Night Train to Jamalpur

by Andrew Martin

  Presently, I saw Fisher’s legs hanging over the side, since he was sitting on his bunk. He then commenced swinging his legs into the bargain, like a boy sitting on bridge over a stream. Then blue smoke began to loop down towards my bunk, so Fisher was now smoking a Trichie as well as swinging his legs.

  I said, ‘You turned up late at the Debating Society dance, I noticed.’

  No reply. The legs kept swinging, but more slowly.

  ‘Fancied a bit of a jig, did you?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Of course, by then the “do” was about finished; only one dance left, I would have thought. You can dance, can you?’

  ‘Is should think so – all the bloody mess dos I’ve been to.’

  The swinging legs regaining some of their speed now.

  ‘You didn’t come with a partner, though . . . So who had the pleasure?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some bloody woman.’

  ‘What was the dance?’

  ‘A fucking waltz, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You weren’t there to meet anyone in particular?’

  The legs had stopped swinging. There came a knock on the door.

  ‘Enter!’ I shouted.

  An Indian dragged open the door: a steward. He was proposing to collect our booking for dinner, to be taken at a twenty-minute stop somewhere down the line.

  ‘Nothing doing,’ said Fisher. ‘We’ve already eaten.’

  ‘Then order for drinks, sahib?’

  ‘Sling yer hook,’ said Fisher, and the man bowed and closed the door. Fisher’s legs recommenced their swinging.

  I did wonder at Fisher’s reasons for wanting to avoid interruption. It was true that we had both eaten, and it was a great palaver to order a meal on the Indian railways. It was always a rushed job, and there was no end of people to tip. So perhaps that was the beginning and the end of the matter. In any case, it would be futile to resume my questioning about the dance. I checked my watch: five minutes until the ‘off’. I took the Webley out of my kit bag and slid it under my pillow. That would come in handy against any snake as well. I put my one bottle of Beck’s in the ice tray.

  I opened my paper, and my eye fell upon a report that some outfit known as the Swaraj-something-or-other had been declared illegal by the Governor of Bengal. Ghandi-ites of some kind. I turned over the page: ‘Fierce Fight at the Zoo.’ A tiger had attacked two leopards. The tiger had pulled up the iron drawbridge of its cage by yanking on a chain with its teeth. This had occurred on the Monday – the very day I had seen Hedley Fleming at the zoo. I turned the page, and with a great crash Fisher jumped down from his bunk. He took off his suit coat, revealing a sweat-soaked shirt tunic. No shoulder holster. But the pistol might be in his kit bag, or in the pocket of the suit coat, which he now hung on a peg by the window. He ducked into the little washroom, pulling the curtain behind him. I heard the clunk of the lavatory seat being raised or lowered. Fisher was paying a call of nature – a call of the longer sort, I suspected, from certain ancillary sounds. I eyed the suit coat. Fisher wouldn’t come out of the washroom without first pulling the chain on the thunderbox. You weren’t meant to do that in a station – the prohibition applied even here in India where all railway lines doubled as latrines – but Fisher wasn’t a man for such niceties. His suit coat hung lower on one side than the other. I stood up, put my hand into the lower pocket, and there was the piece: a Webley, like my own. I broke open the gun, and there came the shriek of the platform guard’s whistle. The cylinder was fully loaded. We lurched away, and Fisher threw back the curtain as I thrust the gun back into the pocket. He had not pulled the chain; he was in his undershirt, and he held his unbuttoned trousers loosely about his waist. We were running clear of the station now and rattling over a bridge. Fisher was eyeing me.

