"1989 se. Tab se wahan stall tha. 2001 mein shift hua."
"Aap kaise yaad hai aapko itna saara?"
"Jab aap kisi jagah ko roz dekhte ho — poori tarah, dhyan se — to woh jagah aapke andar aa jaati hai. Uski har cheez. Badlav bhi, aur jo badla nahi woh bhi."
At noon, they sat at the chai stall and Suresh made them tea without being asked and brought a plate of glucose biscuits and looked at the two of them — the old man and the girl — with an expression warmer than most expressions he wore.
"Aaj Varanasi ja rahe ho Mishraji?" he said.
The old man looked up at him. Then he looked at Kavya. "Haan," he said. "Ja rahe hain."
At one-thirty they went to the ticket window. Masterji insisted on buying both tickets — he would not hear otherwise. Two tickets, Allahabad to Varanasi, second class, unreserved. He counted out the money carefully from a small leather wallet worn thin at the corners.
The ticket came out of the machine — that particular thin paper, slightly warm, with the route and time printed in the plain urgent font of railway tickets everywhere. He held both tickets in his hand. He looked at them for a moment — just a moment — and his face did something private and complicated that Kavya pretended not to see.
Then he held out one ticket to her. "Yeh tumhara," he said.
She took it with both hands, the way her grandmother had taught her, the way she took the small cups of tea.
They walked back to Platform 9 and sat on bench number seven, as they always did, and waited for the two forty-five, which was now only a little over an hour away. And for the first time in eleven years, the old man's waiting had something at the end of it.
