In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,56
we do now.
The gulf between them has closed, he is joined with her in a flurry of high emotion. If she did leave the pills in the cloakroom there is a slim chance they might still be there. You’re sure, Anna, you’re sure that’s where they are.
Yes, yes, I’m certain. She is wailing now, a spectacular display of distress, and everybody in the compartment has gathered around. There is jabbering and commotion. Somebody calls the conductor. He listens gravely to the story, then throws up his hands, nothing he can do about their problem.
But Anna is insistent, she won’t let up. I will die without my medicine, she cries dramatically, and this persuades the hapless conductor to stop the train. At some nameless siding in the middle of the night the whole chain of carriages comes juddering to a halt and Anna descends with the uniformed man in tow and they go down the platform to find a phone, while I sit guarding the luggage. People hang out of the windows, watching and commenting. Others come to question me, what is the problem, why is your lady friend crying. It’s as if her chaos has leaked out somehow and touched the physical world, throwing people and objects into disarray.
When she comes back there is still no clear answer. The cloakroom has been closed for the night, perhaps the medicine is there, perhaps not. As if to underline their uncertainty, the train starts to move again, a slow and noisy acceleration into the dark. I sit, pondering. Maybe it would be better to jump out at the next station and try to retrace our steps. Or maybe it would be better to go all the way to Bangalore, which is a major centre, and try to get some help there. What’s not in doubt is that she’s dependent on that little assortment of pills and if this is how mad she’s been when she’s taking them he doesn’t want to think about how she’ll be without them.
At this point a kindly avuncular man, who’s been sitting opposite them since the start of the journey, speaks up. He is Mr Hariramamurthy, he tells us, and perhaps he can be of assistance. He is going to a station near Bangalore but he will come to the last stop with us and speak to the railway police there, he’s sure they’ll be able to help.
No doubt these are merely polite words, when we get to the other end Mr Hariramamurthy will have disappeared. But when we pull in to Bangalore the next morning there he is, standing by, ready to assist. Like helpless children we trail along behind him as he bustles from office to office, having complicated conversations with various functionaries, none of whom want to be bothered with our case. But Mr Hariramamurthy is not deterred. There are retiring rooms upstairs at the station, he tells us, take one of these rooms and call me in two hours on this number. He hands us his card.
We manage to get a room. It seems like a reasonable option, the next train back to Madurai is this evening, if we have no solution by then we will make the journey. But when I ring Mr Hariramamurthy later in the morning he tells us he has good news. His cousin works for the railways in some capacity, and has managed to track down the medicine. It will be sent on the train tonight and we have only to wait in our room, it will be delivered to the door.
This seems too good to be true, I am full of unworthy suspicion, surely we’re being set up somehow. But we have no choice except to wait. We will be vigilant, whatever the scam is we won’t fall for it, at the very worst we’ll have lost a day, we can always go back tomorrow.
In the meanwhile they go into Bangalore and wander around. Anna is more manic than he has ever seen her, she fizzes and fiddles without stopping, her conversation jumping from one topic to another, how she’s not ready to go back to South Africa yet, how she’s almost sure her relationship at home is over, everything depends on Jean now, if she asks him maybe he’ll come back to Goa and meet her before she goes home. Anna, I say, that’s crazy, he’s only just got back to France himself. She looks at me with wide, confused eyes, and in her stare I