Dev waited on the edge of the platform, taking his hand out of his pocket to check the time. He waved the tickets in the air.
“I’m not feeling so well,” Ted said.
“Once you’re out of the heat, you will feel better.”
“My stomach,” Ted said. He placed his hand over the approximate discomfort.
“We will be there soon.”
In the train’s passageway, an old woman nudged him with her cane. Not rudely, he was just in the way.
When Dev mentioned “first class,” Ted had expected a private berth. But the compartment looked like a college dorm, one bunk atop another. A family of four occupied the bunks on the right side. Two kids dangled from the top, and the father had plugged a miniature fan into the wall socket above the window.
“I thought you got a private compartment,” Ted said.
“Private,” Dev said, as if the word didn’t exist. He sat on the bottom bunk, occupied with his luggage.
The father nodded at Ted. The fan oscillated, left, right, back again.
“This is first class?”
“The individual compartments were sold,” Dev said. “You should consider yourself lucky to have even this.”
Lucky. Ted nodded back.
Dev asked, “Do you need help climbing up?”
Ted shook his head. The Navajo pattern of the upholstery transfixed him; he stared, trying to discover its repetitions, its interlocking scheme.
The door slid open. Another passenger? No: the man held up a metal bucket of bottled waters. Dev spoke, and the man left.
The windows had two tints: One offered the world in amber, a layer of condensation making everything indistinct. The other was the world in gray; it was already dusk, and Ted couldn’t tell if the world had indeed grown dark or if the window provided its own darkness. The platform was gray; the dented metal chests on a pulley, waiting to be loaded, were gray.
The train pulled forward, a hiccup, and men rushed alongside, as if they were late.
Ted unfastened the privacy curtain bunched against the wall.
“Not yet,” said Dev.
The red curtain had a design of crescents and swirls. Ted thought of cranes in flight. The emergency stop cord was wrapped in red velvet the same color, as if begging to be touched, pulled.
The door slid open again. This man had butcher paper — wrapped bundles under his arms. He placed one on each bunk. A set of sheets and a thin, fibrous blanket.
“Chai?” the man asked. The family said no. Dev said no too.
“I’ll take one,” Ted said.
Ted couldn’t sit upright. His head hit the ceiling, and he kept his neck bent. Hunched over, his stomach didn’t bother him as much. Dev was reading a medical paper from the conference. Ted untied his shoelaces, and his shoes landed with a thunk on the ground. Dev looked up, annoyed. The young boy across from him giggled. Ted pulled off his socks with some difficulty — damp, clingy — and laid them across the bed to dry.
The door again. A gray-haired bellman came in. He surveyed the cabin and approached Ted. He nudged Ted’s shoes under Dev’s bunk and took off his slippers. He unfolded the sheets from their bundle. Standing on Dev’s seat, he tucked the sheets tight. He picked up and quickly put down Ted’s socks, holding up his hands: Sorry.
The other side of Delhi presented itself: a burned-out house, black with soot; buildings only half-constructed, abandoned after two walls out of four. The city was a facade, a soundstage: from one side, it seemed solid, real, alive; from the other, it was propped up with bamboo poles. Concrete had broken off into crags; rusted rebar jutted out of abandoned projects. An unfinished city.
The bellman returned with a brown plastic tray. On it was a yellow thermos the size of a beer bottle. The chai. The warmth of the cinnamon lingered on his tongue, but the sugar soured his mouth. The chai formed a skin, as if trying to heal over a wound. He screwed the thermos closed and set it by his pillow. He would rest, and when he woke, he’d feel better. He’d sleep it off.
Dev had stopped reading; chin on hand, he leaned into the window, as if trading secrets with his reflection. Outside, young boys in a dirt field played gully cricket. They’d built a wicket out of concrete blocks; the ball was a tennis ball, the bat a polished stick. Ted imagined Dev as one of the boys.
No. If anything, Dev would have played at a private school with its own pitch. Dev, wearing crisp whites and bat in hand; Dev, winding his arm in a wide circle to bowl; Dev, catching a fly ball with his bare hands and running into a scrum with his teammates.
Ted folded his hands against his stomach. Dev stood, and for an instant, Ted thought that Dev was checking on him, but instead, he clicked the lock for the berth door, secured the privacy curtain around them, and resumed staring out the window.
Wrong again. Dev wouldn’t have been playing cricket at all. He’d have been sitting under the shade of a tree, a book in his lap, the wind carrying cheers and the crack of ball against wood to him. He’d look up at his mates, and they’d wave for him to join, and he’d shake his head no. Come play, come play, they’d say, and he’d stay where he was, content with his current position.
Three hours in, Ted woke, aware of a distant growl, like the snore of a great beast. The rhythm of the wheels on the rails. Through the gap in the curtain, he saw the woman across from him curled toward the wall, while her husband massaged a cream into his face. Dev dozed with a pencil in his fingers, a medical journal open in his lap. Ted’s stomachache hadn’t abated. He swallowed three times in quick succession, trying to clear bile, but couldn’t produce enough saliva to wash the bitter taste away.
The man with the face cream closed his curtain.
Near the door, there was a stack of TV dinner — sized trays, smeared with red and brown. Crumpled balls of foil lay on top. The smell of the food lingered: ginger, some sort of curry. He had slept through dinner. Maybe the pain he felt was hunger. Was there a way to distinguish different types of pain?
He climbed down the metal rungs on the wall and sat next to Dev. Even that small effort produced sweat all over his body. Dev had his feet propped on his suitcase. His lap was a valley into which Ted wanted to fall. Just for a moment. The heat on the train was unbearable, and Dev’s neck — dark, shaved smooth — would be cool to the touch. Ted’s body buckled. His head rested on Dev’s shoulder.
Ted expected a nudge, maybe a quick jerk, but the force of the push: Ted’s body flailed, and his head knocked against the bedpost. It wasn’t painful — not compared with his stomachache — but Ted made no effort to right himself. He had deserved it: it was a mistake, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Not when we’re in public,” Dev whispered.
The reality of the train rushed back: the woman murmured to her husband, a Bollywood song seeped through the Walkman the kids on the top bunk shared. Dev sat ramrod straight, hands on thighs. Would he stay in that position for the entire trip?
After a few minutes of silence, Ted asked, “Where are we?”
“We are going,” said Dev, head resolutely straight, “to Varanasi.”
Ted knew Varanasi only as a dot along the Ganges, hiding in the creases of the guidebook’s foldout map. For every promise of beauty, Fodor’s warned, there was an equally dire promise of wily pickpockets, of contaminated water, of dangers so wide-ranging it was a wonder anyone ever left home. Every year in Varanasi, it read, two or three tourists disappeared. Some dropped out of society, cutting ties with their previous lives for a more enlightened existence. The others — simply disappeared.
The pain had condensed from a diffuse queasiness to a sharp stab.