Remarks: Nil

I did not tell her my name.

I want that to be clear, because what happened afterward makes it sound as though I did. I closed my mouth so hard my teeth clicked, and I looked out of the window at the moonlit valley, at the lights of little villages strung down the hillsides, and I did not say a word until Solan.

She did not seem offended. She hummed a little. It was an old Hindi film song, the one my grandfather used to sing every morning while shaving, and she hummed it slightly off-key in exactly the place he always went off-key.

At Solan she stood when I stood. She followed me down the steps onto the platform. The Chandigarh family walked past her. The Tibetan woman walked past her. The ticket checker at the exit gate looked straight at her and waved me through and did not ask her for a ticket.

Outside the station she stopped at the edge of the light, where the road began.

"I can't go further than this," she said apologetically. "Not yet. He never told me his name, you see, so I've never been able to follow anyone home." She smiled. "Goodnight. Tell your mother I said hello. She used to wear a red school sweater with a hole in the left elbow. She would sit on the bench with Thakur-ji and swing her feet."

I walked home very fast.

My mother was awake, sitting in the kitchen with the lights off. She had not been sleeping. When I told her, she did not laugh this time.

"Red sweater," she said. "Hole in the left elbow."

"Was there?"

She pulled her shawl tighter. "I was nine. Papa took me to the station that November. The only time he ever took me. I sat on the bench and swung my feet and ate a packet of Parle-G and I watched him count the passengers coming off the last train. I don't remember anyone in grey." She paused. "But I remember that after that night he never took me again. And he put a lock on the trunk."

We sat in the dark kitchen and did not say anything for a while.

The next morning I did what I know how to do. I treated it as a data problem.

The Kalka–Shimla line is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and heritage sites are documented obsessively. I spent two days in the archive room of the Railway Museum at Shimla, and a week reading scanned PDFs on my laptop at night. Station diaries. Accident reports. Newspaper clippings in English and Hindi. I built a spreadsheet, because of course I did. Every year from 1987 backward. Every mention of Barog, of Tunnel 33, of a girl, of a grey shawl, of passenger counts that did not add up.

Three things came out of it.

First: my grandfather was not the first clerk to write twelve. In the Barog station diary for 14 November 1962, a clerk named Rameshwar Sood had noted passengers alighting 1 in excess of tickets sold, 52459, cause not known. In 1941, a British stationmaster had written a single line in the margin: The girl again.

Second: all three clerks — Sood, the British stationmaster, and my grandfather — had served at Barog for exactly the same number of years after that entry before retiring or dying. Thirty-one. I checked the numbers four times.

Third, and this is the one I did not want to find: in the archives of the Tribune, 17 November 1934, a short item on page six. MISSING GIRL — BAROG. Miss Kamla Devi, 20, daughter of a Barog tea-stall keeper, was last seen boarding the down train on the evening of 14th inst. She was wearing a grey woollen shawl. She had told her family she was going to Solan to meet a railway clerk of her acquaintance, whose name she did not give. Her family requests any information.

The article did not say which clerk. It did not say whether she ever reached Solan.

I sat back from my laptop.

"She's not looking for my grandfather," I said out loud, to nobody. "She's looking for the man she was going to meet. She's asking every clerk his name because she doesn't know which one he was."

Or she knew exactly which one he was, and he was the one who never let her arrive.

My phone buzzed. It was my mother.

"Anaya," she said. "Something came in the post. It's addressed to Papa." A pause. "It's a railway pass. For the down train. 14 November. Next year." Another pause, longer. "Someone has written your name on it."

"I never told her my name."

"I know," said my mother quietly. "But I think somebody else did. It's in Papa's handwriting."