Pankaj Mishra - The Romantics

She slipped a present into my hand as I came down the stairs: it was a gift-wrapped CD, useless for me as I didn’t own a CD player.

Mrs Pandey and Shyam looked up and nodded as I passed them. Panditji was lying on his bed, eyes closed, an expression of pure serenity on his face, when I went into his room. I left without waking him.

And then only one more goodbye remained to be said.

*

At the railway station, the train was late and all was disorder as usual: piles of lumpy luggage scattered the dusty floor of the platform, incomprehensible echoing announcements from the loudspeaker, food stalls with their stacks of oily bread pakoras and swarms of flies, a stench of drying excrement from the exposed tracks, perspiring harried faces everywhere, below frenziedly spinning fans.

From this chaos, Catherine emerged without warning. I had been searching for her in the crowd flowing down the overbridge stairs, but she crossed on another overbridge, and the moment I had been anticipating since I left my house, the moment of her arrival on the platform, felt oddly flat.

She was dressed a little too elaborately for the occasion: looped silver earrings, long flared black ankle-length skirt and sparkling white cambric blouse. Her hair was brushed back from her forehead and wound in a coiled mass above her head, revealing a long stretch of pale delicate neck. Men turned to stare at her; women considered her with faint hostility from the corners of their eyes.

The train was to arrive at the same platform on which Anand had made his dispirited goodbyes as we left for Mussoorie. The thought must have struck Catherine, for her first words to me were: ‘Anand is jealous of you, of my friendship with you. He said he was worried that I might fall in love with you when we went to Mussoorie. He suffered a lot when we were away. . He did nothing all day. He could do nothing. He didn’t even practise; he just lay in bed and smoked a lot of cigarettes.’

I was taken aback and could not say anything. I remembered well Anand’s run-down appearance as we arrived from Kalpi and found him in the house. But I wasn’t expecting to hear about Anand at this time. It broke into my mood; it briefly cooled the emotion that had been working up inside me on the rickshaw ride to the station, the pangs of grief that I had felt over and above my anxiety regarding my father.

Some of my optimism about the future had already begun to leak away; it seemed more and more a consoling lie, and the sadness I now felt came as much from the fact of leaving Benares, and with it, Catherine, as from the undeniable truth of our separation, its unknown length, the uncertainties we were both travelling to in different ways.

I knew that no matter what happened to Anand, I was going back to the same old uncertain life. Anand was the lucky man, moving on to a new life, with its own assurances and securities and even luxuries; I couldn’t think of him as a sufferer.

We stood there for some time in a dull, estranging silence.

It was Catherine who finally spoke. ‘I am sorry to see you leave,’ she began slowly, her voice low. ‘Everything happened so fast between us. There was no time to think. But you must promise this. .’

The last sentence was drowned out in yet another droning announcement from the loudspeaker. I asked her to repeat it. She did, with a sudden fit of shyness. She appeared to have prepared the words for the occasion; she hadn’t expected to be interrupted.

Her eyes were turned away from my face and fixed on the ground as she spoke again: ‘You must promise me that you will never regret anything. No matter how painful it is for you. .’

She jerked her head up to look at me. I saw her eyes were wet; her lips quivered as she repeated, ‘Will you promise me this?’

I said, my voice hoarse, ‘Yes, I promise.’

‘What do you promise?’ She was now gazing at me with a ghost of a forced smile hovering over her face.

I was about to reply and then just nodded. It was hard for me to join her mock-cheerful banter.

A tremor of excitement suddenly moved across the crowd: the train was approaching and when it came, the engine softly blowing at the banks of dust arrayed on the platform, the passing faces at the windows were weary but expectant.

Fighting our way through noisy, agitated crowds, we went straight to the air-conditioned coaches. A strong smell of phenol filled my empty compartment. We had just finished storing my bags under the seats when Catherine was in my arms, sobbing softly in the way I had seen her all through the long journey from Kalpi to Benares.

But the moment was brief this time. We could stay like that only for a few seconds, Catherine’s head resting on my chest, before the world began to trickle in.

The sliding door to the compartment was yanked back open once, twice; curious gazes rested on us and were then withdrawn.

The third time, a uniformed colonel came in, his batman tottering under a heavy iron trunk. His family followed: first, his plump, bespectacled wife, and then their teenage, sullenly pretty daughter, who was holding a sheaf of Archie comics.

Their presence and voices shrank the compartment; new perfume and deodorant smells filled the air. An awkward silence grew between Catherine and me. We waited for them to leave the compartment.

But, their luggage stored after loud, urgent exhortations to the batman, they settled themselves in a row, the colonel, wife, and daughter, on the seat before us, and shot appraising glances at Catherine as she wiped her tears, and then at me.

Catherine at last said, her voice strangely choked, ‘You must write. I’ll wait for your letters,’ and before she could even finish her sentence she burst into fresh tears.

The colonel and his family stared even harder.

Finally, it was Catherine who suggested, in a whisper, ‘We must go out. It’s really awful, the way they are staring.’

We had been out in the corridor for barely a second when the warning whistle blew. Catherine groped in her skirt pocket for something and brought out a cream-coloured envelope. ‘This is for you,’ she said, and leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

She seemed more composed now. ‘You are a treasure trove,’ she said. It was what she had told me in Kalpi. ‘We’ll write to each other and then one day we’ll meet. Soon,’ she said, and then added with extra emphasis, ‘ Very soon.’

I felt tears welling up inside me. The train lurched forward; Catherine hurried to the open door of the coach, her skirt swishing, and stepped down agilely on to the platform.

I stood stunned for an instant, clutching the envelope, and then dashed towards the door, almost colliding with a mystified coach attendant coming in with a bundle of towels and sheets.

As I leaned out of the open door, I saw her standing behind a magazine stall, her hand raised in a still wave. I waved back with one hand, holding on to the cold steel door rail with the other.

The train lurched a few more times and then began to slide quickly off the platform. As it picked up speed, large sackcloth bundles lying at the end of the platform blocked my sight of Catherine. When the view cleared after some agonizing seconds she was walking away, with that brisk steady gait of hers, receding serenely into the background confusion of spinning fans, bundles, men, magazine and food stalls, and I thought, as I had so many times before, of the rest of the journey that took her away from me — up the footbridge to the exit and a waiting rickshaw, through the streets and alleys I had just passed, past the sadhu with the matted hair, up the staircase with the Rama-Sita mural — the short journey that took her to the faraway place where her real life existed.