Out of Order (7 page)

Chapter Eight

The boy held the collapsing paper cup through the horizontal bars of the window in the second-class car of the six twenty-five express to Ahmadabad, walking along as the train began to lurch out of the station.

“Chai. Hot chai,” the boy shouted, determined to make one last five-rupee sale before departure. Jason took the folding cup from the boy’s hand, not because he wanted a second cup of the milky, oversweet tea but because he knew if he didn’t it would somehow end up on his lap. He handed the boy a crumpled fifty-rupee note and waited for change. The boy smiled and waved as the train picked up speed and the platform fell away.

There was a chill in the morning air he had not expected and the scalding chai warmed his hands through the thin cup and burned his tongue when he dared a tentative sip. He yawned and stretched, tensing his muscles in his back and his legs. Other than the late-night fight over the sari he had slept well.

Attar’s wife had had a full meal prepared for them when they arrived from their encounter with the backpack-stealing monkey. Just as she had done during lunch, Pravi Singh stayed cloistered in the kitchen, the children running out now and then to see the tall white man and his beautiful tanned wife. After the meal Attar had driven Jason to a store no larger than his cubicle at the mortgage office where he was able to replenish his supplies. A stroll down a side street led to an open-air market where a man with a foot-powered sewing machine repaired his torn pack for a handful of lightweight coins. The Hello Kitty replacement strap he threw in for free.

“Doesn’t he have anything in black?” Jason had asked, examining the neon-pink padded strap.

“He says this is the only one that will fit your bag, that model being quite rare,” Attar explained, eyeing the new strap, doing his best not to laugh. “He cautions that the clips have been damaged and you should not put too much strain on them or you will lose this strap as well.”

“Impossible,” Jason said, hefting the pack to his back. “I couldn’t be that lucky.”

Back at the apartment Rachel and Pravi were curled up on the sofa, watching a slideshow of baby pictures on a laptop computer, the boys squirming in to get a better view.

“Jason wants to name our first son Peter after his father, but I like Jason, junior,” he had heard Rachel say through the door before he turned on the shower, the drizzle of water splashing on the stone bathroom floor and running down the porcelain squat-style toilet behind him. By the time he was done drying his hair the thin towel was soaked and he felt his skin stick as he pulled on a clean Yankees tee shirt and gym shorts. He was climbing into bed when Rachel had entered the room.

“I hope you didn’t use up all the warm water,” she had said as she dug through her bag.

“Nope. That was used up before I started.” The bed was comfortable and with his eyes shut he knew he’d be asleep in minutes.

“You know I usually sleep in the nude,” Rachel said, Jason’s eyes popping back open.

“Well, don’t change your routine on my account.” He leaned up on an elbow, just in case.

“But I knew we’d be sleeping on a lot of trains so I bought this.” She held up a Nike warm-up suit, the long-sleeved top matching the full-length bottoms. “Cute, huh?”

“Adorable,” he said and settled back down, his head sinking deep in the feather pillow.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Rachel said as she gathered up the things she would need in the shower.

“It’s a little thing I like to do every night called sleep.” He had thought of adding something about being willing to change his plans if she had other ideas but it sounded wrong in his head.

“Not in that bed you’re not.”

“Now that you’ve made us man and wife I think it’d look kinda strange if I slept out on the couch. And there’s not enough room to sleep on the floor.” Jason waved a hand to take in the clutter of dark computer monitors and cannibalized mainframes that covered the room.

Rachel looked around, pushing a pile of broken keyboards under the bed with her foot before giving up. “All right. You can sleep
on
the bed but you can’t sleep
in
it.”

With a dramatic flourish, Jason threw back the covers and climbed out. He tucked the sheet and light blanket back in place on his side of the bed and lay back down under the thin top blanket. “Better?”

“Much,” she said and ducked into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. By the time she had stepped under the shower’s trickle, he was asleep.

It was dark when he woke, his body shaking in the arctic-cold air conditioning. Jason tried to slide under the covers only to find that, as a defensive measure or a reaction to the dropping temperature, Rachel had managed to wrap the free ends of the blanket tight around herself. He felt for his backpack, pulled the sari from the bottom and tossed it in the air, unfurling a few yards of fabric it as it flew. In the dark he did his best to cover himself with the last gift his dead friend bought for his mother, his chattering teeth louder than his conscience.

