She did not say anything to him that day. She went home and ate the lunch her father had left — rajma chawal, her favourite — and sat at the table and thought for a very long time.
The problem, as she understood it, was this: Masterji had made a promise to his wife. His wife had died before the promise could be kept. Masterji came to Platform 9 every day because it was the only way he knew to stay close to the promise, to not abandon it entirely, even though he had no way to keep it now.
But — and this was the thing she kept coming back to — the train to Varanasi still ran. Every day at two forty-five, Platform 9. She had read it on the board. She had even gone to the enquiry window and asked, as casually as she could manage, and the man had confirmed it: Allahabad to Varanasi, two hours and forty minutes, returns the same evening at seven-thirty. You could go and come back in a single day.
A promise made to someone who has died is still a promise. This was something she felt strongly without being able to say exactly why. Maybe because of her mother, who was in Lucknow, and sometimes when Kavya missed her she would do the things her mother had told her to do — eat breakfast properly, water the tulsi plant on the balcony, put a dupatta on her head when she visited the temple — because keeping the small promises felt like maintaining a thread that connected them across the distance.
