I took a bus, sat at the back, watching the raindrops gather and collect in quick lines on the windows, the kid desperate beyond everything to get out of its stroller, the old man muttering to himself, and the girl in tears on her phone. At the station, I stood on the freezing platform and waited for whatever train would be coming from the left, trusting my instincts over my sense of direction. Trusting my gut. Even now, the way I feel isn’t swallowing me up if I keep moving. It’s the only cure I’ve found for what I’ve lost. Going somewhere. Anywhere. All the time. In my head I see stampedes of horses, torrents of water, jet planes, spacecrafts, all light speed and hurtling. I think about Superman, flying round the earth so fast that he slows it down on its axis, stops time and all that. It’s ridiculous, impossible, I know, but I can’t help it, because ridiculous and impossible have been given whole new definitions for me.
At the airport, I couldn’t sit still. Part of me wanted to run home and never leave, like Henry. The rest of me smiled at everyone, delighted with this brand-new self, this healing of wounds and shedding of skin. After takeoff, I relaxed, almost, breathing out into the cabin, making my donation to the noisy, communal air. The way I feel about Novo was in everyone’s overhead bin then, everyone’s seat pocket, everyone’s lungs. I thought, We are all in it now, the traveling toward a life, five hundred miles an hour, at thirty-five thousand feet.
It’s love, I told myself. It’s love, for god’s sake, and who doesn’t want to be a part of that?
TWENTY-SEVEN
And so I travel. The windows on this train fill the space between the bunks, big as flat-screen TVs. If I lie on my front I can look out at everything we’re passing, once it’s light enough. The man across from me is stretched out on his side like a prince, curvaceous and plump. He frowns and pouts and looks down at one of his three phones. In my head I list all the old-school stuff that used to fill the world with weight and object and now fits inside a phone instead. Barometer. Calculator. Camera. Notebook. Telescope. Newspaper. Calendar. Radio. Map and compass. Watch. Wallet. TV. Voice recorder. Heart-rate monitor. Bank. I’m not tired of it yet, and I’m not nearly done. “Unbelievable,” Novo said once. “What a compact time to be alive.”
When the boy comes through with the chai, the prince flicks at him with the back of his hand, curls his lip, and doesn’t speak, but the boy knows what it means and pours him some and takes the money in silence, eyes down. I have some too, half a tiny cup. I thank him and my voice is louder than I expected in the quiet train. Conspicuous.
I was lucky to get a bed. My ticket didn’t count, apparently, didn’t exist. I handed my booking in at the desk, once I’d found the right one (third time lucky, up a flight of stairs, foreign tourists only, who knew?). Behind me and below me, Mumbai Central Train Station swarmed and hollered and sprawled. The upstairs waiting area was quieter, hushed even, like a library. I waited my turn, melting already in the winter heat, pretty sure that the only people who actually wait in line for anything in Central Train Station are the foreign tourists, and that’s why we get a room of our own, because otherwise we are never, ever going to get it together to leave. I used to hate waiting in line. But these days, there are plenty of Nows in a wasted hour for me.
At the counter, I handed over the paper. An eye roll, a headshake, a sigh. The ticket man scratched his belly and didn’t bother looking up from his screen. He’d clearly had this conversation too many times already, with too many clueless travelers like me.
“Waiting list status,” he said. “No berth, no seat,” and he didn’t tell me why, because he didn’t have to.
I swear it wasn’t unwelcome, this feeling that my plans were falling apart already. I’m half-sunk into the unknown on purpose, have been from the beginning, soft and accommodating, like a bog. The man said I should come back later, give it three hours and there’d be room. So I took his advice. Three hours to kill, no different than the ones I’d been killing at home all that time since Novo left. Mum told me once that when I got to be her age I wouldn’t get over how much time I’d squandered—how much I’d give to claw some of it back. According to her, there are about six hundred thousand hours in the average lifetime, and I’d already spent way too many of mine sulking around in my sweats and beached on the sofa. True enough. I couldn’t argue with that. But I had my reasons. I told her if that’s what she thought, it was a mystery she ever bothered ironing pillowcases or vacuuming the crap out from behind the cooker. When she laughed, I didn’t raise the possibility that there was also such a thing as an extraordinary lifetime, the opposite of average, not straight, start to finish, like an arrow, but numberless and infinite like a wheel.
To use up three of my hours, I took a cab driven by an economics student called Dev to Rampart Row and drank a fresh lime soda, sweet and salt, no ice, at a tourist bar, all winter-scene murals and plastic tables and cooled air. I sat near the door to watch the street—wiry dogs and car horns and hot traffic, whole families on mopeds, women at the back, sari skirts dancing like flags in and out of the wheels. I saw a man sitting up against a blood-red wall, legs straight out in front of him, the stumps of his feet all bandaged and seething with flies. Two little girls walked past him, oblivious, breathing secrets into each other’s ears, covering their mouths with their hands when they laughed.
I felt my heart in my chest then, still there, still beating, in spite of everything, and I thought about how many times it’s done that since it was made, how many more beats it will make before I’m finished, the exact number, written down on a scrap of paper for me to read. What kind of a difference would it make in the world if that was a number we all knew? And what does it change, what kind of person does it make you, if you know for sure that the number is infinite, that you and your beating heart are never ever going to stop?
But still. I’ve done it. I’m on the other side of the world going somewhere. I’m not stuck on the sofa at home, staring into space. I’m here on this train staring out of the window. Always moving, always learning, living a life, as instructed. The only way.
This train bumps and thrums like a heartbeat, soothing, actually, pulling me down to sleep. I think about other numbers. How many stops between Mumbai and Madgaon. How many miles an hour this thing will go while I am sleeping. How many minutes it will wait at each station and how many people will get on and off. The number of days I knew Novo for, and all the useless days before I knew him, and all the endless days since. The number of nights we spent awake and talking, just talking, as if no one had ever quite heard our voices before. The weight of all he did and didn’t tell me. The sheer volume of our laughter. How many people he will see in his own lifetime, compared to mine. How long it will be, if ever, before I forget about him and about how this feels, before I’m whittled down and worn out by experience and disappointments and other loves (not like this one, nothing like this one) and can throw in the towel and say, “I knew a boy once.”