An hour later he shook himself awake, the sari now part of Rachel’s growing cocoon of blankets. He freed a section large enough to crawl under and fell back asleep only to wake up twenty minutes later, his small portion of the six-yard sari reclaimed. He sat up, grabbed the end of the sari, his fist tightening around the soft fabric and the button, and yanked it free, rolling Rachel onto the floor. Without a light on he could only guess at the dirty look she gave him as she crawled back in bed.

She didn’t mention the sari incident as they packed to leave in the pre-dawn light, but as he brushed his teeth he caught her admiring the elaborate gold-thread embroidery. Now on the train, he noticed her eyeing the simple lever that kept the train’s door shut.

“Once it warms up a bit I’m going to open the door,” Rachel said. She glanced back at the half-empty car to see how many people it would upset. “In Canada they’d never let you stand in an open doorway. Too many rules, everybody afraid of a lawsuit. Here, you want to stand in the doorway of a moving train, knock yourself out.”

“And how many people are killed falling off trains?” Jason was thumbing through Rachel’s guidebook, looking for restaurants in Ahmadabad. “Rules protect us from our own stupidity.”

“Okay, Dad. I get it,” Rachel said in an exaggerated teen voice.

“If you haven’t noticed, safety isn’t very high on the list here. It’d be smarter if you just stick to your toy trains.”

“They’re not toys,” she said, this time in a voice that let Jason know she was done kidding. “They are scale trains. One inch to eighty-seven point one inches.”

“HO scale,” Jason said. “I used to build plastic car models. When I was a kid.”

Rachel sighed. “Here it comes. You’re going to make all sorts of smart-assed remarks about my hobby and I’m going to get pissed off and then you’re going to feel sorry and I’m going to have to forgive you so why don’t we just cut to the chase. I forgive you for being an insensitive jerk who thinks he has the right to belittle people just because they like things he doesn’t.”

Jason smiled. “Well, we got that out of the way. But come on. Trains?”

Rachel looked at him for a moment, trying to spot any hint of sarcasm in his expression. “It started with my grandfather. My dad’s dad. He worked for Canadian Rail as an engineer, worked the last steam lines in Ontario back in the fifties. Then he got hit in the face—some engine part flying off. Went blind in one eye.” Her finger came up involuntarily, touching her right cheek. “That was the last day he drove a train. A full-scale one anyway. He was hoping for a grandson who he could share his passion for trains but he ended up with me. I was ten when he died. Keep the trains going. That was the last thing he said to me. So I did.” She looked down at her hands.

Jason swallowed hard and took a breath before speaking. “Wow.”

“You like it?” Rachel said, her whole face brightening as she popped up in her seat. “I thought the bit about him dying was too much, but it seemed to fit. Usually I have him lose a leg in Manitoba but the eye was a nice touch.”

Jason felt his face redden. “You made it all up?”

“Always tell people what they want to hear. It makes them happy and it doesn’t cost you a thing.”

“So there was no grandfather, no dying request?” His voice matched his waving hands, rising and dropping as he spoke.

“Of course there was a grandfather, silly. He sold insurance. Lives in Florida now. He likes my trains, at least I think he does, but he thinks
I’m
kind of weird.” She looked at him and smiled. “Close your mouth before a fly lands in there.”

“You…but…why….”

“Why would I lie? Because the truth is never as interesting. Oh come on,” she said, giving his arm a playful punch, “like you never made up a story when you were flirting with someone you liked.”

He drew in a breath to answer and held it, wondering what she had meant.

“Other than the Freudian ‘trains into tunnels’ thing,” she said as she stood up, “I just think they’re neat. Now I’m going to see if they’ll let me do something stupid and climb up to the engine. I’d ask you to come along but I’m sure there’s a rule against it.”

