The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  “Is that comfortable?”

  Vita nods, her eyes already closing, like a cat falling into a nap, and within a few minutes, Vita Brodkey, who is journeying to the place of her birth in order to die, is fast asleep.

  Outside, the sky has changed again, gone from the deep-diving blue to a calm, solid wash of gray. By Joan’s watch, there are nine hours to go before they land. Soon, shades are lowered and the cabin dark is cut by the movie flashing from the small screens above each seat, where people dressed in sherbet colors are running around on a lawn. All that extruding happiness makes Joan sad. She wonders how many others on board this flight have suffered at the hands of their children, who else wishes they could find themselves in some remembered place where they were once happy. She knows where her own happy place was—at her dining-room table in her East Village apartment, the pages she was writing multiplying. Then Joan is also asleep.

  She is dreaming deeply. Great waves of water splashing up from somewhere far below, cool drops raining on her skin. When she peers down, she realizes she is standing over a crevasse, balancing on a tightrope pulled taut between two enormous trees. She thinks, I must be very, very careful; then she feels a tug that excites the wire, and she’s gripping her toes hard, hanging on, regaining her balance, feeling relief, but when she looks behind her, there is Daniel, kneeling, about to pluck the wire again, a deep laugh as he wraps his fingers around it, ready to make it ricochet like a sling.

  She wakes to a man’s voice saying, “This is your captain. The local time is nine thirty a.m., and the temperature is 36.67 degrees Celsius, 98 degrees Fahrenheit. For everyone aboard, you might be happy to know that Delhi appears to be in a cooling trend. It is one degree cooler today than it was yesterday.”

  Vita, too, is just waking up. The big man seems not to have moved at all.

  Thirty minutes later, they have landed. When the plane comes to a stop and the seat-belt sign is turned off, the big man, whose linen suit has remained uncrushed, lifts Vita Brodkey out into the aisle, plows his body backward for a second time, and allows Joan to move out of their row until she stands in front of him. There is a delay in deplaning, they are told, and a groan rises up. It takes only a few minutes before the temperature in the plane rises, the air growing even more stale.

  “How are you getting to Udaipur?” the big man asks Vita Brodkey.

  “Aren’t you a darling,” Vita says. “A car is picking me up here, driving me there.”

  “That’s nearly a ten-hour drive, madam,” the big man says. Vita Brodkey nods happily. “Oh, yes, I know. I want to see the country one last time before I never leave Udaipur again.”

  The big man nods, as if what Vita Brodkey has said makes sense. It makes no sense to Joan.

  Over Vita’s head, the big man says to Joan, “And you? Where are you going?”

  “The Delhi train station.”

  “Fine. You’ll both follow me. I’ll get you through baggage claim and customs,” he says, snapping his fingers.

  “Oh, marvelous,” Vita says. Joan nods uncertainly. They shared a row of uncomfortable seats for fifteen hours, but he never said a word. He did not introduce himself when they first settled in, and he has not introduced himself amidst this hint of comradeship. Knowing his name would not alter his status as a stranger, but if he can do what he says he can do, she might as well accept his offer.

  A breeze meanders through the cabin, too warm to refresh, but the doors have opened, and they are finally disembarking. “Stay close,” the big man says.

  * * *

  At the gate, the big man catches a porter’s eyes, nods, and a wheelchair appears in front of them, for Vita, who sits down happily. The big man leads the way, pushing Vita fast, and Joan slings her carryall around her body and hurries to keep up with his pace. He smacks his shoulder into a swinging door, and they are through, into a quiet back alley of the airport, and then into an open-air hangar, where the plane that brought them to Delhi sits like a stranded whale with its belly ripped open. Suitcases and bags and boxes fly through the air, tossed down the line of baggage handlers until they are loaded onto carts.

  Three metallic gold suitcases topple out and Vita cries, “There is my suite of suitcases.”

  The big man yells, “Sunil,” at one of the handlers, whose uniform is faded and grease-stained. Soon, Sunil has nestled Vita’s bags around her wheelchair, like golden offerings to a queen. A few minutes later, Joan spots her black bag with its jaunty red ribbon. Next to Vita’s aristocratic bags, it looks utilitarian, plebian.

