The Woman on the Tracks

The molten humidity tightens her skin until she feels as if she’ll burst like an over-ripe mango touched by rough hands. Sweat slicks her skin. Her body is coated with it and with dry, dark, powder-like dust. On her scalp, flattening her hair, in the armpits, the crease of her groin, sliding down the back of her neck, burning its way down the valley between her breasts. Any day now the monsoon rains will arrive and bathe the city in refreshing coolness. She imagines the feel of moisture on her skin and smiles at her own foolishness.

The crowd on the railway platform has left her no room to maneuver. People are everywhere, the heat from the packed bodies making the atmosphere even more oppressive. She wishes she had a hand free to wipe her face and neck, maybe fan herself with the edge of her sari.

Clutching her plastic shopping basket, filled with potatoes and spinach, a pouch of Amul milk, her umbrella and her purse, she takes a breath, blowing some air vertically towards her forehead, lifting the three curls glued to her skin.

Aaah…a breeze! The air stirred up by the arrival of the VT-Dadar local train. Her train. Time to get on. She is jostled from every side as she is carried along with the crowd towards the second-class compartment, just as she has almost every day for the past ten years.

Then she feels it. A hand sneaking up towards her left breast, pinching, stroking. Roughly sly. She twists her body, trying to slide away, turns her neck to look at the anonymous, sweaty, tired faces behind her, searching for the hint of lasciviousness that would surely mark her molester. One handle of the basket slides down her wrist and hangs in the air.

The potatoes spill on to the platform, rolling away from her. Then her umbrella starts to slip. She tries to hold on to it. The train is about to pull away from the station. The compartment is full but the crowd behind her still pushing; she can feel the heat of that invading hand around her even though it has stopped touching her for now.

The whistle blows. Her foot is caught between the platform and the metal steps of her train. She tries to move and the hem of her sari is caught instead. The train moves and she is pulled under.

Three wheels pass over her waist before the train stops.

“Stop. Stop. There is a woman under the train.”
“She’s dead. She’s dead.”
“The train cut her in half.”
“Someone call the police.”

Her eyes flutter open and she looks up from where she lies on the tracks to the faces clustered above.
Silence.

She is going to be late making dinner for her family tonight. She needs to find a PCO and call them, just to let them know she is going to be late.
“Uh…phon…” she manages.
“Shhh…shhh…she is saying something.”
She tries again and then passes out.

There is no pain. She feels something heavy on her chest and a strange numbness but not much pain. How much time will she need to take off from work to recover from this. A week at least? The new manager at the Canara Bank, where she works will not be happy about this. With Sarita off on maternity leave and Mamata leaving at the end of the month the bank… Oh well, she fell in front of a train. What could they do? She would work extra hard when she returned.

She can see khaki from the deepening haze that clouds her eyes.
“Why are the police here?” She is screaming the question but no one can hear her. Maybe she is just screaming on the inside.
“Arrey bhai, call the ambulance.”
“Ten minutes ago we called these cops. Now they show up,” someone mutters.
“The whole station has been shut down. No trains until this whole mess is cleared up.”
“Saali, she had to fall from this train only.”
“Tchh tchh…how can you talk like this?”
The words congeal into beads strung together, tethering her to a version of consciousness.
It must be evening or the breeze from the sea must have started coming in because she is not feeling hot anymore. Still, it’s a chilling kind of cold. Not pleasant.

One of the cops is kneeling down awkwardly, peering at her from the overhang of the compartment under which she lies. The other cop is trying to keep the crowds away.
“Chalo, chalo. Move on.”
“Take her to the hospital,” someone says.

“Yes, yes, that will have to be done.” A buzzing, impatiently angry sound comes from the assembled people, getting late for getting home. Late for seeing their husbands and wives and children. Late for evenings spent cooking and eating and watching television and sleeping.
“And what will that do? She is almost dead.” The hawaldar, Deshmukh, is sweating profusely, his thick khaki shirt soaked. He smells sour.
“Kamaal hai. She needs to be taken, na?” A man in a once-white kurta and jeans speaks out.
“So, sir, you want to file police case?”

The man backs down. No one has the time for filing a police claim. They know what it means. Days of running to the thana. Being questioned by police, maybe even detained and tortured on suspicion of pushing the victim to the tracks. Whose family had the money to bribe the cops for their release? Best not to get involved.
“Bring some water, here,” the younger cop, Mohan, who is standing by the woman, shouts.

Someone hands him a small, plastic water bottle. He pours some water into his cupped palm and scatters it onto the woman’s face.
The drops of water flutter onto her face, falling onto her eyes. She splutters and regains consciousness.
“Yes, yes, she is still alive,” he shouts out to his companion.
“Behenji,” he shouts down to her, from the distance of the foot or so that separate them, “are you all right?”

She opens her mouth slightly and he watches as a trickle of dark blood oozes down the crease at the corner of her lips. Her eyes close as if in extreme tiredness.

He gets up, off his haunches, and walks away.

“She will not survive. I have seen one other person struck by a train. I can tell.”
“So, what should we do, Mohan bhai?” The second cop is scratching his crotch, shifting uneasily.
“Accident report has to be filled out, Deskmukh bhai.”
“Saala…in this heat, now we have to stand and fill this out?”
“What else can we do? The new inspector sahib wants everything fit-faat, filled out.”
Someone in the crowd says, “Chalo, at least let’s get that poor woman up from the tracks.”
“How will we do that? If we pull her from there, disturb her body, she will surely die.”
“Yes, yes. Possible, very possible,” said someone in the crowd.

She is feeling even colder now. If someone would just help her, lend her a hand she would like to get up. She is sure she’s lost all her groceries but she would like to go home now.