  ‘What are you playing at?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  He seemed willing to let it go at that. I didn’t believe he’d seen me touch the gun. He eyed me for a while, then delved into his kit bag and found a blue-and-white package: Bromo water-closet paper. He returned to the thunderbox and closed the curtain. But then he immediately threw the curtain open again, plucked the suit coat off its hook and took it in with him. So perhaps he had seen what I was about. But surely he couldn’t shoot me with a revolver in a compartment of a fully occupied railway carriage – not if he hoped to escape detection: the report would be too loud. I had heard the shot fired on the Night Mail to Jamalpur, but that had apparently been fired by a wild dacoit about to make off on a thoroughbred horse. If Fisher planned to loose off a bullet in the compartment we presently occupied, then he would need . . . It came to me at last: the word that should have been on my lips when I spoke to Canon Peter Selwyn in the Bengal Club. To shoot someone on a crowded train, Fisher would need a silencer: a silvery metallic tube about six inches long and half an inch in diameter – surely the very article that Selwyn had seen in Fisher’s possession.

  Ten minutes later, we were lying on our bunks again, and I had my Beck’s on the go. I didn’t like the look of the meat paste in my tiffin basket; I believed it had curdled in the incredible heat. Fisher was addressing me from the top bunk; he was speaking of ‘the last lot’: the war. I knew nothing of Fisher’s own war, save that he had been in France, then on the North-West Frontier of India. I believed he had served in both the Royal Engineers and the Military Police, but when asked he’d only say, ‘That’s all ancient history, isn’t it?’

  He said, ‘You were on the little trains. In France.’

  ‘Two-foot gauge.’

  ‘But it’s not quite two foot, is it?’

  ‘One foot eleven and five eighths, if we’re splitting hairs.’

  ‘But the mountain railway – the one we’ll be taking to Darjeeling. That really is two foot, isn’t it?’

  ‘Dead on,’ I said. What the hell was he driving at?

  I heard Fisher lighting a cigar.

  ‘You were running arms to the forward lines. Petrol-electrics, I suppose?’

  ‘Steam. Baldwins. Made in America.’

  ‘Up to the job, were they?’

  ‘Not bad. The boilers were set rather high.’

  ‘So they were unstable?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  Paddy fields beyond the window slats. We had left the city behind.

  ‘Blow over in a breath of wind?’ Fisher suggested.

  ‘Breath of wind from a nine-pound crump, yes.’

  ‘But you came through all right?’

  ‘I’m sitting here talking to you, aren’t I? Lying here, I mean.’

  I had half a hundredweight of iron in my left thigh but I didn’t go into that. Nor did I mention the bad blood within my own unit that had arisen from one capital crime and resulted in another.

  ‘You didn’t pick up a medal, then?’

  I shook my head, forgetting that Fisher couldn’t see me. I had received some private congratulations for sorting out the bad business, but only after I’d nearly swung for it myself.

  It had also earned me a posting to Mesopotamia, and the privilege of keeping tabs on the lieutenant colonel of dubious morals.

  ‘But you got your commission?’ Fisher said.

  It was as though Fisher was trying to work out how much of a loss to the world it would be if he shot me dead.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ I said, taking up my copy of The Statesman again.

  On the top bunk Fisher had control of the light switch. He now turned it out. In the rattling darkness, I paid my own visit to the washroom. As I emerged from it, we ran through a station, and an arc of electric light swung through compartment, illuminating the side of Fisher’s face. He was silent, but not asleep. Before regaining my berth, I peered through the window slats at the endless paddy plains of North Bengal. Here and there were the beautiful silhouettes of palm trees – they looked better in silhouette – and of wooden contraptions used for irrigation. The mysterious orange sparks from the engine held my gaze. I closed the
slats, and retreated to my bunk. Eventually I dropped asleep, in spite of my best intentions. Some time later, I was aware of a voice: it said, ‘Someone’s coming.’ It was Fisher’s voice. For a while, nothing happened, and I half believed I had dreamed it

  I was awakened by the compartment door being pulled open. The train was moving slowly. Some light spilling from the corridor illuminated two faces: an Indian railway official and a European. The train began to gain speed. We must have made a stop, where this European had boarded. The official entered the carriage and began making up the opposite bunk, creating a good deal of din in the process.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Fisher muttered, after enduring a minute of the din, and then the European was about installed. The official quit the carriage, pulling the door to behind him. The European settled himself quickly, but then he got up and went into the washroom. He was in there for a good while. He came out to the accompaniment of the roaring flush of the thunderbox, then he went over to the window and opened the slats. All was darkness beyond, but he continued to peer through.

