi. I even read Sanskrit. In many ways I felt more at home in India than I did in my own country. And despite all of this, everywhere I went I was still treated like a “red monkey,” a stupid hippie fresh off the Magic Bus. Obviously, I could stay here for the rest of my life and nothing would change. And I had just gone out of my way to be nice to this kid. “Do not
touch
me!” I scolded him, wagging a finger inches from his startled face, then pointedly walked away.

When I felt his fingers brush my leg again, they burned like fire. I lost all patience and was seized with a blind, self-righteous fury. In a single swift motion I whirled around and slapped his hand away. He lost his grip and the coins he had been clutching scattered on the ground, rolling and skipping across the platform. For a second he looked up at me, his face contorted in an expression of disbelief, then panic, as he dropped to his hands and knees and scuttled around in a frantic effort to retrieve the money. The five-rupee note I had given him fluttered onto the tracks, and he clamored after it, vanishing under the train. Filled with shame, I no longer cared about the chai. I wanted simply to run and hide. At just that moment the whistle blasted and couplings rattled up and down the line, as one car tugged against the next.

I'm going to kill a boy.

At first the words came to me as a vague, indistinct memory, the memory of a dream. Then they returned as a thought. And finally—all in a matter of seconds—they flashed into my mind with the full strength of a realization.

I'M GOING TO KILL A BOY.

The train was rolling forward, heavy steel wheels clanking over the rails. I stood and watched in horror, my eyes fixed to the spot where the child had disappeared—where he was now trapped. I was paralyzed, frozen in place, overcome with fear and guilt and a wild desire to flee while I still could. The train was rapidly gaining speed; very soon it would be
going too fast for me to get on, and I would be stranded here in the darkness—god knows where—left to confront the consequences of my pride and arrogance. It was too much to bear. I wrenched my eyes away from the tracks and sprinted up the ramp and along the platform, running hard by the cars, passing a succession of square windows, each one a miniature proscenium opening onto its own cramped world where people slept and dreamed amid the chaos of things they had brought with them on their journey. The train picked up speed, and very soon it was overtaking me, the windows moving by me now in the opposite direction, the same scenes I had just witnessed repeating themselves in reverse order, as if I were sliding backward in time, losing ground, falling into the past.

This cannot be happening. Oh Jesus fucking Christ. Please. This cannot be happening.

The train was moving fast, and I reached out in desperation and grabbed a handrail and held on, my feet flailing in midair as I was yanked off the platform and up into the open doorway. Within seconds the station was gone—lost—and I was once again hurtling through the void.

37

I
AWOKE TO A FRENZY
of activity, just as the train was entering New Delhi station. Up and down the aisle people struggled with their luggage, pushing their way toward the door. There was no point in moving, so I lay in my berth and waited until most of the passengers had gotten off, then climbed down and made my way through the crowded station. Outside I flagged a motor rickshaw and had him take me to the YMCA on Jai Singh Road.

Fortunately they had a vacant room. Once inside I secured the door and collapsed onto the bed and attempted to dispel the image of that boy from my mind.

I told myself that it wasn't my fault he got trapped under the train. It had been a terrible accident. Buddhism teaches that the karmic consequences of any action are rooted in its intent; murder is not murder unless there is a clear intention to kill, and I certainly had no such intention. And anyway, I asked myself, how do I know he actually died? He could easily have crawled out on the opposite side of the train, where I wouldn't have seen him. Or else kept low against the tracks and waited for the cars to pass. I remembered reading about someone who had done just that with a CTA train in Chicago. The man was completely unharmed.

This reasoning went nowhere. It wasn't enough to
not know
whether I'd unintentionally killed a boy. Especially when I had to deal with the abject cowardice that had driven me to abandon him and run for the train—which was the only reason, after all, that I didn't know if he were still alive. The truth was that I hadn't even wanted to know. All I'd wanted was to get away.

So what did I want now?

I wanted to forget. I wanted to bury the memory of those few horrible moments deep down under wherever it is that memories get buried. Unfortunately, that was not possible. All of it was there, vividly present in my mind. Or at least most of it was there.

I remembered waking up in the middle of the night, and everything
that followed—right up to the point where I flung myself into the train. But from there on things got hazy. Try as I might, I could not recall making my way back through the cars to my berth. After leaping into the train, the next thing I remembered was waking up in the New Delhi station. Obviously, it would have taken a while to find my way through the cars and get settled again and fall asleep—especially after what had just happened. So why couldn't I remember any of it?