***

Jason tied the grimy curtains together and wedged the knot under the top horizontal bar of the window. The side doors were propped open and the hot, dry air of the Rajasthani plains blew in, providing the sun-baked car with an illusion of relief. Although more passengers had boarded the train at the small stations along the route, the car was quiet, the mid-day heat and the gentle rocking of the train lulling the riders into a lethargic doze.

With variations on the theme, the view from the window remained the same. A line of hills was visible on the horizon, indicating where the flat farmland came to an end, and towns too small to earn a stop blurred by in seconds. Despite the heat and the dust, neat, green rows of some hearty crop ran away from the tracks, the mile-long fields separated by dirt roads or pump-fed irrigation ditches. Shacks appeared at unpredictable intervals, thrown up by the side of the tracks or plopped down in the middle of the field, not large enough to store a motorcycle, yet Jason knew they probably served as homes for the army of workers that dotted the landscape.

The few men he saw stood stork-like, with a bare foot propped against a bony knee, arms pulled tight across their chests as they leaned on homemade walking sticks. They watched as teams of women attacked the arid soil with pointed sticks or loaded the unknown harvest into the back of an ox-drawn cart, the tall wooden wheels replaced with bald truck tires. Some men chatted on cell phones and a few slept in the shade the rare tree provided, but most were content to just watch.

While the men wore an assortment of tattered slacks, tee shirts, jeans, and white cotton dhotis, the women all wore saris, the neon-bright colors and festive patterns shining through the dirt and sweat. Under their saris the women wore tight half-shirts that covered their shoulders and upper arms but left their stomachs bare.

Ancient women—one bracelet-covered arm balancing a heaping basket of dirt, the other drawing the end of the sari to veil a leathery face—snaked through the fields, the men pointing with their chins where each load should be dumped. Jason wondered if the saris they wore were the gift of a dutiful, stork-standing son.

Although no one seemed to have a problem staring at him, he felt uncomfortable studying the saris of the women who walked down the aisle of the train. At the station in Jaipur he had smiled when one girl, looking up suddenly, caught him admiring her form-fitting yellow sari. The girl’s eyes widened in horror and, covering her face, she ducked into the crowd.

From what he could tell from his sidelong glances, the sari was wrapped around the waist, somehow creating a row of pleats in the process. The older the woman the higher up the waist the sari was wrapped, with girls in their twenties daring the sari in place on their hips. It took him an hour to notice that there were different ways of wearing the final length of fabric. The fashion conscious preferred a style that swung up from the left hip, across the chest and over the right shoulder, with the most elaborately decorated section of the sari hanging below the waist. The old women on the train—and everyone he saw in the field—passed the final yards of fabric around their backs and over their left shoulders, pulling a portion up onto their heads to serve as a veil, a toss of the fabric separating the trendy from the traditional.

Vidya had never worn a sari, happiest in tight jeans and midriff-bearing tops, a look that matched her attitude.

He thought about the sari balled up in the bottom of his backpack and the friend who asked him to hold on to it, the friend he thought he knew.

Attar had made it clear that he believed Sriram had cheated him and his former classmates out of a fortune, his sudden move to the States evidence of his crime. And even if the program was as “academic” as Ravi had claimed, Sriram had still betrayed his friends for a chance to make it rich. Attar’s faith—or whatever this Krishnamurti thing was—helped him, to a degree, move past the betrayal, to focus on today and forget about yesterday’s lost millions, something Jason was sure few others would do. And he wasn’t sure he could blame them.

Jason thought back to the dinners at the Sundarams’ and how little Sriram had discussed his job. He loved to ramble on about the role of computers in society and the philosophy behind artificial intelligence and self-writing programs, but when it came down to what he did each day, Sriram had said little. If he was to believe Sheriff Neville and the reports in
The Leader
, there were a lot of things Sriram didn’t share. Jason knew that his feelings towards his friend were shifting, that he was beginning to accept that Sriram had sold out his partners for thirty pieces of silver and a pair of green cards, but he still couldn’t imagine Sriram murdering Vidya and then shooting himself. With the more he learned about Sriram he wondered if that, too, would start to shift. Maybe they weren’t as happy as he thought, maybe there were passions he never imagined burning behind the smiling mask. He didn’t know what went on when they shut their door.