The woman who would share my rail car was around my age. She introduced herself to me and said she was a school teacher, on her way to Udaipur for a conference the following day. The train ride was long and hot and, even in our more comfortable cars, the dust made its way through the windows and doors, to coat our clothes and set us coughing from time to time.
Before she arrived to share my car, I had already figured it was going to be a long night. Unlike other countries I had vistited, I began to seriously dread the journeys from one destination to another in India, and the fact that I had waited at the train station four hours—me being early by two and a half and a train delay making up the difference—didn’t add to my peace of mind this time around. I try to be philosophical in such situations, but stoicism comes much easier when the mind is less anesthetized by the numbing agent of an unparalleled boredom.
Stoicism and Buddhism are about concentration.
Then an agent shows up on the platform I had been restlessly prowling, and my name doesn’t seem to be on the reservation list. My imagination whiles away the nothing-to-think-about time with vague terrors of not having a seat for the 14 hour journey, or of the train departing without me, and my having to start the process of waiting and moving all over again the next day.
“Are you going to Udaipur?” she asks in perfectly accented, grammatical English.
“Yes.” I am somewhat surprised to be drawn out of my fret. No one else here seems to have had much English, nor been much help, although the circle of five farm boys with their curious prodding eyes have been undeterrable, badgering me for more than an hour: standing closer and closer to me, their faces taking up my entire field of vision, as if closer proximity would make up for the fact that I don’t understand Hindi… They tire me, these Indian men.
never sure when honest curiosity spills over into sly insinuation
always needing to be on my guard
But this woman… about 26 probably… she has a round face and a pleasant, wide mouth that’s given either to a simple smile, or an “Oche!” clicking–a habitual, perhaps subconscious sound that peppers her conversation, like a Western “uh huh” or “hmn” or “oh”.
It turns out she will be traveling in my car, and she is pleased by the prospect. Not often out on her own as a single woman, she was bound to feel some trepidation, and Ithink she was intrigued by the worldly bold way I am handling these boys. Besides, she is looking forward to using her English.
She tells me that teaches English at a city school in Jodhpur.
Finally, after a month in India, the chance to get a woman’s perspective!
As the train starts us moving, my traveling companion asks me a few questions about where I am from, and the inevitable “Are you married?”
I turn that the question back at her after my reply: Soon, she will have an arranged “alliance.”
For a while, she says, she had actually contemplated moving to America. She would like to do a PhD, but teaching at a university means less mobility when it comes time for marriage, and she must go where her husband lives.
I tell her of the book of Indian women’s short stories I’ve been reading. We talk about women in this country, and she tells me there is progress.
“I can see the difference between my mother and my sister… my father and my brother in law.”
“Women have careers now. Money equals independence.”
She agrees with my view that the higher rate of divorce in the West is not necessarily a sign of moral corruption.
“Here, where there is little divorce, the women make the sacrifices. Always women sacrifice. And many are unhappy.”
She talks about her teaching and the pleasure she feels when children prefer her class:“They are often most happy when they know I will be their instructor.”
Why do they prefer her class? She shrugs, but seems proud at the same time. She does not believe in beating students, for instance, when beating is still very much part of the Indian school system.
And: “If sometimes it is hot, or they have had too much to do, and they request that we not work so hard for one class, sometimes I let them go. We go outside and do not work.”
She has an MA in literature… a kindred spirit. She asks about the West, about which (following some recent letters she’s received from friends), she says now has misgivings.
“It is materialistic?”
I try to explain about the different communities—the artistic and intellectual community to which I claim a certain kinship seems less materialistic—but, yes, too many of us focus is on money and on buying things. The comfort and the status that brings.
What of family? She is surprised by my ability to leave everything behind and just wander, and looks at me with the same expression that she used when she asked about my ability to travel alone all over the world ALONE. “Are you not afraid sometimes?”
Yes, I am afraid sometimes, and sometimes I miss my family.
“So why do you keep doing this?”
The question opens up a silence. As I contemplate all the possible whys, the landscape passes… It is almost dawn now; we have been talking through the night.
The steady rhythm of the train’s wheels on the tracks makes me think about how far I’ve gone, and it makes me wonder why I have no answer for her.
The dust has been coming in all night. At one stop soon after the sun had set, she got up to lock the doors to our carriage, so we have made the entire journey, just the two of us, alone in this car. She said her brother had warned that she should not let anyone join us.
Deep in the darkness, at one stop about half-way to Udaipur, she asked me to tell a man banging on the door to stop wanting into our car, and to go away.
I did so in my most authoritative, Western English.
He could have been anyone: a chai seller, the conductor, someone who had a seat booked in our carraige, or a bandit.
We parted at dawn, she went to her teachers conference and I wandered out into the light, in search of a cheap place to stay.
