“Good sister, let me come in too.”
The voice was heard from the veranda and, wiping her hands with the hem of her kurta, a girl came into the room. Among all her acquaintances, Malka Begum was the first to have sat in a train, and what was more she had travelled all the way from Faridabad to Delhi for a day. All the women from her neighbourhood had gathered to hear her tell the tale of her journey.
“Ai hai, come in if you must. Frankly I am tired of telling this tale over and over again. May Allah forgive me if I am lying but I must have told it hundreds of times by now. I sat on a train and travelled from here to Delhi. When we reached there, we met some wretched Station Master who was known to him. He left me with the luggage and disappeared with his friend while I sat there, wrapped in my burqa, atop our belongings.
“There I was in my wretched burqa and then there were all those God-awful good-for-nothing men! Men, in any case, are awful creatures and when they see a woman sitting alone they begin circling around her like birds of prey. I didn’t have a moment’s respite to even pull out and eat my paan. Someone or the other would be hovering around me: one rascal would cough, another would pass lewd remarks. My heart was leaping out of my chest in fright. And the hunger – God save me!
“And the railway station at Delhi, dear, was bigger than any fort. It stretched from here to there. For as far as the eye could see, there were just the railway lines, engines and goods trains. But my greatest fear was those awful black men who lived inside the engine.”
“Who lives in the engine?” someone asked, cutting her midflow.
“Who lives there? I don’t know, dear, who lives there. They were dressed in blue clothes; some had beards and some were clean-shaven. They would swing onto the moving engines holding the railing with one hand, making the person standing by and watching them quake with terror. And the sahibs and the mem sahibs, dear…there are so many of them at the station that they cannot begin to be counted. Walking around hand in hand, talking away git-pit. Our Indian brothers just gape at them with wide-open eyes. Those wretches with the staring eyes… It’s a marvel they don’t pop out of their sockets. One of those fellows said to me: ‘Come on, show us your face.’
“I immediately…”
“So you didn’t show them?” someone teased her.
“Have some fear of God, my dear! Had I gone there to show my face to these scoundrels? My heart thumped like a rabbit’s foot.” In a different tone, she added, “Listen if you want to; don’t interrupt me while I am talking.”
An utter silence descended. After all, who gets to hear such juicy stories in Faridabad? People came from long distances to hear Malka’s tales.
“And yes, my dear, the vendors aren’t the sort we see around here. They were all dressed either in clean khaki clothes or white ones; although the dhotis of some of them were a bit soiled. They went about carrying their wares in their wicker baskets: paan, bidi, cigarettes, dahi vade, toys and sweets. How they would dash about carrying their sweets and toys onto moving trains!
“Then a train came to a halt. What a clamour there was! I felt my eardrums would burst. On the one hand, there was the screaming and shouting of the coolies, on the other hand, there was the din of these vendors. And the passengers! They were piling one on top of the other. In the middle of it all, there was poor me – sitting on top of my little pile of luggage. I must have been pushed and shoved, jostled and trod upon a thousand times. Bhai, terrified out of my wits, all I could do was mumble: ‘Jal tu, jalaal tu, aayi bala ko taal tu.’ With God’s grace, the train eventually moved on, but then a fight broke out between the passengers and the coolies. ‘I will charge one rupee.’ ‘No, you will get only two anna.’ And so the bickering continued for an hour till finally, the station emptied out. But it didn’t really empty out totally; the louts remained.
“About two hours later he appears, twirling his moustaches. And with utter carelessness, he says to me, ‘I can get you some puris if you’re feeling hungry. Will you eat? I have eaten at the hotel.’
“I said to him, ‘For God’s sake, just take me back home. I have had my fill of this wretched trip to Delhi. No one would want to go with you even to paradise. You are a fine one to bring me on a sightseeing trip.’
“The train to Faridabad was ready at the station. He seated me in it and said with a grimace, ‘Fine, do as you please. Don’t go on a sightseeing trip if you don’t want to.’”
Excerpted with permission from ‘A Trip to Delhi,’ by Rashid Jahan, translated from the Urdu by Rakhshanda Jalil in Basti & Durbar, Delhi–New Delhi: A City in Stories, edited by Rakhshanda Jalil, Speaking Tiger Books.
