Pappu bhaiya told her the story anyway, in the fog, in the voice of a man who has kept something for a long time and is relieved to put it down.
Six years ago, on a January night like this one, a young assistant loco pilot had been riding in the cab of a night passenger train to Palwal with the senior driver, an older man who had trained him and whom he called Chacha. Somewhere past Faridabad, in fog as bad as this, a tractor-trolley loaded with sugarcane had stalled on an unmanned crossing. The senior driver saw it too late. He pulled the emergency brake and pushed the young man down onto the floor of the cab, and then threw himself across him.
The young man walked away with a broken arm. The senior driver did not walk away.
"He was here the next night," Pappu bhaiya said. "At this stall. His arm in a sling. He stood exactly where you are standing and he did not drink the chai. He just held the cup until it was cold. At four o'clock he went home. The next night he came back. And the next." He shrugged, a huge, sad movement. "He asked for the night roster. The same kind of trains. He said somebody has to drive them. He has not slept one full night since. He says every time he closes his eyes he sees the fog."
Zoya was holding her cup in both hands. The chai had gone cold.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because in six years," said Pappu bhaiya, "he did not laugh once. Not one time. And then eight months ago a girl with a big voice comes and makes a stupid rule about no names, and he laughs." He wiped the counter with his towel, not looking at her. "Tonight is the sixth anniversary. And tonight there is fog. And tonight his train is cancelled."
Zoya put the cup down.
"Do you know where he lives?"
"No." Pappu bhaiya finally looked at her. "But I know where he goes."
The railway colony was twenty minutes' walk away, behind the station, a maze of old yellow quarters with washing lines strung between them and cycles chained to every railing. The fog made it a dream place, every lamp post a ghost. At the far end, past a closed dhaba and a Hanuman temple the size of a cupboard, there was a small memorial: a black granite stone with a name carved on it and a painted railway signal beside it, its arm raised.
He was sitting on the ground in front of it, in his uniform jacket, his knees drawn up. He had not heard her coming.
Zoya stopped a few feet away. She had spent two years talking to strangers in the dark and she did not know what to say.
So she did what she always did at 2 a.m. She talked.
"I host a radio show," she said.
He went very still. He did not turn around.
"It's called Neend Nahi Aati. People call in when they can't sleep. I've been doing it for three years. Last month a man called from a truck on the Expressway and told me his wife had left him and he'd been driving for thirty hours because he couldn't bear to stop, and I kept him talking until he pulled over at a dhaba near Mathura and ate something. He called back the next week to say he was okay." She took a breath. "I'm really good at helping strangers. I'm terrible at letting anybody help me. That's why I made the rule. So I'd have one hour a night where nobody needed me to fix anything and I didn't have to pretend I was fine."
Silence. Fog. Somewhere far away, a train horn, long and low.
"My name is Zoya," she said. "I'm breaking the rule. You don't have to."
For a long moment he did not move. Then his shoulders began to shake, very slightly, and she realised that he was laughing — not his sudden light-switch laugh, but something quieter and wetter and more tired.
"I know your name," he said. His voice was rough. "I've known it for seven months. I heard you on the radio in the cab one night. Pappu bhaiya's radio. I recognised your voice in the first sentence." He wiped his face with the back of his hand. "I listen every night, on the way to Moradabad. You're the only reason I can drive through the fog."
Zoya sat down on the cold ground beside him. Not touching. Close.
"You never said anything."
"You made a rule." He looked at the black stone, at the name carved on it. "And I thought if you knew who I was, you'd know about — this. And then I'd be one of your callers. Someone you had to fix." He finally turned and looked at her, and his eyes were red, and he was smiling. "I didn't want to be fixed. I just wanted to drink chai with you."
"That's the least sad sad story I've ever heard," Zoya said, and her voice cracked in the middle.
He laughed properly then. The light switch. In the fog, it sounded like the only warm thing in Delhi.
"Arjun," he said, and held out his hand. "Loco pilot. Night roster. Very bad at sleeping."
She took it. She did not shake it. She just held it, and he let her, and they sat in front of the memorial of the man who had saved his life, in the white silence, until the fog began to turn grey with morning.
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