At sixteen, the price of a dream can be very high, as we would often learn that summer when the Rajdhani Express first thundered past our bedroom windows. Its maiden run from Howrah to Delhi had reverberated through our town. The few coins we had earned doing odd jobs around Chandan Ji’s place, we traded to enter the train yard where its engine stood, scintillating like a silver jewel amid the older, snub-nosed and soot-covered express engines. This was no ordinary machine (we knew from the snatches of conversations that were abuzz the neighborhood): its box design contained a flurry of switches inside it, and controls that allowed it to cruise fast, a speed of a hundred or a hundred and fifty—I forget—purring rhythmically when it skidded over the joints in the tracks. In those long summer days, the train would often puncture our dreams, hooting its way into our classroom goof-ups and dinner-table conversations.

Those days, we could not be found in the three-room confinements of our school, rooms borrowed one at a time from the charitable Das family, whose balcony leaned heavily across our courtyard. Our shared existence with them was as much a violation of their privacy as ours; we had negotiated fickle concepts of mutual space over the years, the lines blurred and redrawn through festivities and mourning, a bastard kinship of sorts. Our fingers had touched many a wayward petticoat that had flown over the fence, a windswept clothesline hanging guiltily empty. No one claimed these later—admission was as embarrassing for them as they hoped it was for us—because behind our snickers and whistles, we were still children entrusted to the school.

The better hours of our days were spent gluing parking slips to cycles and scooters. For a rupee, anyone could park their two-wheeler in the shed that had been hastily constructed near the station. Every morning, a horde of daily passengers rode into it and by evening they would have aged significantly, remembering perhaps a time when the factory behind the school was still active, when they were nearer home than they imagined themselves now. Most of them worked desk jobs in the city, typing memos, letters, schedules, and bits of their lives on paper stacks with perforated edges, in an office that smelled of folders and coffee stains on rusted desks. In short, they led vulgar lives, their frustrations recorded in profanities scribbled on their walls and banter—Baba among them, laughing and sharing smokes.

Palash and I took turns sticking these slips on the vehicles. Early that year, we were thrown into an uneasy comradeship, both of us aware of our own poor luck and that of the other, nodding and smiling customarily when our eyes met. He was older, more experienced, and had been doing this for a while when I had joined. Maybe, if this were more serious work, he could be a mentor and I an apprentice, learning what adhesive to use and what geometry to trace it in on the back of the dull-pink chit so that it stuck best. But not in the wildest of my daydreams could I conjure up a romance in our tasks, and neither could Palash, so after three days he took up the task of narrating to me the train schedules.

“That is the Shaktipunj coming in now, Ayush.”

“This is the time the Baidyanath Dham leaves.”

And like clockwork, the silence in that empty shed would be overrun with the shrill whistle of a train, sometimes arriving, sometimes departing, but always leaving us behind.

I was not good with schedules, much to Palash’s dismay, but to me these whistles sounded like the cries of a desperate man being forced to run against his will to stay, to stop in time a while and look at the world around. I remember thinking that one day I would own a train station littered with trains, but these would not be trains that take people places or bring them home. No, these would stay on their tracks, so that everyone who came to my station would always know where to find a particular engine or a particular compartment, and no one would then have to learn schedules any more. And if the trains did not move, and no one really went anywhere, then no one would bring their cycles and scooters to the shed and Palash and I would be back in school where the other kids were right then, being taught by Chandan Ji.

Chandan Ji knew our condition. On many occasions, he had come up to our house at our neighbor’s insistence, talking softly but assuredly with Baba about his drinking habits. By and by, we had come to respect him, Baba too, a respect mixed with fear that endears as well as distances. “Education,” said Chandan Ji, “is the only release we have from a lifetime of subjugation.” We knew he was not entirely right—ours was a leftover education, a few disjoint scraps thrown at us in dim classrooms and from textbooks which we could barely read—but we also hoped he was not entirely wrong. Bleak and discouraging though it was, the school was still the only place I felt I could breathe with abandon, until the day I first saw the Rajdhani Express and decided on an impulse that I would drive it someday.

It was Arun who had proposed the plan. All we had to do was bribe the guard at the yard, he had said, and the rest was easy sailing. The engine had been brought to our town, he had said—with the airs of someone who lived at the station and was a second-hand expert in these affairs—and it would leave early next week to Howrah where its run would begin. We had to act fast, he had said, if we were sure to be acting at all.

The job at the station parking did not pay me enough to cover both my needs and Baba’s drinks, acquired sheepishly these days with money we saved to repay loans. Our two-member dysfunctional family had a lopsided financial axis—with each passing day, its burden seemed to be weighing down on me and its rewards seemed to be skirting around Baba. It was a fair thing that all of us children contributed equally to the station guard’s bribe; after all, no one got to see the Express engine any more than the rest of us. So, Palash and I asked Chandan Ji for a job that would give us a few rupees in a few days.

“What are you boys up to now?” he asked sternly.

“Nothing,” we said, our desperation showing clearly on our faces. “We are just trying to earn something on the side, what with things back home being the way they are.”

