Trivandrum Mail

1999

1999.

She was twenty-two, and wearing health shoes.

 They weren’t really health shoes, more like health sandals.  They were made of that black kind of rubber she found ugly but too comfortable to let up, and she wore it anyway. The sandals hugged her feet affectionately, caressing and cushioning her soles, her heels and toes still exposed to the damp air around her; she grudgingly accepted their comfort despite their looks. The toe ring she wore on her middle toe on her left foot kept slipping on and off as she walked (but there was no ring on her left hand).

 The rain seeped into the gap between the health sandals and her feet, just like it was seeping into everything else. It had been a month since the advent of the monsoon. Kerala was steeped in water, as if someone had pushed it in and pulled it out, like her mother used to steep white clothes in indigo bleach in a plastic bucket in their backyard. People were prepared, as they should be, in a state where it rained six months a year – the motorcycles in the parking lot she’d just walked through where covered in blue and silver rain covers, umbrellas stuck out of the sides of people’s bags and autos drew their black covers as they tottered on the potholed roads trying to pick up passengers. It was still less this year – it hadn’t rained for two days but now it was starting again – the clouds overhead were getting thicker as she hurried towards the station entrance, hurried because she didn’t have an umbrella with her. They broke just as she stepped onto the grimy stairs, muddy and littered with supari packets; the cold rain shuddered down from the sky, slipped down people’s collars and into their shoes, and a bit went into her health sandals because she didn’t get under the shade fast enough. Umbrellas were opened, heads ducked, the inside of the station got more crowded with rain-freshened, glowing Keralites pulling damp suitcases behind them. The young men slicked their hair back, cast her looks as she walked past. She kept her eyes fixed on the platform numbers, trying to find platform one.

 The Trivandrum Mail was to leave at 5:35 – it was 5:16. It was coming from Trivandrum, and would stop at Kottayam for a brief time, and then go on to Chennai, her final destination. It was a fourteen-hour journey and she had an upper berth – another reason she wore the health sandals.

 She found platform one. But the train was not there.

 It was her first time travelling alone – her first instinct was to think that she had done something wrong. She looked up at the platform number, but it said ‘1’ in bold white font on the blue board. The announcement being made then was in Hindi; she could not understand it.

 She stood looking at the number for a while. The colour of her salwar-kurta was the same as the board, a deep midnight blue, a flowy cotton-silk, hiding her thin shape underneath its folds. Her dupatta was draped modestly on her shoulders, covering shapely collarbones. The pleats fell naturally over her shoulders, pinned in place with small golden safety pins so she wouldn’t have to worry about it. From over the gather of cloth her neck stretched up, long and thin, fair skin stretching over it, literally seeming stretched because of the tendonlike protrusions that were evident when she turned her head a little – it gave the impression that she was stiff, holding herself tightly so she wouldn’t fall apart. Her face too was drawn, more drawn than it should be for a girl fresh out of college – because she did indeed look like a girl still, despite the dark maturity in her wide brown eyes; they were not innocent, nor trusting. They looked like the kind of eyes that saw the world for how it was – rainy and covered in supari packets and mud. They were not the kind of eyes that saw beauty in the Kerala rain – they did not see the rain itself, just the havoc it caused.

 The eyes were framed by deceptively thick lashes which curled outwards perfectly despite the fact that their simple middle-class owner did not know that such a thing as eyelash curlers even existed. The nose was small, tweakable by a loving older brother or uncle, a small bump in the otherwise perfect ridge caused by a fall from the garden swing when she was eight. When she wore her reading glasses, they sat perfectly on that little bump.

 The lips were the only part of her face which seemed to be something she paid extra attention to – they were full, plump, coated in dull, almost unnoticeable red lipstick which she wore more for her own satisfaction than anyone else’s – she thought it added at least something to an otherwise plain face. She could not leave her house with it; the act of putting on the lipstick would spawn a variety of questions regarding her destination and whom she was meeting, so she applied it in the auto on the way, hoping the bearded driver would not notice.

 Her hair was thick, long, a bottomless shade of ebony – she had braided it without a hair tie at the end – the shorter parts at the front fell out a little and she did not brush them away because they hid the folded, wrinkled patch of skin on the side of her neck and a bit of her shoulder, left from when she was twelve and was burned by a spilling of hot Horlicks from her older brother’s milk mug as he stood behind her. The patch was surrounded by smooth coffee-coloured skin, as was on the rest of her body. It was only here that there was a mark that would never fade. It was small, just about the size of a supari packet.

 She held on to her suitcase with both hands, both free of any kind of adornment. She looked up and down the platform and saw no sign of the train. The clock on the wall of the platform, next to the man selling books on a wooden crate, read 5:25. The train was to leave in ten minutes, but it hadn’t reached yet.

 She decided to ask for help. She did not usually do this, but this was an exception as she could not afford to miss the train. Looking up and down the platform, she spotted a police booth, and a young officer standing outside it, sipping tea from a paper cup. She decided to approach him.

~