The old man did not talk to the porters. He did not buy samosas. He looked at the tracks, drank his tea slowly, and sometimes closed his eyes and tilted his head slightly as if he were listening for something.
He stayed until the five-thirty local came in. Watched it arrive. Watched the passengers spread across the platform and flow toward the exit. Then he watched the train leave. Then he stood up, folded his newspaper, picked up his cloth bag, and went home.
He had been doing this for eleven years.
The porters knew him. The tea stall owner — a young man named Suresh who had taken over from his father — knew him. The station master knew him by face if not by name. They all knew that he came, that he sat on bench number seven, and that he left after the five-thirty. Nobody knew anything else. Nobody had ever asked.
His name was Ram Prasad Mishra. He was seventy-three years old. He had worked at Allahabad Junction for thirty-eight years as a public announcement officer — the voice that spoke from the speakers, the man who said Yatriyon ka dhyan aakrishit kiya jaata hai in a voice that an entire generation of travellers had heard without ever seeing his face.
He had retired at sixty-two. He had been coming to Platform 9 since he was sixty-two.
On a Tuesday in October, a ten-year-old girl sat down on bench number seven, right next to him, without asking permission.
She looked at him. He looked at the tracks. She waited approximately forty-five seconds — which was not very long — and then she said: "Baba, aap yahan roz kyon aate ho?"
He turned and looked at her. She had two braids. She had a school bag with a cartoon rabbit on it. She had a smear of something orange — possibly mango pickle — at the corner of her mouth that she was not aware of. She was looking at him with the direct, uncomplicated attention of a child who has asked a genuine question and is prepared to wait for a genuine answer.
The old man looked at her for a long moment. Then he said: "Chai pioge?"
"Haan," she said immediately, as if she had been expecting this.
He poured a small amount of tea into the thermos cap and handed it to her. She took it with both hands, the way her grandmother had taught her, and drank it. It was too sweet and slightly too strong and she drank every drop.
He poured his own tea and they sat together in the companionable silence of two people who have just, without any formal agreement, decided that they are going to be friends.
Outside, a goods train passed on the far tracks, long and unhurried, filling the platform briefly with its wind and noise. The old ceiling fan turned its slow circles. The pigeon in the rafters shuffled and settled. The old man said nothing. But he did not seem to mind that she was there. That, the girl would later think, was the thing that made her decide to come back the next day.