  “Everything retrieved?” the big man asks, and Joan feels like a child when she nods.

  “Yes, darling, everything is retrieved,” says Vita, and their group is off. The big man pushes Vita’s wheelchair. Sunil pushes and pulls and hangs onto Vita’s bags. Joan trots behind, pulling her rolling suitcase by the red ribbon, as if it were a dog on a leash forced unhappily to run.

  The customs line is filled with people pleated between snaking black ropes. Outside, the line continues, fanning out in all directions. With the big man leading, Vita Brodkey and Joan are whisked through customs without being questioned, or presenting their passports, or hearing the click-click of the entrance stamp marking their arrival in Delhi. Joan wishes her passport would contain evidence of her trip here, of her escape, but without the big man’s help, she might still be standing in that line several days from now.

  Outside the main entrance, the air is heavy, humid, dirty, a yellow pall coating the scene. There are popcorn vendors, flower sellers, tandoori cooks, all those smells mixing together, along with the ripe aroma that hints of a zoo. Joan spies monkeys sitting in the sun, as if waiting for their ride, using the time to peel nuts.

  Sunil marshals Vita’s bags. The big man thunders out a long string of words. Sustained honking moments later. And then a driver in a car throws the upper half of his body out of the window, one hand waving and waving, his toothy smile bright, as he inches the car forward in the dense traffic.

  “Maim yaham hum,” the driver yells. “I’m here for you!”

  Vita’s little hands are waving excitedly. “Namaste, namaste, Abhay!”

  “Vita, do you know that man in the car?” Joan asks.

  “Of course I do, darling. That is Abhay, the great-grandson of my parents’ chauffeur.”

  The golden suitcases are stored in the trunk. The big man lifts Vita Brodkey out of the wheelchair, places her gently in the backseat, and carefully shuts the door. Joan had not expected him to be so kind, out here in the open, in the crazy Delhi airport traffic.

  Vita leans out of the window. “Here, darling,” she calls to Joan. “Here is my card. Phone number and email. Call or write if you need me. You will be happy, I know it.”

  Joan leans in through the window and hugs the twin points of Vita’s frail shoulders. When she steps back, the great-grandson of Vita Brodkey’s parents’ chauffeur twists around in his seat to kiss Vita’s hand. The car crawls forward and Vita and Abhay call out, “Namaste, namaste,” and Joan waves, until the big man says, “You’re next. So follow me and keep up.”

  “Wait, please,” Joan says. When he begins marching away, she grabs the sleeve of his linen suit. “Please, a moment.”

  Joan pokes her head through Vita’s window again. “You made this trip so much better than I thought it would be. Thank you.”

  “Oh, darling, I know I did. You were a rough customer at first, but I believed you would come around. And wasn’t I right? You told me nothing about yourself, but I know what you want, what you need. It’s to be more like me, a woman following her heart. Like I said, call or write if you need me,” and Vita Brodkey squeezes Joan’s arm. “Last words of wisdom. Whoever you were as a child, she’s your future.”

  “You!” the big man yells, as a sleek black car with diplomatic plates pulls up. “It will take an hour to get you to the train station. So let’s go. Chop, chop.”

  In the diplomatic car, with her bags at her feet, the cacophonous
sounds of Delhi disappear behind what must be bulletproof glass. When the driver leans on the horn, it is a distant honk, but he leans on that horn again and again, zigging and zagging each time the slightest space opens up. The streets are a messy jumble, filled with as many people as cars, and the driver uses a fast-slow combination through the traffic, jerking forward until he slams on the brakes. Joan loses count of the number of near collisions in just the first ten minutes.

  An hour of this travel and Joan’s stomach is turning over, her skin slick with sweat, her eyes dry and glued wide. The train station appears, and the driver yanks the car this way and that, until he pulls up to the curb.

  “Buy your ticket inside at the window, not on the train,” the big man says. He hands her a shiny business card. “For emergencies only.”

