Where Earth Meets Water. Pia Padukone
paced back and forth, his ears perking up at the faintest of rumblings, which sent him scurrying to perch his toes over the perimeter of yellow paint that warned passengers not to cross this line.
Once, the transit police who were loitering up and down the platform had approached him as he peered down the tunnel. “Sir,” the officer had said. “I’m going to have to ask you to step away from the platform edge. It’s for your own safety.”
When they’d first taken the subway together years before, Karom’s platform behavior had made Gita nervous.
“You stand so close to the edge,” she’d said, tugging at his hand. “Please come back.”
“It’s just a game,” Karom had said. “I lean over until I have to lean back.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
People lived in those tunnels, in the dank recesses, venturing out only to forage for food. Mole people, as he had heard them referred to, though he thought this term disrespectful and embarrassing. He couldn’t imagine living that far underground, though he’d read that the tunnels spread so far below the surface of pavement that it was possible to venture seven or eight stories deep. He had joked to Gita that one day real estate would be at such a premium that well-appointed condos with marble countertops and bamboo floors would have no choice but to spread to the netherworld that lay beneath them. Doormen would stand at attention at the mouths of stairwells that meandered far below the sidewalk, and the former valuable measurement of natural light would be replaced by mold-repellant abilities.
“Just wait,” Karom had said, “until the most sought-after apartments are those that are farther below the surface. Humans always need one-upmanship.”
After two hours of waiting on the Jaipur station platform, Karom stood up suddenly. Gita turned the page of her guidebook and shifted her position without looking up. Karom walked gingerly over the bodies sprawled across the platform napping, through a group of children playing a hand-clapping game and knelt at the platform edge. He sat down, his legs dangling over. A group of men playing cards and puffing on strong clove-scented cigarettes eyed him from the shadows of a snack cart’s canopy. Dust motes swirled in the early-afternoon sun and the slightest breeze lifted a piece of hair off Karom’s forehead and swung it over his eye.
In an instant he had jumped down to the tracks. He glanced around, the walls of the platform looming up around him like a cave. He couldn’t see the passengers from here, only sky and the great expanse of the tracks in the distance, far away, leading to Agra. Karom stood with both feet on one of the rails, the cool metal cutting through the inadequate rubber of his sandals and massaging the sore arches of his feet. He walked, holding his arms out balancing himself, pretending there was a book upon his head. On the seventeen-hour flight from New York to Bombay, Karom had watched a documentary on Philippe Petit, the daredevil tightrope walker who’d walked between the World Trade Towers and lived to tell the tale. Karom bent his feet to span across the track like Petit, a make-believe balancing pole in his hands as he walked forward.
He’d walked to the outskirts of the train station on the tracks like this when he heard Gita’s scream. Swiveling around, he tipped off the tracks. As he righted his balance, he saw the card-playing men in the distance watching him, squatting at the edge of the platform. He saw the children hovering on the edge, holding hands tightly. And he saw Gita, looking as though she was about to launch herself over the edge but being restrained by three hefty women in Punjabi suits.
“Karom! Get off the tracks! Come back!” she shouted. Karom put his hand up in acknowledgment, but just as he did so, he felt a faint rumbling underneath the balls of his feet. He turned around and began a slow march back toward the station, putting one foot in front of the other on the metal track.
“Come back to the platform. Please!” Gita shouted. He could see her face was stained by tears, her voice strained with panic. His rubber sandals slipped against the shiny metal, and the approaching vibration tickled his feet. He was at the station and had hoisted himself up onto the platform on his own before the Punjabi women released a sobbing Gita into his arms. He held her tightly and buried his nose in her hair.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, baby. I’m okay. See? It was just a walk. Nothing happened. It was just the game.” He let her cry in his arms until she quieted and spread out across their backpacks to nap.
They didn’t say anything further to one another until they boarded a train two more hours later. As she climbed the stairs into their car, Gita put her hand up and smiled at the tour guide. “This wait is nothing,” he called back. “Very short. Very lucky.”
They reached the Taj just moments before sunset, to the sights and sounds of children screeching, parents strolling across the manicured lawn, tourists adjusting one another’s hands for the perfect pose in front of the reflecting pool, others showing security guards how to operate elaborate cameras. The Taj was a deep aubergine, the setting sun glancing off the Yamuna River at a distance and cloaking the grounds and the shrine in darkness. They took a quick round, wandering through the arched doorways in their bare feet, marveling at the intricate inlaid stonework, tracing their toes over the perfectly symmetrical marble, and stood solemnly before the mausoleum before they realized they’d forgotten to take any pictures. The Taj was dark by then, lit only by eight floodlights where moths savagely attacked the bulbs.
“No pictures,” Gita said sadly. “How will we ever remember that we were here?” They were stationed directly in front of the Taj, in front of the bench that thousands upon thousands of tourists sat on every day, with a perfectly cruel vantage point of the structure in front of them. Karom slipped his arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. With his other hand, he pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. He read:
“Should guilty seek asylum here,
Like one pardoned, he becomes free from sin.
Should a sinner make his way to this mansion,
All his past sins are to be washed away.
The sight of this mansion creates sorrowing sighs,
And the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes.
In this world this edifice has been made,
To display thereby the creator’s glory!”
“It’s what Shah Jahan said about the Taj,” Karom said, folding the paper back into his pocket. Gita closed her eyes and leaned against him. He wanted to comfort her, but he too felt let down. Nothing had happened. There had been no revelations.
Karom had been sure that he would leave the Taj Mahal with a deeper understanding of the world, of colors, of light, of love. He was sure that something magical would transform them, would transform him, the way he saw the world. He had placed too high an expectation on the Taj Mahal. After all, it was just a building. But it was a building that was homage to love, homage to the departed. He’d wondered if he would catch a glimpse of the past here, if he might tap into the spirit of the palace, the serenity of the courtyards. He’d wondered if, like a sinner, he too might be absolved, washed pure and clean, and set into the streets refreshed. He’d wondered if he might put lingering ghosts to bed and feel, for the first time, at ease with himself and finally, finally have the strength to put the game to rest.
Finally, Karom took her hand, pulling her back outside the gates into a world of hawkers offering prayer beads, postcards and miniature hand-carved wooden replicas of the great shrine.
On the rickshaw ride back to the train station, they quietly held one another’s hands. When their eyes met at a traffic light, Gita looked at Karom for a beat too long, causing him to snap, “I’m fine. I told you I’m fine,” and pull his hand away from hers. Gita felt suddenly vulnerable sitting in the rickshaw as it inched along the crowded streets. On either side, beggars and street vendors thrust their hands into the open sides of the vehicle, offering open empty palms or rickety plastic toys for sale. At that moment she couldn’t find solace even in the man who sat next to her; it was how she’d felt the first time she’d experienced one of his close shaves firsthand.
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