Her father was at the station entrance at nine fifty-three PM, when the train arrived, and he was not worried — he had tracked the train on his phone, the way he tracked all trains, professionally and personally — and when he saw the two of them come through the gate together, the old man and his daughter, he put his phone in his pocket and the look on his face was one that Kavya filed away to remember later.
Masterji shook her father's hand. Her father said: "Shukriya, Mishraji. Hum aapke aabhari hain."
Masterji said: "Nahi. Main hoon."
They walked home and she ate a late dinner and went to bed and slept the sleep of someone who has done a complete thing, start to finish, and can rest without any unfinished part of it still pulling at them.✦
Things were different on Platform 9 after that. Not dramatically — she would not have been able to point to exactly what had changed. He was still there every day at quarter past three. He still sat on bench number seven. He still looked at the tracks. He still gave her tea from the thermos cap.
But the quality of the sitting was different. The looking at the tracks was different — less taut, less the forward alertness of someone waiting for something to arrive, more the calm looking of someone who is simply comfortable in a place they know well. Like the difference between looking through a window for a person who hasn't come yet and looking through a window at a view you love.
He talked more. Where before he had offered small pieces of himself carefully and at long intervals, now there was a quality of greater ease, as if some internal door that had been latched was now simply closed without being latched, and could be opened without effort.
