Bunny Reuben

Extract from the Savage Trio by Bunny Reuben

From the A Train From Santha:

" I hear it," she said aloud to herself.

Absently smiling, standing in the fields.

"I hear it coming now, my train."

Like all peasants who work much of their lives alone in the sun, the rain, the fields, the girl too had grown into the habit of speaking aloud to herself.

The trains stormed along the high embankment outside her village, and its shrub covered sides sloped steeply down to the fields where Santha worked under the sweltering Indian sun.

Trees even, grew from the sides of the embankment, drooping crazily from their slanted bases, and after the rains the embankment was almost impregnable. But the girl knew its stretch for a full mile on both sides, starting from the fields where she worked. She knew the Achilles Heel of the impregnability and when she wanted to go sit on the railway tracks, high up on the embankment from where she could see her village sprawling in the heat-vapor distance, she used the broken track she had discovered a little, made a little.

It was summer, before the rains, when heat lay its shroud of blinding white on earth. There was work in the fields for the crops to come and in the afternoons she would sit in the shade of the tiny mud hovel under the tamarind tree and eat the meal of daal and bajri bread she brought from her home in the village.

When it got too hot of afternoons she drew water from the well by the hovel, and splashed its mud sides with it, then sat in the moist shadows, eating and smiling to herself, lying down and smiling to herself, listening to the trains.

There was a tunnel further up to the north, and the first she heard of a train was the muffled roar as it neared the end.

And it kept coming coming its roar grew louder louder until its deafening crescendo passed right through her marrow her thin bones and belly to pass and die and yield to infinite quiet, and the chirp of sparrows fell on her perception like the whisper of the unseen wind to tell it was silence again.

It happened like that all the time.

Sometimes two trains coming from opposite directions passed each other there, and then the roar and fury were double deep double piercing double wrenched through her bony frame.

At harvest last year Santha and the women worked at night in the fields with the men. And it was night without moon so only the glow of kerosene lanterns guided their work.

There were no trains that night but one. When the muffled roar of its emergence from the tunnel proclaimed it, Santha paused in her work and looked up to see how it appeared in darkness. There wasn't the train first, only the muffled roar and then .the sharp knife-beam of the headlamp cutting brutally through the black, and the rising crescendo of sound and little patches of light of compartment- windows and the statued replicas of humans huddled stilly together in steep, so distant, so quiet, another world going to another world and the girl far beneath, looking up at it.

The trains gave a different life to the living fields. They were snaked about her existence like veins twined round her throbbing heart. Their shattering hammer blows of sound alternated with the silence so that sound and silence, silence and sound, sound and silence, coursed up-down this-way that-way through the unconscious being of the girl. And their haunting-wailing cries in the night was the blood coursing hot through her veins and the light, the blinding flashes in the murk of adolescence.

It was late morning and late summer. Santha was working in the fields. Her little bundle of food lay in the shadow of the mud hovel. The small of her back ached and she straightened to blink at the sun. It would be overhead in a little while and she would eat.

She heard the muffled roar from the tunnel again.

"It's coming now, my train," she muttered.

She put the scythe down and stood up, watching the train in utter concentration, her mouth slightly open, her eyes staring.

The train slowed a moment in the field of roaring crescendo and suddenly she saw a door in its snaky body fly open and a bundle catapult out. In a flash the roar of the train passed until only its scars remained on the skin of silence.

She ran to the foot of the embankment. The track was steep and rough but she could scramble up if she moved fast, grabbing shrub roots and rocks, helped by her own momentum. Halfway up the girl paused.

She looked about.

It was unearthly still. There was the scurrying rustle, of mynahs but that was not alien. Rapidly, thoroughly, her eyes and ears sought the alien, the thing that had fallen for her from the train.

Seeking it she heard it, the alien sound, a branch snapping under weight, rubble sliding down the embankment, crunch of dead leaves.

She left the path quickly, pushed into the tangle of underbrush. Trying for a foothold and slipping some yards down every time he tried to go up was a bleeding, tattered man. She looked down at him and he saw her.

"Help me go up," he gasped.