Luggage crashes from the overhead racks. Passengers in the aisles fall. Voices cry, merge into a jabber of panic. The shatabdi jars hard, jars again; comes to a screaming, shuddering halt. The voices peak and fall silent. The train sits motionless. The com crackles, goes dead. Thomas Lull cups his hands around his face, peers out of the window. The rural dark is impenetrable, enfolding, yonic. He thinks he sees distant car headlights, bobbing lights like torches. Now the questions start, everyone asking at once is everyone all right what happened?
Aj mumbles, stirring. The tranqs are more effective than Thomas Lull thought. Now he is aware of a wall of voices advancing down the train and with it a stench of burning polycarbon from the air-conditioning ducts. With one hand he snatches up Aj’s bag, with the other he drags her upright. Aj blinks thickly at him.
“Come on, sleeping beauty. We’re making an unscheduled disembarkation.” He pulls her, still quasi-conscious, into the aisle, seizes the bags, and pushes her towards the rear sliding doors. Behind him the black picture window explodes in a spray of glass-sugar as a concrete block trailing a sling-rope bursts through. It bounces off the table, strikes a woman in the seat across the aisle. She goes down, spraying blood from a smashed knee. The press of fleeing passengers trip over her and fall. She is dead, Thomas Lull realises with a terrible, intimate chill. The woman, or anyone else who goes down in this surge.
“Get the fuck moving!” Thomas Lull bounces the dazed Aj down the aisle with slaps of his hands to her back. He glimpsed flames through the empty window; flames and faces. “Go go go.” Behind them the jam is hideous. Low vanguards of smoke steal from the vents and under the uptrain carriage door. The voices rise to a chorus of dread.
“To me! To me!” roars a Sikh steward in railway livery standing on a table by the inner carriage door. “One at a time, come on, there is plenty of time. You. Now, you. You.” He uses his passkey to turn the sliding door into a people-lock. One family at a time.
“What the hell is going on?” Thomas Lull asks as he takes his place at the head of the line.
“Bharati karsevaks have fired the train,” the steward says quietly. “Say nothing. Now, you go.”
Thomas Lull shoves Aj into the door section, blinks into the dark outside.
“Fucking hell.” A ring of fire encircles the small encampment of dazed, fearful passengers and their goods. Decades of working with the digits of cellular automata have made Thomas Lull skilled at estimating number from a single glance. There must be five hundred of them out there, holding burning torches. Sparks blow back from the front of the train; orange smoke, luminous in half light, is a sure signifier of burning plastics. “Change of plan. We’re not getting off here.”
“What’s going on, what’s happening?” Aj asks as Thomas Lull forces open the doors to the next carriage. It is already half empty.
“The train’s been stopped, some Shivaji protest.”
“Shivaji?”
“I thought you knew everything. Hindu fundamentalists. Who are pretty pissed with Awadh right now.”
“You’re very glib,” Aj says and Thomas Lull cannot tell if it is the end of the tranqs or the start of her weird wisdom. But the glow from outside grows stronger and he can hear the slam and shatter of objects hurled against the carcass of the train.
“That’s because I’m very very scared,” Thomas Lull says. He pushes Aj past the next door open on to the night. He does not want her to register the screams and the sounds he recognises as small-arms fire. The bogies are almost empty now, they plough their way through one, two, three, then the car staggers sending Thomas Lull and Aj reeling as a deep boom rocks the train. “Oh Jesus,” Thomas Lull says. He guesses that a power car has exploded. A roar of acclamation goes up from the mob outside. Thomas Lull and Aj press on. Four carriages back they meet a wide-eyed Marathi ticket inspector.
“You cannot go on, sir.”
“I am going on whether it’s past, over, or through you.”
“Sir, sir, you do not understand. They have fired the other end, too.”
Thomas Lull stares at the inspector in his neat suit. It is Aj who pulls him away. They reach the intercarriage lobby as smoke forces its fingers between the inner door seals. The lights go out. Thomas Lull blinks in darkness, then the emergency floor-level lighting kicks in casting an eerie, Gothic footlight glow into the crannies and crags of human faces. The outer door remains fast. Sealed. Dead. Thomas Lull watches the smoke fill up the carriage behind the inner door. He tries to find purchase on the rubber seal.
“Sir, sir, I have a key.”
The inspector hauls a heavy metal Allen key out of his pocket on a chain, fits it to a hex nut, and begins to crank the door open. The inner carriage door is blackened with soot and beginning to buckle and blister. “A few more moments, sir.”
The door cranks wide enough for six hands to haul it open. Thomas Lull flings the luggage into the dark and himself after it. He hits awkwardly, falls, rolls on rocks and rails. Aj and the railwayman follow him. He pulls himself upright to see the interior of the carriage they have abandoned light startling yellow. Then every window detonates outwards in a hail of crumbed glass.
“Aj!” Thomas Lull shouts through the tumult. He has never heard noise like it. Screaming voices, wailing, a jagged tangle of cries and roars and language multilayered and shattered into incomprehensibility. Revving engines, a steady hammer of missiles. Children’s fear-stricken shrieks. And behind all, the sucking, liquid roar of the burning train, steadily consuming itself from both ends like vile incense. Hell must sound like this. “Aj!”
Bodies move everywhere in every direction. Thomas Lull has a sense of the geography of the atrocity now. The people flee from the head of the train, now a series of actinic detonations as electrical switchgear blows, where a deep line of men in white advances on them like a Raj army. Most are armed with lathis, some carry edged mattocks, hoes, machetes. An agricultural army. There is at least one sword, raised high above the horizon of heads. Some are naked, white with ash, naga sadhus. Warrior priests. All carry a scrap of red on them, the colour of Siva. Flames glint from missiles; bottles, rocks, pieces of smashed train superstructure hailing down on the passengers who crouch and scurry, not knowing where to look for the next attack, dragging bundles of luggage. Gunsmoke plumes up into the air. The ground is strewn with abandoned, burst baggage, shirts and saris and toothbrushes trampled and scuffed into the dust. A man clutches a gashed head. A child sits in the middle of the rush of feet, looking around in terror, mouth wide and silent with a terror beyond cries, cheeks glossy with tears. Feet trample a crumpled pile of fabric. The pile quivers, struck by hurrying shoes. Bones crack. Thomas Lull now senses a purpose and direction in the flight: away from the men in white, towards a low line of huts that has become visible as eyes adjust to the dark of Bharati countryside. A village. Sanctuary. Except a second wave of karsevaks runs from behind the burning rear of the train, cutting off the retreat. The stampede halts. Nowhere to tun. People go down, piling up on each other. The noise redoubles.