The train came in at two forty-three — two minutes early — which the old man noted with the satisfaction of someone who still cared about such things.
It was not a glamorous train. It was old rolling stock, the coaches painted in the Indian Railways blue and cream that had been the standard for decades, faded now and marked with the accumulation of ten thousand journeys. The wheels spoke the particular language of trains — that clicking rhythm on the joins in the track, systematic and calming, the heartbeat of something that moves on rails.
Platform 9 filled quickly the way that train platforms fill — people appearing from the stairs and entrances with the purposeful urgency that departure times produce, families and students and working people, everyone carrying something. The goods porters appeared with their flat carts. The chai wallah on the platform started shouting. The pigeons in the rafters, disturbed by the noise, flew in a brief scatter and resettled.
Masterji stood up from bench number seven. He picked up his cloth bag. He looked at the train for a moment with an expression that Kavya couldn't quite read — it had too many things in it at once.
She stood beside him. "Theek ho?"
"Haan," he said.
They joined the movement of people toward the train. Masterji walked slowly and steadily and the crowd moved around him the way water moves around a stone — not because he was pushing but because there was something in his stillness that people instinctively navigated around. Kavya stayed close to his side.
They found a compartment with space — second class, unreserved, wooden benches with the particular worn smoothness of surfaces that have been sat on by millions of people over decades. Masterji sat at the window seat. Kavya sat beside him. The whistle blew. One long clean sound — the station's voice announcing what was about to happen. Kavya felt the train shudder — that preliminary movement, the coupling taking up slack — and then, slowly, with complete certainty, they began to move.
The platform slid backward outside the window. Bench number seven passed. Then the chai stall. Then the old announcement board with the pigeon's nest at the top. Then the end of the platform, and then they were through the station and into the open city, the tracks stretching ahead of them between the buildings and the trees and the open sky of a November afternoon in Allahabad.
