Chapter 3: Anushka / Konkan Kanya

# Chapter 3: Anushka / Konkan Kanya

Train smelled of metal and vada pav and the accumulated sleep of three hundred passengers who had boarded at Mumbai CST with the collective intention of being somewhere else by morning.

Anushka found her berth, upper, left side, the one she'd booked specifically because it was against the window and she could press her face to the glass and watch the Konkan coast unfold in the dark. She'd done this three months ago, in the opposite direction, and the memory was so vivid it felt less like memory and more like a film she was rewatching: the same train, the same route, the same uncomfortable blue rexine of the berth, the same rattle of wheels on track, the same India scrolling past the window like a film strip, stations, tunnels, bridges, the brief luminous interruptions of platform lights in the darkness.

The berth below her was occupied by a woman in her fifties — solid, competent-looking, wearing a cotton nightie and reading glasses, the universal uniform of the Indian aunty in transit. She had arranged her luggage with the architectural precision of someone who took train journeys seriously: suitcase under the berth, smaller bag on the hook, food containers (steel, three-tiered, the kind with the clip-on handle) on the fold-down table, water bottle in the mesh pocket, phone charging from the single outlet that every passenger on the train was competing for.

"Going to Madgaon?" the woman asked, looking up from her phone as Anushka climbed up to the upper berth.

"Yes."

"Family?"

"Yes."

"First time?"

"No. Second."

A woman nodded, satisfied. Two exchanges were sufficient for her social requirements. She returned to her phone, and Anushka settled into the berth, pulling the thin railway blanket, the one that smelled of institutional laundry, the smell that was the same on every Indian train and had been the same since probably independence, over her legs.

The train moved. The slow, grinding departure from CST, past the signal boxes and the shunting yards and the last stragglers of the Mumbai skyline, and then the acceleration into darkness, the city falling away behind them like a shore receding from a boat.

---

Konkan Railway at night was a tunnel through time. The train entered the first real tunnel south of Panvel and the window went black, the glass becoming a mirror, and Anushka saw her own face reflected: eyes wide, skin lit by the blue reading light above the berth, the face of a woman who was travelling toward something she could not name. Then the tunnel ended and the Konkan reappeared, a darkness deeper than the tunnel's darkness because it was living darkness, populated, the scattered lights of villages and farmhouses and the red blink of a mobile tower on a distant hill.

She had brought a book. Sudha Murty's Wise and Otherwise, the collection of short stories that her adoptive mother had given her years ago and that she reread on trains the way some people reread religious texts: for comfort, for the specific reassurance of familiar words arriving in a familiar order. She opened it but did not read. The train's rhythm was wrong for reading tonight. Too urgent, too forward-leaning, the wheels saying going-going-going instead of the usual steady-steady-steady.

The woman on the lower berth was eating thepla. The smell rose through the compartment, the wheat and methi and the faint tang of pickle, the unmistakable smell of Gujarati travel food, the food that every Gujarati family packed for every journey regardless of duration, because a train without thepla was not a train but a punishment. She offered some to Anushka. Anushka accepted. The thepla was perfect, the kind of perfect that only a grandmother's kitchen produces, the dough rolled thin, the methi bitter and green, the oil soaked in just enough to keep the bread soft during travel.

"Going to Goa?" the woman asked.

"Yes."

"Holiday?"

"Family."

The word surprised her as it left her mouth. Three months ago she would have said "visiting someone" or "personal trip." Now she said "family." The word was new in this context. New and terrifying and also, in a way she could not explain, true.

She couldn't sleep.

Not because of the train — she was a Mumbaikar; she could sleep through anything, including local trains at rush hour, which were louder than this and involved considerably more physical contact with strangers — but because her mind wouldn't settle. It was doing the thing it did before piano recitals: running through the programme, rehearsing the emotional beats, preparing for what was to come.

What was to come: Madgaon station. The bus to Benaulim. Or maybe Shalini would come to the station, she'd offered, twice, in messages that were carefully casual: "I can ask Conceição's son to drive me if you want. He has a Maruti. It mostly works." Anushka had told her not to bother. She'd take the bus. bus was fine. The bus gave her thirty-five minutes of transition, thirty-five minutes to shift from the person she was in Mumbai (piano teacher, daughter of Mandakini, Tara's sister, the girl from Dadar) to the person she was becoming in Goa (Shalini's daughter, Deepak's daughter, the woman from both places).

What was to come after that: ten days. The festival (three days, November 15-17, at the Kala Academy in Panjim — Rhea had sent the schedule, a dense PDF of performers and timings that included jazz ensembles from Lisbon and Kolkata and Cape Town and a folk segment featuring Goan mando singers and a solo piano recital by someone from the Goa University music department whose name Anushka didn't recognize but whose programme, Debussy, Ravel, Mussorgsky — she respected). And before and after the festival, seven days in Benaulim. Seven days with Shalini.

The last time had been twenty-one days. Twenty-one days that had contained more emotional events than the preceding twenty-six years combined. She'd arrived a stranger and left a daughter. She'd found a mother, a dead father, an aunt, a village, a history, a house. She'd played piano on a Casio balanced on a cutting table. She'd eaten prawn balchão until her tongue burned. She'd watched her biological mother sing in public for the first time in twenty-eight years. She'd held a rosary that belonged to a man she'd never met, and she'd read a note in his handwriting, "She is here. Our daughter is here.", and she'd understood, with the cellular certainty of the body rather than the intellectual certainty of the mind, that she had been loved before she could remember being loved.

