Eleven Passengers

My grandfather kept a logbook for thirty-one years, and in all that time he wrote in it only one thing that was not about trains.

I found it in March, in a steel trunk under his bed in Solan, three weeks after we cremated him. The trunk smelled of naphthalene and old paper. Inside were his railway uniforms, folded with military sharpness, a transistor radio that had not worked since 1994, and eleven thick ledgers bound in faded green cloth. KALKA–SHIMLA RAILWAY. PASSENGER & GOODS REGISTER. B. K. THAKUR, BOOKING CLERK, BAROG.

I am not sentimental. I am a data analyst in Gurugram; I spend my days telling logistics companies why their trucks are late. But I sat on the floor of that small cold room and read my grandfather's handwriting for four hours, because it was the most honest thing I had ever read. Train 52457. Departed Barog 17:42. Passengers boarding: 6. Goods: 2 crates apples, 1 bicycle. Remarks: Nil. Thirty-one years of Remarks: Nil.

Except on the night of 14 November 1987.

Train 52459 — the last down train of the day. Departed Barog 21:10. Passengers boarding: 11. Tunnel 33 cleared 21:14. Passengers alighting at Solan: 12.

Remarks: Counted three times. Twelve. Guard Negi also counted. Twelve. The twelfth is a girl, perhaps 20 years, grey shawl, no ticket. She says she boarded at Barog. She did not board at Barog. I sold every ticket myself. She asked me my name. I did not tell her.

Below that, in a different pen, darker, as if added years later:

She comes back every 14 November. I have stopped telling her my name. Do not ever tell her yours.

I read that line many times. Then I turned the page, and the next entry was an ordinary one — 15 November 1987, Train 52457, passengers 4, goods 1 crate peas, Remarks: Nil — as if nothing had happened at all.

My mother laughed when I showed her. "Your nanaji," she said, "loved two things. Trains and ghost stories. He used to scare all of you children with Colonel Barog every summer."

Everyone in Himachal knows the story of Colonel Barog. In 1898 the British engineer was building the tunnel through the mountain from both ends at once, and the two halves did not meet. He had miscalculated. The government fined him one rupee — one rupee, the story always says, as if that is the tragic part — and he walked into the unfinished tunnel with his dog and shot himself. The tunnel was finished by someone else, with the help of a local sadhu named Bhalku who found the path by tapping the rock with his stick. The station was named after the man who failed. The tunnel is the longest on the line, one kilometre and some metres, and the toy train takes two and a half minutes to pass through it in the dark.

Every schoolchild in Solan has heard that the Colonel still walks there.

Nobody had ever told me about a girl in a grey shawl.

"Did nanaji ever talk about her?" I asked.

My mother's smile went away. She looked at the ledger for a long moment, and then she said something that I have been turning over in my head ever since.

"Every year in November," she said, "he would go to the station and sit on the bench until the last train had gone. Even after he retired. Even when he was sick. I asked him once why. He said, 'Someone has to count them.'"

She closed the ledger and gave it back to me.

"The fourteenth is next Friday," I said.

"I know what date it is, Anaya."

I took the train anyway.

I told myself it was curiosity. I told myself I was a data analyst and that there is no such thing as a twelfth passenger, only a clerk who miscounted and a guard who wanted to agree with his senior. I booked the last down train from Barog, 52459, departing 21:10, and I sat by the window in the second coach with my grandfather's eleventh ledger in my lap and a pen in my hand.

The platform at Barog is beautiful at night. It is small and very clean, with a slanting roof and wooden benches and pine trees so close you can smell them. The station master's office glows yellow. I counted the passengers as they boarded because I could not stop myself. A family of four from Chandigarh, wrapped in blankets. Two college boys with a speaker. An old man with a basket of oranges. A honeymoon couple taking selfies. A Tibetan woman with a baby asleep on her chest.

Eleven. I wrote it down.

At 21:10 exactly, the little blue train shivered and pulled away from the platform. Ahead of us, the mountain opened its mouth.

The lights in the coach flickered as we went in. The sound changed — the clatter of the wheels folded back on us from the walls, loud and close. Somebody's child laughed. The college boys turned up their music. The honeymoon couple kissed. I watched the black rock go by the window, inches away, wet and glistening in the coach lights, and I counted the seconds in my head. Sixty. Ninety. A hundred and twenty.

At a hundred and forty seconds, the lights went out.

Not a flicker. Out. The music stopped too, mid-beat, as if the speaker had been switched off. The wheels were still loud, the train still moving, but the coach was absolutely dark and, apart from the wheels, absolutely silent. Nobody screamed. Nobody said anything. It was as if everyone had fallen asleep at once.

Then someone sat down in the seat beside me.

I felt the weight on the cushion. I smelled wool and woodsmoke and something colder under it, like the inside of a stone well. I did not turn my head. I could not.

A girl's voice, very close and very polite, said:

"Excuse me. Is this seat taken?"

The train burst out of the tunnel into the moonlight. The lights came back on. The college boys' music resumed exactly where it had stopped. Nobody in the coach looked surprised.

In the seat beside me sat a girl of perhaps twenty, in a grey shawl, with her hands folded neatly in her lap. She had a pleasant, tired, ordinary face. She was smiling at the ledger on my knees.

"That's Thakur-ji's handwriting," she said warmly. "I would know it anywhere. Are you his granddaughter?"

I looked down at my own page. Under Passengers boarding: 11, in my own pen, I had already written — without any memory of doing it — Passengers alighting at Solan: 12.

"What's your name?" she asked.