They ate and the train moved through the November dark. The other passengers dozed and talked in low voices. A baby somewhere in the compartment made the small sounds that babies make when they are not quite awake and not quite asleep. Outside, the villages went past — the lights of houses, the occasional flame of something burning in a field, the silhouettes of trees against a sky that was very dark and very full of stars.
"Masterji," Kavya said, after they had been travelling for a while. "Kya tumhe lagta hai — Meenaji ne feel kiya hoga? Aaj. Jab tum wahan the."
He thought about this seriously. "Main nahi jaanta. Koi nahi jaanta yeh."
"Magar agar jaante?"
He was quiet for a moment. "Main chahta hoon ki usne feel kiya ho. Bas itna jaanta hoon."
She nodded. "Main bhi yahi chahti hoon," she said.
The train ran on. Kavya watched the dark plains and thought about her mother in Lucknow — about the Sunday phone calls, about the note in the fridge every morning, about the tulsi plant on the balcony that she watered every three days because her mother had told her to. She thought about promises and distances and the strange loyalty of love, which did not require the physical presence of its object to keep functioning. It just went on, quietly, in the everyday acts — the watering of plants, the eating of lunches, the coming to Platform 9 every afternoon because the feet remember what the mind is still working through.
She felt her eyes getting heavy. "Masterji," she said, fighting sleep.
"So jao," he said. "Main jaag raha hoon."
She leaned against the window and looked at the stars going past and thought: this is what train journeys are — you go somewhere and come back and you are the same person but something has shifted slightly inside you, like furniture rearranged just enough that the room feels different even though nothing is technically different.
She was asleep before Allahabad. She woke up when the train stopped and found that Masterji had put his shawl around her shoulders — she didn't know when — and was sitting very straight beside her, watching out the window with the same expression she had always seen on his face on Platform 9. But it was different now. Less waiting. More arrived.
"Aa gaye," he said gently. "Allahabad Junction."
She looked out and there it was: Platform 9, empty at this hour, the old ceiling fan still turning its slow circles, bench number seven visible in the station lights, and the announcement board with the pigeon's nest at the top. Home, she thought. In the way that a place you've been many times becomes home whether it's yours or not.
