The little lightpusher hits the air hard, a fist of gravity shoves Lisa Durnau deep into her gel couch and everything is jolting and rattling and shaking. She is more afraid than she has ever been and there is nothing, absolutely nothing she can hold on to. She reaches out a hand. Sam Rainey takes it. His gloved hand is big and cartoonish and one tiny node of stability in a falling, shuddering universe.
“Some time!” Sam shouts, voice shaking. “Some time! When we! Get down! How about! We go out! For a meal! Somewhere?”
“Yes! Anything!” Lisa Durnau wails as she hurtles Kennedy-wards, drawing a long, beautiful plasma trail across the tall-grass prairies of Kansas.
18: LULL
How Thomas Lull knows he is un-American: he hates cars but loves trains, Indian trains, big trains like a nation on the move. He is content with the contradiction that they are at once hierarchical and democratic, a temporary community brought together for a time; vital while it lasts, burning away like early mist when the terminus is reached. All journey is pilgrimage and India is a pilgrim nation. Rivers, grand trunk roads, trains; these are sacred things across all India’s many nations. For thousands of years people have been flowing over this vast diamond of land. All is riverrun, meeting, a brief journey together, then dissolution.
Western thought rebels against this. Western thought is car thought. Freedom of movement. Self-direction. Individual choice and expression and sex on the back seat. The great car society. Throughout literature and music, trains have been engines of fate, drawing the individual blindly, inexorably towards death. Trains ran through the double gates of Auschwitz, right up to the shower sheds. India has no such understanding of trains. It is not where the unseen engine is taking you; it is what you see from the window, what you say to your fellow travellers for you all go together. Death is a vast, crowded terminus of half-heard announcements and onward connections on new lines, new journeys. Changing trains.
The train from Thiruvananthapuram moves through a wide web of lines into the great station. Sleek shatabdis weave over the points on to the fast uplines. Long commuter trains whine past festooned with passengers hanging from the doors, riding the boarding steps, piled onto the roofs, arms thrust through the barred windows, prisoners of the mundane. Mumbai. She has always appalled Thomas Lull. Twenty million people live on this onetime archipelago of seven scented islands and the evening rush is upon her. Downtown Mumbai is the world’s largest single building; malls and housing projects and office and leisure units fused together into a many-armed, many-headed demon. Nestled at the heart of it is Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus, a bezoar of Victorian excess and arrogance, now completely domed over with shopping precincts and business units, like a toad entombed in a nodule of limestone. There is never a moment when Chattrapati Shivaji is still or silent. She is a city within a city. Certain castes boast they are unique to it; families claim to have raised generations among the platforms and tracks and red brick piers who have never seen daylight. Five hundred million pilgrim feet pass over the Raj marble each year, tended to by citiesful of porters, vendors, shysters, insurance sellers, and janampatri readers.
Lull and Aj descend among the families and luggage onto the platform. The noise is like a mugging. Timetable announcements are inaudible blasts of public address roar. Porters converge on the white faces; twenty hands reach for their bags. A skinny man in a red MarathaRail high-collar jacket lifts Aj’s bag. Quick as a knife, her hand stabs out to arrest him. She tilts her head, looks into his eyes.
“Your name is Dheeraj Tendulkar, and you are a convicted thief.” The ersatz porter recoils as if snake-bit.
“We’ll carry our own.” Thomas Lull takes Aj by the elbow, guides her like a bride through the press of faces and smells. Her gaze darts from face to face to face in the torrent of people.
“The names. All the names; too many to read.”
“I still can’t understand this gods thing,” he says.
The red-jackets have gathered around the rogue. Raised voices, a cry.
There is an hour’s wait until the Varanasi shatabdi. Thomas Lull finds haven in a global coffee franchise. He pays Western prices for a cardboard bucket with a wooden stirrer. There is a tightening in his chest, the asthmatic’s somatic reaction to this claustrophobic, relentless city beneath a city. Through the nose. Breathe through the nose. The mouth for talking.
“This is very bad coffee, don’t you think?” Aj says.
Thomas Lull drinks it and says nothing and watches the trains come and go and the people mill through on their pilgrimages. Among them, a man bound for the last place a man of his age and sentiments should go, a dirty little water war. But it’s mystery, allure, it’s mad stuff and reckless deeds when all you expect to feel is the universal microwave background humming through your marrow.
“Aj, show me that photograph again. There’s something I need to tell you.”
But she is not there. Aj moves through the crowd like a ghost. People part around her, staring. Thomas Lull throws cash on the table, dives after her, waving down a couple of porters to heft the bags.
“Aj! Our train is over here!”
She moves on, unhearing. She is the Madonna of Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus. A family sits on a dhuri underneath a display board drinking tea from thermos flasks: mother, father, grandmother, two girls in their early teens. Aj walks towards them, unhurried, unstoppable. One by one they look up, feeling the whole attention of the station turned upon them. Aj stops. Thomas Lull stops. The porters trotting behind him stop. Thomas Lull feels, at some quantum level, every train and luggage van and shunter stop, every passenger and engineer and guard freeze, every signal and sign and notice board halt between the flip and the flop. Aj squats down before the frightened family.
“I have to tell you, you are going to Ahmedabad, but he will not be there to meet you. He is in trouble. It is bad trouble, he has been arrested. The charge is serious; theft of a motorbike. He is being held in Surendranagar District police station, number GBZ16652. He will require a lawyer. Azad and Sons is one of the most successful Ahmedabad criminal law practices. There is a quicker train you can catch in five minutes from Platform Nineteen. It requires a change at Surat. If you hurry you can still catch it. Hurry!”
Lull seizes her arm. Aj turns; he sees emotions in her eyes that frighten him but he has broken the moment. The terrified family are in various states of alarm; father fight, mother flight, grandmother hands raised in praise, daughters trying to gather up the tea things. A hot wet stain of spilled chai spreads across the dhuri.
“She is right,” Thomas Lull calls as he drags Aj away. Now she is unresisting, leaden, like the ones he would escort from the beach parties, stumbling over the sand, the ones on the evil trips. “She’s always right. If she says go, you go.”
Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus exhales and resumes its constant low-intensity scream.