That seemed to convince him. He invited us over to his house the next day to run some errands for him. These were simple things, he explained, mostly organizing and dusting, and this way he could also keep an eye on us. We were grateful, so early next Saturday, we walked past the school to his quarters.

I was asked to dust and re-shelve the scores of books that lined his walls, while Palash had to make the beds in the guestroom and main bedrooms. The shelves reminded me of a time I had accompanied Maa to the bazaar. The corner-store, with the big neon lights blinking Welcome and Sale, had been stacked ceiling-high with magazines and books bound in leather and paper, the smell of decay falling thickly around us. When Maa and I had picked out a book for us to read together, the bookseller had held her hand and said, “For you, Bhabhiji, I think I can make this free.” It tugs at me even now sometimes, thinking about how we had come out that day without a book, worried and pensive into a refreshing sunlight, accepting without saying that we were both relieved as the distance between us and the bazaar increased. Chandan Ji’s books that day inspired a similar feeling, and also a little greed and envy, so that I sat down near the water pot and began ruffling a few pages.

The sound of a crash from the next room startled me. It seemed Chandan Ji had also rushed in on hearing that sound, for he was quite out of breath when we reached Palash, who seemed to have slipped on the varnished floors of the bedrooms. He was wailing quite loudly for a sixteen year old, and Chandan Ji gave me a few rupees and asked me to take him to a dispensary immediately. I did exactly as asked. During our short trip Palash calmed down, his wails giving way to sobs and then to the casual carelessness of a child who had nothing to lose in the whole wide world.

On Tuesday, I had come to school after a long hiatus. At the doorway, Chandan Ji met me and said, “Ayush, I heard about Palash.”

I looked down at the concrete flooring, a grey texture that could engulf us all.

“I understand,” he said softly, tapping my head, “if you ever need to talk…”

He left the last sentence hanging for me to fill.

I sought him out after lunch. “Chandan Ji,” I said, “Palash and I were not friends, you know.”

He gave me a sympathetic look, one that told me that he could see right through me.

“I have been told you want to drive the Rajdhani Express someday, now, do you?”

“Yes,” I said, biting down my lower jaw to stop a sudden strangeness of feeling that had come over me.

“I’ll take you to the bridge tomorrow when it runs,” he said.

That night I barely slept. The day I had first seen the engine at the yard, Palash was absent. He had also not come back to work for a while, and on being pestered on his way to the lavatory, the station-master had finally told me that he had left town, probably never to come back. Palash and I were not friends, so we had never promised to stay in touch. I could then imagine him running alongside the tracks in an endless foreign platform, a distant train siren announcing an arrival or a departure, and Palash muttering to himself that it was the distinctive wail of the Rajdhani. I cannot tell you clearly what I felt that day because in doing so I will have to violate a few boundaries I have since set for myself, but that was the last I ever saw of Palash.

The next day, Chandan Ji and I went up to the bridge early in the morning, before the town had risen. The train would pass the bridge at around forty-five minutes after four in the morning, and we lay in wait from three-thirty on. Occasionally, the signal would rise, and so would my hopes, but the wait was a long one for a heart so excited. Chandan Ji had kept one of his arms on mine, he explained, to prevent me from going too close to the tracks.

Forty minutes into our wait, I told him I was off to the washroom in the parking shed, behind the counter. He said he would wait there for the train and call out if he saw anything. I trotted up slowly past the platform and out of the turnstile. Then I walked up the path to the shed. It was mostly empty except for a few wayward bicycles that would be claimed later that day, cycles that belonged to people who traveled for work where the hours were not fixed—people who, Chandan Ji had explained, were needier than us.

I slipped into the washroom and waited for a while, deciding to run back to the bridge if I heard the train far away. A door clicked somewhere and a pair of feet shuffled closer. The washroom door swung open behind me and before I could say anything, a familiar hand pressed me down to the urinal walls.

The Rajdhani Express ran over the bridge every day except Fridays, when its absence would be accentuated by the smell of ammonia in the cramped quarters of the washroom. I would think those days of Palash running down the platform and asking me to follow him, though to what end I had not come to realize yet. I never saw the engine, only heard it rumble past us, its noise silencing my own that first day when Chandan Ji had barged into the washroom.

It has been years since I was sixteen. Baba is not here anymore and I do not know what has become of my school and my friends, or even of Chandan Ji. I am not sure I want to know any of it either. I have kept that part of my life closed and bound in an old attic, the memories taking on a mellow newspaper color and stink, better disposed of than reminisced over. I have moved on to more adult things in life, never looking back at the child who would race with his friends on the platform to win and be called the Rajdhani Express till the next race.

When I get the time, I will probably go down to Howrah. There, I have heard that the trains stay, sometimes even overnight. It will be a funny feeling to stand on the platform and touch the snout of the engine as if one were petting it. It will also be a good idea to see if the Rajdhani waits at the first platform, a little old now but still packing its punch, still thundering down a few young boys’ dreams.