Perhaps her husband, Rajesh, will run down to the little Udupi restaurant down the road and they can eat dosas for dinner tonight. Yes, that is a good idea.

Her daughter smiles at her. Wait! What’s this? She is not the ten year old she knows today. This is Priya as a baby; wide, gummy, toothy smile. She can smell the baby’s smell and breathes in deep, trying to substitute that sweet scent with the acrid, urine and garbage smell that surrounds her where she lies. Her son, Vasant, not the fuzzy upper lipped teenager but a little boy, crying as she swabs Dettol on his scraped knee. As she finishes, she dries his tears with her sari and he impulsively hugs her tight.

I am growing old, she tells herself, getting senile. But her mind, caught in this web of sequences, shows her herself. A bride, wearing red, heart quavering with fear, eyes swollen with her tears, she leaves her parents home to start a new life. Raising her eyes, on a flower bedecked bed, for the first time to look into Rajesh’s equally scared face. The shared recognition, that first smile.

“Listen, Mohan bhai, come here,” the fat cop motions to his companion.
“What?”
“Come here, come here.” The man repeats the words for emphasis.
Looking for a place away from the crowd they huddle together barely a foot away from where the woman lies on the tracks, in the gap between two wheels.

“This is what I am thinking,” Deshmukh says. He pauses, then goes on.
“The accident report…it is…what eight pages? Then all that running around, doctor, hospital, court, etc. etc.”
“So?” Mohan asks.

“So…arrey, you are an idiot yaar. The death report is just four pages. Plus no running around. Just call the morgue and say she is dead. Work done. Otherwise, we fill out the accident report. She dies anyway. Then comes the death report. Double work, na? Anyway, she is going to die. Who can survive like this?”

“So we wait for her to die without getting a doctor or anything?” Mohan is finding this idea intriguing. After all, who wants to rush around in this terrible heat? Plus this way he can get home early today.

Deshmukh walks to the station master’s office and calls the morgue, knowing it will take the van more than two hours to get here at this time of the day. By that time she would definitely be dead.

She can hear everything, the two voices coming at her from a distance but echoing as if in a tunnel. Who are they talking about? Her?
“What? What are you saying? I have to go home…I am not going to die.” Again, she screams her words but cannot be heard. They can’t be talking about her.

She feels another few drops of water hit her face and gently opens her eyes.

“Arrey, she is still alive,” Mohan says to Deshmukh who is back now, his mouth moving rhythmically as he chews paan, some of the red juice spurting down one side of his mouth. Pursing his lip, he expertly aims and then spits an arc that lands on the side of the compartment by which they are standing.

“Bhai, be patient. She is almost gone now,” is the response.
People have started to disperse now. Other tracks are now operational and trains are full of people trying frantically to get home.
Occasionally, someone will come and peer at the woman, staring at her, pointing out anything that struck them, to friends.

“See, she is barely held together. Don’t even know how she is alive for half an hour already. Miracle. Tchhh tchh.”

A teenage boy throws up when he is dragged by his friends to look her. The vomit lands at her feet, a vile, greenish-white puddle of stink.

“So Mohan bhai, how is the new wife? New married life is the best, na?” Deshmukh slyly prods the younger man in the ribs.

Mohan looks down, thinking of his new bride’s taut body. He can’t wait to get home to her. One month of marriage and he has not had his fill of her. Gathering the dust and soot from the city that has settled into his airways, he gurgles his saliva and spits in a stream down onto the tracks, away from the woman.

“Arrey, wish we had cards. Could have passed the time. Your time to go check on her Deshmukh bhai.”
“Still alive,” Deshmukh reports when he returns, “when will that murda gari get here? Hope she goes before then.”

“They’ll be here soon.”

Maybe it’s true. Maybe she is dying. Dying. How heavy that word sounds to her. Like a ball of lead stuck in her throat. Burning tears run in a stream from the corner of her eyes to the ground. But if she is dying there should be pain? If she is that badly hurt, there should be some blood, some pain? She strains trying to raise herself to look at her body.
It’s too tiring. Her eyes go upwards to the high metal, cross-beams of the ceiling. She can hear the buzz of the crowds alternatively recede and come towards her. From where she lies she can see the shoes of one of the cops but she cannot force her eyes go any further than his ankles.

Water. She would like some water. She says the word out loud several times, the words rattling around inside her. The tears stop flowing. It’s getting even colder than before. She shivers. Once.

Deshmukh sprinkles some water on her face. No reaction. Some more. No reaction. He tries to make sure, squinting into the dark overhang of the train. Her chest is no longer moving in that up-down ragged way it had the last time he had looked at her.

“Ayyy…Mohan bhai, come here, come here. She’s gone I think.”

Mohan sprinkles some water as well. He strikes a couple of matches and holds them down towards her to get a better look, trying to illuminate her face that is shadowed under the overhang of the train. Her eyes are frozen still, her mouth open in a grimace. A drool of blood has caked on her lips.

“Yes, she is dead.”

“Quick. Let’s fill out the paper work. By the time they come we should have everything ready so we are done. Then I go home to my dal roti and you go home to your new bride. Saala, you are so lucky. My wife looks like a black buffalo, yours like a young antelope. Such is fate.” He chortles to show no ill will towards the younger man.

Later that night Mohan makes love to Revathy frenziedly, sweat pouring from him in a stream, his concentrated gaze lancing her closed eyes. Then, he looks further down and sees her body messily severed at the waist, gleaming, slick tendons and dark seeping blood. Cursing, he hurls himself away from her. He will never touch Revathy again and not see the woman on the tracks.