Masterji was looking out the window. He had not looked away from the window since they had sat down. His hands were on his knees, very still, and he was looking at the city that had been his city for fifty years passing backward outside the glass.
Kavya did not talk. She sat beside him and let the train move and let the afternoon pass and understood that this moment required presence, not words.
After a while, without turning from the window, he said: "Woh hamesha khidki ki seat leti thi."
"Meenaji?"
"Haan. Kehti thi ki agar tum khidki se nahi dekhoge to train lene ka kya faida."
Kavya looked out her own window at the city and the sky and thought that Meenaji had been completely right about this.
They had reached the edge of the city now and the fields had begun — winter fields, the wheat just coming up green in long rows, and here and there the smoke of a cooking fire from a farmhouse set back from the tracks. At a crossing, there were three children standing on a bridge railing watching the train go under them, and as the train went under they shouted something she couldn't hear but could see on their open mouths.
She waved. They waved back, all three of them, with both arms, the way children wave when they mean it entirely.
She looked at Masterji. He was smiling. The full one — the real one — watching her wave at the children on the bridge.
"Usne theek kaha tha," Kavya said.
"Haan," he said. "Hamesha theek kehti thi."
The train ran on through the afternoon, through fields and small towns and the brief darkness of a tunnel and back out into the wide Gangetic plains with their enormous sky. And in a second-class compartment of the Varanasi Express, an old man and a ten-year-old girl sat side by side at the window and watched the world go backward.
