Bhowani Junction Read Free Page B

We would go on the Norton. She thought about it a minute. Then she nodded, and I slapped her on the back. I said, ‘Good girl! Come on!’ I got up right away and went to the door, but she turned to say good-bye to Kasel. There was no need for her to do that.
    The ride was hot and dusty. I drove fast because I was in a hurry to get up there, get the work over with, and get on with our picnic. That was a good bike, and I was strong enough to hold it down. We roared past everything—villagers on foot, bullock carts, children playing among the houses, old women, donkeys. The bumping rattled my teeth—and Victoria’s too, I suppose. The dust hung in a long spreading cloud behind us. The fields and huts seemed to race toward me, then passed in a flash and disappeared in the dust. The exhaust made a terrific racket against the houses, and I felt a lot better.
    We got to Pathoda in twenty-four minutes. I leaned the Norton on its stand, went into the station, and shouted for the stationmaster, a fat fool called Bhansi Lall. He wasn’t there. Victoria and I walked along the platform. Pathoda’s a hill village, and the platform is just a levelled gravel standing, faced with brick on the line side and about a foot high. The station is on a curve.
    The coal train was standing there, and you couldn’t see anything wrong at first because the engine was hidden by thecurve of the train. But when we got up past the end of the platform we saw that the engine was standing in the ballast. Twisted rails stuck out like wires from under the tender and the first few wagons. The wood was broken and splintered, and ballast stones had been shot about everywhere. The engine had sunk in a foot or more so that the bottoms of its driving wheels were hidden. A group of railway people stood in a bunch round it, and thirty or forty villagers were squatting on the low embankment opposite, watching. The breakdown train had come up from Bhowani and was on the line in front of the derailed engine. Its crane was swinging round as we arrived. They’d lifted the inspection trolley off the rails.
    ‘That was a narrow escape,’ Victoria said, and pointed.
    I nodded. Twenty yards in front of the derailed engine the line crossed a stream on a girder bridge. There were check rails, of course, but they wouldn’t have been enough. The stream ran about forty feet down in a shady gorge. I saw some red flowers down there, and the water was green and cold and noisy, and from thinking about the engine falling down into it I began to think again about Victoria in a bathing suit.
    I went over to the District Engineer, but there wasn’t much I could do, and soon I went back to Victoria. I found Bhansi Lall, the Pathoda stationmaster, talking to her. He’s very fat and he was trembling with fright and excitement. He was saying, ‘I say, you know District Engineer is saying this is sabot age? Sabotage, here in my station, Pathoda, my goodness, what next?’
    I asked him what he meant, sabotage. His eyes rolled round, and he licked his lips. He said, ‘District Engineer is being rude to me! My God, my job! He is asking, how can bloody
sabot
age-men pull up line in broad daylight without you seeing? He is saying, you must have seen. But Miss Jones, Mr Taylor, I am seeing nothing! Look, station is there, and rail was pulled here, round curve, under embankment. How can I be seeing that villainy? Beside, rascals did not pull up rail but merely loosened fish-plates on two rails—there, there, on inside of curve. Oh, goodness me!’
    I looked up and down and I had to agree with him althoughI didn’t like him. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out he was another of these secret Congress wallahs.
    Then an engine whistled to the east, down the line behind the derailed train. Bhansi Lall unfurled his red and green flags—he had them in his hands and he’d been using them to gesticulate with. He said, ‘Oh, goodness me, hark! Relief engine has come to pull back wagons.