  ‘Get to fucking bed,’ said Fisher, and the man turned his head somewhat in the direction of Fisher. The man did not stir himself unduly, but he did close the slats a few seconds later, and climbed into his bunk. Half an hour later, I could still not be sure he was asleep, but I was pretty certain on another point: whatever Fisher’s plan might be, he could not shoot me now.

  II

  The European did not appear to speak or understand English. I put him down as Italian or Spanish or something, going by his responses to the bearer who came in with tea and toast at half after five in the morning. I opened the window slats: more paddy fields, now with pale orange sunlight burning the mist away. As I moved back from the window, the track began to curve, and I immediately looked again. What I had taken for a great bank of cloud was in fact a great bank of mountains, and it appeared that we were approaching the very perimeter wall of India.

  Siliguri station was located at the base of the five-mile-high mountains, and it stood in the same relation to them as a doorstep to a tall house. It was as if this weird situation had sent everybody mad, and the sidings around the station contained engines and wagons of two sizes: full-sized and half-sized. A half-sized train was made up and waiting for us on the platform opposite to the one we’d come in on. Another little train waited behind it, and both together made up the Darjeeling Mail. In other words, what was billed as one train was really two. Well, I supposed it was better for a short train to fall off the mountain than a long one.

  Fisher, it turned out, had a good deal more luggage than what had accompanied him in our compartment. He engaged two porters, and shouted at them continuously as they carried two cabin trunks, a shotgun sling and golf clubs across the platform from full-sized to half-sized luggage vans. The tip he gave must have made up for the abuse, since it caused the Indians to bow very low. Were they Indians, in point of fact? They looked oriental, like Gurkhas, and we would be heading towards the territory from which Deo Rana and his fellows had originated.

  The little engines were four-coupled saddle tanks, bright green in colour, and overrun with engineers. Three blokes were crammed on to the footplate, a further two sat on the coal bunker, which straddled the boiler. As I looked on, two more blokes climbed up on to the buffer beam, so the engine was now practically smothered by the men who operated it.

  The carriages offered a variety of accommodations within each class. Our tickets allowed us to travel in any marked ‘First’. Fisher selected a saloon of the second train. This was an open carriage (no compartments), which suited me, as it meant I wouldn’t be closely confined with Fisher. The carriage held couches, basket chairs and occasional tables, as though furnished from a house clearance, and as we boarded three European women and their assorted children climbed up, together with their three ayahs, or maids. All turned and smiled at Fisher and me.

  ‘Room for us all here, I think?’ said the first and boldest of the women. Half rising to my feet, I nodded and smiled. But Fisher remained seated. He lit a Trichinopoly cigar.

  ‘I say!’ said one of the women.

  The bold woman said, ‘The children don’t care for your cigar smoke.’

  ‘If truth be told,’ said Fisher, ‘I’m not very keen on it myself.’ He then fixed his bulging gaze on the children, one by one. ‘I mean, it’s only a cheap cigar,’ he added.

  It was to the children’s credit, I thought, that none of them flinched under Fisher’s gaze. But at this point of maximum rudeness he gave ground. Rising from his chair, he said, ‘Best for all, I think, if my friend and I adjourn to the smaller saloon.’

  He was indicating a narrow corridor at the south end of the saloon that, as it turned out, led into a supplementary space holding nothing but two basket chairs and an ashtray on a stand.

  So I was trapped with bloody Fisher again.