Twenty-one days for all of that.

What could ten days do?

She turned on her side. train was passing through Panvel now, the industrial outer ring of Mumbai giving way to the first hints of the Konkan, the green, the wet, the steep hillsides that would, by morning, become the coast. Through the window, she could see the lights of a town, small, scattered, the kind of Indian town that existed primarily as a stop on a railway line and a cluster of lights seen from a moving train.

Her phone buzzed. Tara.

Did the train leave on time?

Yes. 11:02. Two minutes late. Practically on time by Indian standards.

Upper berth?

Upper berth.

Good. Don't fall off. Remember when Baba fell off the upper berth on the Pune Express and had a bruise on his hip for three weeks?

Anushka smiled. Dattaram Bhosale, Baba, their father, the man who had raised them, had been a terrible train traveller. He sweated. He complained about the food. He fell off upper berths. He once left his reading glasses in the train bathroom at Ratnagiri and made the entire family disembark at the next station so he could call the railway helpline, which did not help, because the glasses were already being worn by someone in another carriage who had similar prescription needs and no moral objections to found property.

I won't fall off. I'm holding on to the chain.

The chain is decorative. It's not designed to hold a person.

It's designed to hold luggage.

You're roughly luggage-sized.

Goodnight, Tara.

Goodnight, Anu. Text me when you arrive. And don't eat train food. I packed you theplas.

The theplas were in the suitcase. Wrapped in aluminium foil, inside a cotton cloth, inside a ziplock bag. The triple-layered packaging system that every Gujarati and Maharashtrian mother had perfected over generations. Mandakini had made them. Methi theplas with extra hing, the way Anushka liked them. Mandakini had delivered them to the Dadar flat that afternoon, along with a container of mango pickle and a stern instruction to eat on the train and not wait until Goa because "you get dizzy when you're hungry and I don't want you fainting at Madgaon station."

Anushka hadn't told Mandakini about Shalini's text. The "Mothers notice sweating" text. The first time Shalini had used the word. She'd kept it to herself, not out of secrecy but out of. What? Tenderness. The sense that some moments were too new to be shared, too fragile to be examined, like photographs that needed to dry before they could be handled.

She'd tell Mandakini. Eventually. When the word had settled. When it was no longer new but established, load-bearing, part of the vocabulary they all shared.

Train swayed. The wheels clicked. The woman in the berth below began to snore. A gentle, rhythmic snore, the snore of a person deeply committed to sleep. Anushka closed her eyes.

The Konkan coast was out there, in the dark, waiting to be revealed by morning. The rivers, the bridges, the tunnels that punctuated the route like commas in a very long sentence. And at the end of the sentence, at the period, at the full stop: Madgaon. And beyond Madgaon: Benaulim. And in Benaulim: a house with a red oxide floor and a verandah and a mogra bush and a woman who had, in a text message about a ceiling fan, called herself a mother.

Anushka slept. Train carried her south.

---

She woke to light.

Not the harsh fluorescent light of the train compartment but the golden, wet, filtered light of the Konkan morning — the light that came through the train window at an angle that suggested the coast, that suggested proximity to the sea, that said: you are almost there.

She'd slept through the tunnels. Through the bridges. Through Ratnagiri, where Baba had lost his glasses. Through Sindhudurg, where the forts stood on promontories in the Arabian Sea like sentries from a history that was both glorious and complicated. She'd slept through all of it and woken to this: a window full of green, and palm trees, and the specific quality of light that belonged to the Konkan and nowhere else.

She checked her phone. 9:47 AM. An hour and twenty-eight minutes to Madgaon. Three messages waiting:

Tara: Alive?

Mandakini: Did you eat the theplas?

Shalini: Gopal has been sitting at the gate since 6 AM. He knows.

Anushka replied to all three:

To Tara: Alive. Didn't fall off.

To Mandakini: Eating them now. Best theplas ever.

To Shalini: Tell Gopal I'm coming. One hour.

She unwrapped the theplas. Ate them with mango pickle, sitting cross-legged on the upper berth, watching the Konkan scroll past the window. The woman below had already packed her things and was sitting upright, her steel containers washed and restacked, her reading glasses folded and stored, her face composed into the expression of a person who was ready to arrive.

"Almost there," the woman said, noticing Anushka looking down.

"Almost."

"Family in Goa?"

"Yes."

"Nice. Family is nice." She said this with the air of a person stating a universal truth, and Anushka nodded, because it was true, and because the woman didn't need to know the details. Didn't need to know that the family in question was a biological mother she'd found three months ago, and a dead father she'd never met, and a dog named Gopal who attacked postmen, and a village full of people who knew her story before she did.

"Yes," Anushka said. "Family is nice."

Train rounded a curve. Through the window, she caught a glimpse of water, the Zuari, maybe, or one of the smaller rivers that fed into the coast, and the light shifted, and the air through the crack in the window changed, carrying with it the smell of salt and laterite and something floral that she couldn't identify but that her body recognized before her mind did.

Goa.

She was almost there.