  Joan is left on the curb, clutching the red ribbon on her suitcase, her carryall hitting her square in the back, the big man’s card in her palm. She looks down at the raised burgundy ink, at his very long name: Sadayavarman Bimbisara Sundara Pandyan, at his very long phone number: a string of digits nearly all zeroes. The information on the card explains nothing, but seems like proof, perhaps, of his exceptional importance. She turns the card over, another line of type in the raised burgundy ink: Premiere International Facilitator. She can’t imagine the range of duties that title might encompass. When she looks up from the card, the black car, its driver, and all-knowing passenger have disappeared into the wild stampede of cars and taxis and mopeds and bicycles, and people sauntering up and down the street, wildlife wandering about.

  A long, multicontinental trip during which Joan expected to fall apart has instead made her more resolute. The gloom, the fear, the bone-breaking sadness, none of it has dissipated. But there is a muddling because of Vita Brodkey and her story, her pearls of wisdom, her insight regarding Joan’s future, and because of the big man who has delivered Joan to this next stage of her trip, leaving her with a brusque offer of emergency help. She does not feel quite as unmoored as she did when she first boarded the plane.

  At the entrance to the Delhi train station, Joan sees the mob within, the madhouse that it is. There are men, young, middle-aged, and old, in black suits, or in typical Indian attire; teenage boys in low-slung jeans and oversized T-shirts, just like the kids in quiet Rhome, a town that is not even a suburb, is, in all respects, beyond anything urban; older women in saris; younger women in business attire. At the indecisive border between the street and the station, she wraps the red ribbon around her wrist, feels her suitcase nipping at her heels, and charges into the remarkable human mass. Rocked and swayed by the press of rushing bodies, she wonders if the touch of so many will rub away her former identity, leave her earlier self exposed, shiny and new.

  32

  The Delhi train station has signs that demand NO SPITTING, and other signs that state WI-FI AVAILABLE, and cows wandering through, stopping every so often to look around, as if confused about where to meet their fellow travelers. Joan’s purchase of a ticket for the overnight train to Chakki Bank involves loud admonishments that she failed to book a berth in advance, and then a poker spread of her options: an AC Chair car, an AC1 or AC2 sleeper.

  “Not like the old days,” the handsome young ticket seller says, calming down after his tirade. “Once, everything was all willy-nilly, everyone scrambling for spots on the trains. Now, seats and berths are reserved much in advance. But madam, you are lucky, because we always keep a few berths open for foreigners. I would suggest the AC1 sleeper for you.”

  Joan agrees to his suggestion though she doesn’t understand the difference between AC1 and AC2. She buys her ticket, buys a dozen sealed bottles of water at the station shop, finds a small bench from which she watches the racketing, colorful crowd, listens to the jittering, laughing, high-decibel voices around her. As the hours tick by, she realizes she could wander Delhi a bit, at least around the station, but it seems too effortful to rise and make her way through the horde, to wander as lost as the cows on the platform.

  When the train shudders into the station, Joan boards with the crowd. She winds her way through the carriages until she finds the AC1 sleeper car she purchased for the night. Despite what the ticket seller told her, she still expects to find people hanging out of the carriage doors, sitting cross-legged up on the metal roof; she has seen movies where such is the norm. Although no one clambers up to the roof as the train pulls away, no one seems to be settling into their assigned berths. There is a festive boisterousness in the corridors. The tea seller’s cry of “Chai, chai, garam chai,” supplies the refrain that fulcrums all the noises into a song nearly harmonious.

  A steward knocks at her sleeper door when the train is thirty minutes out of Delhi. He tilts his head into the door. “Veg or non-veg?” “Veg, thank you,” she says. An hour later, there is another rap on the door, and a different steward hands over a large vegetarian platter, its samplings piled high, but her appetite has vanished. It is the noise and the heat and the waiting all day and the fifteen-hour flight. She sets the tray down and leaves the relative calm of her personal enclosure, locking the door behind her. A human thicket loiters up and down the corridors as far as she can see, smokers puffing away, their heads out the windows, knots of people laughing or arguing in front of other sleeper cars whose doors are ajar. She follows the signs, through several carriages, across the open platforms, until she reaches the bathrooms. Inside, the air is fetid, flies buzz over the toilet. Joan stoppers her nose and unbuttons her jeans.

