The Ghost Who Alights at Sandhurst Road Station

In the early hours of the morning when the locals make their way to CST, even the sun hasn't woken up properly and is struggling to cast a weak haze on the passengers, who themselves doze off as soon as a station or two has passed. I used to be one such reluctant early commuter. I boarded the train at dawn every day, fully prepared to find myself a cosy corner in which to go back to sleep till CST arrived forty eight minutes later. Only my sleep never lasted that long; I would be awoken every day in the middle of my journey by the fisherwomen sitting at the doors of the compartment, who clearly believed that if their day didn't start with laughing loudly at inside jokes, it wasn't worth starting at all. So as always, I woke up for the second time to a private anecdote being exposed to the public, and as if it were a chant, sure enough, the ghost apparated inside the compartment.

She was already traversing the length of the compartment asking different women for money, waking them up if she had to. The ghost was a hijra who was always present in the compartment for at least six stations of the journey. I never came to know exactly which station she boarded from. I presumed it was somewhere around GTB Nagar, because I would wake up around one station after that, and I fancied that the laughter of the fisherwomen was how she got summoned to join us. What I did know was that she alighted two stations before the last one, at Sandhurst Road, when all the women had woken up and were combing their hair and arranging their saris. When the women began getting ready to go about their days, the ghost finished her daily round and stepped out of the train.

The ghost deserved her title not only because I thought she was summoned by a chant and dismissed by getting-ready rituals, or because I never knew which station she boarded from (because of course, I could have easily found that out with a little sleuthing), but rather because through some miraculous act, she was present on all the morning trains for the length of those ten minutes. I came to board all the consecutive trains in the course of those three years, depending on when my first lecture would start, and without fail, even if the trains were just three minutes apart, I found her in all of them.

At first I thought she must fancy me a ghost as well if she ever really noticed me, because I was also present in all the trains that she was, but unlike me, she seemed to be on all trains of all mornings. I always saw her chatting with all the women typical to the train of that time about happenings of yesterdays and day-befores, like she was clearly a part of them and a distinct permanent character of that particular train. Sometimes, she took the initiative in bestowing a private joke upon the public. In any case, how could she get down at Sandhurst Road and catch a reverse train long enough to be six stations down the track, ready to board the next train in just three minutes? Moreover, it was always only those six stations. What was it about them? She clearly haunted the harbour line between those stations in the early hours of the morning, I had decided.

In contrast to the lazy slumbering hours of the weekday mornings (and my general idea of ghosts), she was exceptionally chirpy. She had square shoulders but walked daintily, making sure of each step she took. She went about asking for money, sometimes prodding, sometimes teasing, never failing to embarrass someone who was taking extra care to put on their make up before alighting the train. In those days, the ghost had become a permanent fixture of this morning routine of getting ready before the last stop of the train arrived. She could be seen making her way between the women in their petticoats attempting to drape their saris while the train jerked their bodies here and there, sometimes on top of each other. They didn't care, of course; they had mastered the art of dressing up in the compartment, and it never bothered them that they were in the midst of all these people, while the ghost tried to earn some cash and also helped them pin up the plaits of their saris. She always had one eye on the women with the small metal boxes filled with talcum powder. Pretty heavily made up herself, she lingered around them when they opened their boxes to put on the talcum, looking at them paint their faces, and also not failing to imply that since they had one hand in their purses already, they might as well take out a few coins to give to her.

She often had a garland of mogras in her hair, which would always be tied up in an oily bun. She was a talcum powder girl herself, the complexion of her face looking starkly different from that of her neck and her arms. At times, when some college going girls were putting on eye liner or kajal, she would forget that she had come to ask for money, and would observe their artistry, that effortless technique of making a smooth cat-eye and keeping the lipstick within their demarcated lines. She would purse her lips with them as they checked in their tiny mirrors and would snap back to reality when they turned to look at her and thinking she was teasing them, as she often did, offered her some money.

With people who didn't bother with getting ready before alighting, she had to make more of an effort. She put her hand on their heads and said a prayer of some sort, like "God will be kind if you are kind" and waited for them to give her money. I could see that she enjoyed the make-up girls much more though. She would tuck away all the collected money into her blouse and be off at Sandhurst. I would look out of the window sometimes to see where she went, but whether it was because of my sleepiness (I was practically a ghost myself) or lack of willingness to actually detect where she went, I only saw that she had disappeared amongst the crowd and harboured no doubt that she would be in the train right behind mine. My curiosity about her was clearly not of an investigative nature. As long as it fit my romantic notions of friendly ghosts haunting the harbour line in the morning, I was satiated.

So it was in the afternoon one day, when the sun was wide awake and shining brightly above our heads, that my harbour line ghost bubble was popped. I was coming back from college and was on the train back from CST at around 3PM. There weren't too many people in the train and I had picked my favourite window seat and a really good book to bury my head into. I was too distracted to know that the train was nearing my station, when I heard a clapping sound like the one a hijra would make while asking for money. It still wasn't enough to stir me. As the clapping drew nearer, I heard a very familiar voice address me directly:

"Ae! Aisa kya hai teri kitab mein? Zara meri bhi shakal padh le!"

