‘Ma, you know the train’s a good way of going to the city,’ he revealed to Mallika Sengupta. She looked with loving disbelief at her son, as if it were another one of his wild, testing ideas. The train! It wasn’t something they had ever had any reason to use; when they’d lived in the city and had to visit old friends in Bandra and Khar, the long drive through Breach Candy into Worli and then Cadell Road and Mahim had been the occasion for a magical, purely private, journey, unimpeded, on the whole, by traffic — there were so few businesses, then, on the outskirts — during which the city changed itself several times, seamlessly but unpredictably; and then back again. And now Nirmalya, in his frayed, slightly dirty corduroys (he would not put them into the wash) was suggesting trains; almost as a form of enjoyment! How quickly things had changed in the last few years!
They still felt the need, of course, to go to the city three or four times a week; the old life was a fix they suffered almost physically without — despite the prettiness of Bandra, despite their avowed contempt for that existence comprising parties and elaborate hairdos. They took a taxi usually, often with shrill Lata Mangeshkar songs playing from the speakers at the back; or, when Apurva Sengupta was picked up in the morning by a colleague, they followed distractedly in the fitfully cool Ambassador. But it cost money, the journey; hundreds of rupees every week at the Shah and Sanghi petrol station at the corner of Breach Candy and Kemp’s Corner. The taxi fare, each time, was almost a hundred rupees.
‘And cheap,’ added Nirmalya. It was not like him to be troubled about such things. Nevertheless, he was aware in a faraway, theological way that there was no company now to foot the bills, and he worried — this was a new and pleasurable anxiety — slightly for his father; and, of course, he quite enjoyed embracing whatever little poverty he could. Travelling by the local train was his way of briefly, innocently, taking on a disguise, of insinuating himself into the life of the multitude.
‘Really? Where does it go to?’ asked Mrs Sengupta, enthused mildly by the thought of saving the taxi fare; excited, too, to be in a new partnership in this foray with her son. Besides, the idea of saving money had always exercised the puritan in Mr and Mrs Sengupta; the actual practice bored them.
‘Churchgate Station,’ he said.
‘Let’s try it tomorrow,’ she replied, negotiating.
They took a taxi — not to the city this time, but to Bandra Station, and, while Mrs Sengupta hovered in the background, near the entrance, watching vendors, abstracted beggars with bandaged, amputated limbs, and auto rickshaws suddenly roaring back to Bandra, he bought two first-class tickets. This theoretical and implausible luxury gave him much pleasure; ordinary tickets were only two rupees; and, if you paid fifteen rupees more, you travelled first class, which was identical to second, except that the seats were slightly cleaner, and, instead of the raw, ubiquitous perspiration of vegetable vendors, errand boys, and people with part-time employment, you inhaled the odour, mingled with aftershave, of clerks and traders’ accountants, their monthly passes (naturally they didn’t buy tickets) in their shirt pockets. The compartment was less than half full because it was half past two; he — because she was so nervous about her feet and balance — had to help her up, clasping her hand tightly; once she was in, she looked about her with a mild, puzzled smile, like one who’d entered a somewhat makeshift drawing room at a suburban social gathering, and then allowed herself, elegantly, silently, to be led to her seat. People seemed to recognise her, and looked at her respectfully, as if they knew she was Mr Sengupta’s wife and what that meant; and then returned almost immediately to their own thoughts. She settled into the seat, without comment, trying to experience the strange magic in the compartment, unworried, for the moment, that the seat was hard and that she had a lingering backache. He glanced at her with a deep, uncategorisable love. Just as the train began to move, barefoot children and tiny, intrepid men with fan-like bouquets of pens jumped on board, displaying them briefly to one tolerant but uninterested person after another; the children took around small plastic packets of peanuts, saying, just a little too familiarly, ‘Timepass?’ Mrs Sengupta looked nonplussed and charmed. ‘Let’s have some peanuts,’ she said, with an air of someone consenting to behave much more rashly than they normally did. Then, surrendering to the breeze, which generally annoyed her when she was in a car because of what it did to her hair, making her quickly roll the window up, she sat munching peanuts with dignity and an impenetrable delight; until, carefully, entering a different phase in her consciousness of the journey, she put the packet into her leather handbag.
Nirmalya stood by the open doorway, holding, casually, the metal rod he’d lately got accustomed to. ‘Be careful,’ she cried. He nodded curtly and looked away, immersed in his own independence. It was a slow train; it gathered speed and immediately lost it; it stopped repeatedly. At every stop, Mrs Sengupta became dreamy and childlike, her meditation seemed uncomplicated and engrossing, and she was nudged physically out of her reverie only by the jolt the train gave when it started again. Surreptitiously, this experiment saddened her and dampened her spirits; no, she was who she was, she couldn’t, at this late stage in her life, become somebody else. She harboured a small panic within her.
‘No,’ she said, getting off, with her son’s help again, on to the wide platform at Churchgate Station, the long train motionless beside her, commuters alighting and vanishing unhurriedly towards the gates and exits by the time she’d found her bearings, ‘this is very nice, but not for me.’ She smoothed the expensive tangail she was wearing. ‘You know I’ve gone round in this city in nothing but a car for the last twenty years,’ she confessed to her son, as if he’d failed to notice. She smiled in apology, seeming to speak of a way of life she’d had no choice but to accept — that’s the way the company had cocooned them all — and how she’d begun to find everything outside it a tiny bit incredible.
She’d taken a change of sari with her for the cocktails that evening, and a jewellery box with a few bangles and small diamond earrings, all in a small plastic bag. She’d refused to give the bag to Nirmalya to carry, nervous that he, in one of his absent, visionary moods, might leave it lying on a seat upon the train.
As ever, like pigeons returning to roost, they got out of the taxi at the gothic archway of the club. Here, at twilight, they were reunited with Apurva Sengupta, in view of members seated on neighbouring sofas, not quite noticing them; and returned to afternoon papers and tea, and fresh lime soda. At the stroke of seven o’clock she went into the cavernous Victorian ladies’ dressing room in the club and began to transform herself.