  * * *

  The night sky is solidly black, except for the white discus of moon she sees through the sleeper-car window. It reminds her of the picture she took in Cairo, of the pyramids lit up by a fingernail moon, when she was there for the international book tour for Fictional Family Life. A photograph accidentally great that she paid to have blown up and framed and now hangs on the wall next to all of those windows in Daniel’s … She will not think about where that photo hangs.

  She is on one of the flat mattresses hooked to the wall by a thin metal frame, the only thick sweater she brought a cushion beneath her. There is raucous chatter outside her door and the tea seller’s chai perfumes his wake. The train moves smoothly through the countryside as stars pop into the sky, pinpricks of light. She sleeps fitfully, sometimes waking, instantly aware that this moon and these stars are hanging over India. Other times, her eyes flash open in the tinged dark hours, and she fears this trip she has sent herself on. She is awake at dawn, watching the bushes, trees, plains, and hills in the distance assume more natural forms. Then she changes into fresh linen trousers and a loose cotton shirt.

  * * *

  Ten hours after departing Delhi, Joan stands on the platform at the Chakki Bank station. She would like to be naked in a cool shower, her hair dripping wet, in a bathroom that smells nice, without flies diving at her thighs. Her lightweight clothes are already lashed to her skin, sweat trickles down her neck, beads her back, and it is just nine in the morning. Her black suitcase is dust-covered, the red ribbon somehow lost. At the far end of the platform is a beautifully maintained miniature dollhouse, a store, but the door is locked, she has already tried, and she wonders what time it opens. She would like a cup of coffee, something other than the granola bars she brought from home, which crumble like dirt in her mouth. Something to charge her back up in this overheated, somnolent, motionless place, something to affirm this particular choice she has made. She leans against a pole on the platform, under a wooden awning.

  A trim man with a neat beard paces in front of the shuttered store, his stride jaunty and quick. He seems unaffected by the heat, his black uniform crisp and sharply pressed. He turns swiftly, and she can tell he has registered her presence.

  “You are here for the chhotey?” he asks, when he reaches Joan.

  “I’m not sure,” Joan says. “Is that the Kangra Valley Railway?”

  “Haan, haan. Yes, yes. So you will know in the future, chhotey is Hindi for small, which is what the Kangra train is.
I welcome you here. So you know, I am the stationmaster. I can answer all of your questions.”

  The stationmaster links his arms behind his back, lifts his face to the low, heavy sun. The light churns up the black in his eyes, softens the cliffs of his face. There is an insistence in his silence when he turns his head to the empty tracks. He loves his chhotey train, Joan realizes, whose arrival she is apparently waiting for, wants her to ask questions about the Kangra Valley Railway. It is too early for a history lesson, but she should graciously give way, as she did with Vita Brodkey, as the big man did with her in Delhi.

  “I would love to hear the history of your train,” she says.

  The stationmaster bows and says, “Since you have been kind enough to ask, I will tell you the story. Construction began in 1925, under British Colonial rule. In December of 1928, this train station was opened, for freight traffic only. In April of 1929, it became a passenger railway. But this dry citation of dates fails to tell the exciting and true story, how the Kangra valley tracks are an incomparable feat of engineering and their extreme importance to this region.

  “Before there were any tracks or train, there was treacherous landscape with which to reckon. The mountain terrain was difficult. Torrential water from the monsoons and from the melting springtime snows in the lower regions of the Dhauladhars flowed far below. Huge chunks of earth had to be detonated. The nineteenth-century construction engineers went to work building two tunnels through the mountains and nine hundred and ninety-three bridges across the water. And after all of that work, tracks had to be formulated for this terrain and laid down. Which they were.

  “The Kangra Valley Railway remains an outstanding example of technological ensemble, and it illustrates a significant stage in human history. It was constructed in harmony with the beauty, serenity, and grandeur of the surroundings.