Having to come out of the world of my book in such a way disoriented me completely. I didn't realize for a moment that I was being addressed - and moreover, by the ghost herself. There she was, in the flesh, looking directly into my eyes and speaking only to me. She had never addressed me particularly like that before. After all, I was never a makeup girl and I spent my time in the morning train sleeping. And then it dawned on me that it wasn't even morning, or anywhere between GTB Nagar or Sandhurst Road. In fact, this was the reverse train, going away from CST, and it suddenly occurred to me, irrationally, that the ghost was not supposed to do that. It was against the rules. Slightly offended at being confronted by this non-ghost of a person who had so abruptly punctured my fantasy, I tried to look back into my book, ignoring her appeal. But she stood her ground.

"Bata na. Aisa kya hai teri kitab mein?"

She had her palm stretched out in front of me.

"Kya re? Itni buri hai kya meri shakal?"

Her persistence was long and loud enough to draw a collective roar of laughter from the ladies in the compartment, who had gotten distracted momentarily from their own affairs by my obvious inability to deal with her mocking. This was a daily occurrence of course, but here I was, looking like a simpleton, shying away from her tongue in cheek comments. Unwilling to accept her being so real but also embarrassed and not ready to be made more fun of, I opened my bag to look for some money to give her. In trying to get all my irrational emotions in order, I dropped my book on the floor. She bent down to pick it up for me. Looking at all my chaotic movements, she handed me my book.

"Chhod re. Tu kya degi merko?" she said with a teasing sneer.

Once again, laughter rippled through the compartment as she turned around with a flip of her hair and walked away. I realized that I liked the morning trains way more than the afternoon ones. The women went back to their own activities soon thereafter, but I kept one eye on her, trying to see what the ghost was doing here in broad daylight. At the next station, all my questions were answered.

At Govandi, another hijra, taller and bigger than her, had apparently spotted her on the train as it was coming to a halt at the station and boarded the compartment in a fury. The ghost, terrified at what was approaching her, attempted to run away from her. She tried to get down but the other hijra pulled her hair. She screamed in agony and tried to escape her grip. The women in the compartment tried to separate them. Two men also got on board, joining the spectacle.

"Kayko aai tu yaha pe? Tera hai kya govandi? Bata merko!" the other hijra demanded to know.

"Sorry bol rahi hi hai na. Vapas nahi aegi. Merko malum nahi tha..." she replied, pleading desperately.

The intermediaries succeeded in separating them for a moment and pushing them on to the platform. A crowd emerged around them in no time. As the train started to move onward, I looked out of the window at the two, surrounded by all these people. They could still be heard saying:

"Malum nahi tha? Kya malum nahi tha terko? Reay Road, Cotton Green, Sewdi, Sandhusrt Road tera hai.... Hai ki nahi?"

The ghost kept pleading.

"Govandi mera hai ye nahi malum hai terko?"

The beseeching and the pleading and her opponent's yelling were left behind as the train lurched onwards and picked up speed and disappeared from the station. As the other women adjusted back to their own separate worlds, I tried to escape into the fictional one of my book again, trying to replace one broken reverie with another. But it was no use. The ghost that alighted at Sandhurst Road was just someone who went back and forth between six stations every day, trying to make most of what had been divided and decided as her share.

I graduated from college soon thereafter and didn't have to board any more morning trains. So my mornings no longer started with inside jokes made public and ghost apparitions. There was one time, however, when I saw her again.

It was a late train, the last one of the night I think, when it was way past the sun's bedtime and the moon's turn to play. Late night trains being close sisters of morning trains, I had dozed off, unable to stay up waiting for my station to arrive so that I could sleep on my own bed. A jerk of the train woke me up and I opened my eyes to the emptiness of the ladies compartment.

A few seats ahead of me, sitting facing each other, were two figures clad in colourful salwar kameezes. I recognized one of them to be her. I sat up suddenly as she caught my eye. Her legs were stretched out, resting on the seat opposite her next to her friend. I shifted in my seat to look at the other figure and noticed that it was the bigger hijra who had been fighting with her at Govandi that day. I watched the two of them lean against the backrest with their hair down and their legs up on the seats in front of them. The bigger hijra then took the outstretched feet of the other one in her hands and started pressing them. She carefully pressed her toes and the underside of her feet and then rubbed her ankles. She looked tired, but grinned at her companion, enjoying the release.

There was nobody else in the compartment. The handle bars hanging from the ceiling of the train went to and fro in unison with the movement of the train. Loose tangles of hair, probably released during the morning's combing and brushing, whirled around in circles with the wind on the floor of the compartment. It's true, I thought, ghosts must have sore ankles.