  We sat down opposite each other in the basket chairs. Fisher had his Webley in his suit-coat pocket, and I had my Webley in mine. I now also matched his Trichinopoly cigar with my own Gold Flake. Beyond our seats, a glass door gave on to a carriage-end balcony, or veranda. From the platform, the pea whistle blew. It was extremely shrill, and I wondered whether it was half-sized, like everything else. We pulled away, and the glass in the veranda door began to rattle. We were trundling along the high street of the town, past tumbledown hotels, and men going past the other way on slow horses. The window glass was clear, no venetian slats. I stood up and walked through the door on to the veranda, and the moment I reached the open air, the town ended and we were into jungle, where the sunlight could not break through. There was a kind of underwater light, and the creepers came down through the trees like anchor chains. Occasionally white tombstones flashed past in the dark tangle of the jungle floor. We were not yet climbing.

  The engine exhaust roared and crackled. I could hear but not see the little loco. Presently we came into a jungle clearing, and a station. We stopped. We’d been going for half an hour, and we were in for a six-hour trip. There’d be a good many stations before Darjeeling, and if Fisher wanted to do me in so that corruption in traffic may not be investigated, he would have to time his move carefully. We were aboard the second of the two trains, so if he stepped out on to the veranda, shot me, and pitched my body on to the track I’d lie undiscovered for a while. But even though it had been Fisher who had picked the second train, he could not, surely, have predicted the arrival of the ladies which had caused us to remove to the supplementary saloon.

  We began running past the corrugated iron shacks of a bazaar. The shack roofs were painted light green and the sky above was the palest blue. We ran around a curve and, by leaning over the veranda railing, I could observe the little engine. The two blokes on the tender would pick up lumps of coal and pass them around the side of the cab to the fireman, who would inspect them, as if considering their suitability, but he never in practice rejected them. He just put them on the fire. As for the two men on the buffer beam, I believed they were laying down sand so as to increase traction – and we were now beginning to climb. I looked though the glass door at Fisher on his basket chair. He had got hold of a newspaper, and he was opening and closing the pages with great rapidity, as though trying to catch the news by surprise.

  It seemed perfectly possible that he had meant to shoot me with a silenced pistol on the night train to Jamalpur. But silencers were fiddly bits of kit, and something had gone wrong, so he had fired with an unprotected Webley, but he had done so in the darkness, and it was John Young who had taken the bullet. But no pistol had been found on him; and what about the Indians who’d been galloping away on horseback?

  We were running through thinner forest; pine trees were appearing among the bamboo, and India was beginning to be below us. The train went into a tight curve on the edge of the hill, and it kept curving through a short tunnel. While we were in this tunnel, the other train was on top of the tunnel. We were looping the loop, as on a fairground ride, and at
the end of the loop we were much higher. The plain of paddy fields lay below: the giant chessboard on which the British played their game of empire.

  We came into another station. A painted board said ‘Rangtong’ and there was nobody there but the station master, who stood on the platform looking mightily pleased with himself. As we pulled away, I heard the rattling of the glass door. Fisher came out on to the veranda. He leant far out over the back railing.

  ‘Come here,’ he called, still leaning over the side.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Something queer about the track.’

  Was he really interested in small gauge railways? We were now approaching a second curve, a second loop. The train gave a lurch, and as we continued our curving progress, with the right side of the train now overhanging the edge of the drop down into the plain of Bengal. The veranda railing protecting us from this drop – a drop of some two thousand feet, I thought – was somewhat lower than waist height, so while the drop was big, the railing protecting us from it was small. The train curved and curved, and then we were two thousand two hundred feet above Bengal, and still overhanging the drop as we rattled across the face of a mountain.

  ‘Come here and look at this,’ Fisher demanded again.

  Remaining behind him, I said, ‘Look at bloody what? I’ll look at it from here, if it’s all right with you.’

  ‘The track,’ he said again. ‘Something’s missing.’

  The train hit another curve, which swung us sharply to the right, projecting us yet further over the drop. Could it be there really was something amiss with the rails? The carriage did seem to be rattling badly – and there were women and children inside. I inched forward so that I was alongside Fisher. We watched the unwinding of the little track. The outer rail was two feet from the edge. If you fell on to that track and rolled even slightly you’d be gone, falling away into thick clouds, the plain of Bengal having now been replaced by a damp mist.