Page 125 - Train to Pakistan

‘The engine did not whistle.’
‘It is like a ghost.’
‘In the name of the Lord do not talk like this,’ said the lambardar. ‘It may be a

goods train. It must have been the siren you heard. These new American engines
wail like someone being murdered.’
‘No, Lambardara, we heard the sound more than an hour ago; and again the

same one before the train came on,’ replied one of the villagers.
‘You cannot hear it any more. The train is not making any noise now.’
From across the railway line, where some days earlier over a thousand dead

bodies had been burned, a jackal sent up a long plaintive howl. A pack joined
him. The men shuddered.
‘Must have been the jackals. They sound like women crying when somebody

dies,’ said the lambardar.
‘No, no,’ protested the other. ‘No, it was a human voice as clear as you are
talking to me now.’

They sat and listened and watched strange indistinguishable forms floating on
the floodwaters. The moon went down. After a brief period of darkness the
eastern horizon turned grey. Long lines of bats flew across noiselessly. Crows

began to caw in their sleep. The shrill cry of a koel came bursting through a
clump of trees and all the world was awake.
The clouds had rolled away to the north. Slowly the sun came up and flooded

the rain-soaked plain with a dazzling orange brilliance; everything glistened in
the sunlight. The river had risen further. Its turbid water carried carts with the
bloated carcasses of bulls still yoked to them. Horses rolled from side to side as

if they were scratching their backs. There were also men and women with their
clothes clinging to their bodies; little children sleeping on their bellies with their
arms clutching the water and their tiny buttocks dipping in and out. The sky was

soon full of kites and vultures. They flew down and landed on the floating
carcasses. They pecked till the corpses themselves rolled over and shooed them
off with hands which rose stiffly into the air and splashed back into the water.

‘Some villages must have been flooded at night,’ said the lambardar gravely.
‘Who yokes bulls to carts at night?’ asked one of his companions.
‘Yes, that is true. Why should the bullocks be yoked?’

More human forms could be seen coming through the arches of the bridge.
They rebounded off the piers, paused, pirouetted at the whirlpools, and then

came bouncing down the river. The men moved up towards the bridge to see