The Train · The Quiet Exam · Pulse Beat
He took the night train to Pune with a single bag. The second-class carriage was full of boys like him: some jubilant, with parents who had come to fetch them and sat in rows eating sweets, some…
He took the night train to Pune with a single bag.
The second-class carriage was full of boys like him: some jubilant, with parents who had come to fetch them and sat in rows eating sweets, some silent, curled against the window. A father across the aisle was reading his son's rank off a phone, again and again, in a voice like a prayer. Dev put in his earphones and turned his face to the dark.
At two in the morning a girl in the opposite berth, about his age, in a faded green kurta, asked if he would mind if she put on the light. She had a book open. The Left Hand of Darkness.
"Fiction," he said. It came out like an accusation.
"I haven't read fiction in two years." She smiled. "I've just failed too. Medical. I decided to read something useless on the way home."
He found he was laughing. "How useless?"
"Wonderfully." She held it up. "I'm Meera."
They talked until dawn, in the way strangers do in the dark. She had wanted to be a doctor because her mother was ill. She had spent four years in a coaching class in Kota. She had never once, she realised on the second night of reading, asked herself whether she liked it.