Unreserved seating

The 6:12 was ready to depart. The last passenger, harried and hurried, climbed on board and, hoisting his wheeled case behind him awkwardly, queried the guard.

“Yes. You will find a toilet at the end of each car,” he was assured.

The platform was now empty. The handful of people in each of the three first-class cars were settled, their spreadsheets and granola parfaits arrayed on the tables before them. The man with the case, which was slightly too wide for the aisle, bumped his way forward, in search of amenities certain to be present. He was an Indian man and he wore the benevolence of that nation on his face, as well as its perseverance; he asked the next fellow in a rail uniform if there were more seats further along.

In the corridor alongside the galley kitchen, the man’s bag became trapped. The crew, unconcerned but also unhelpful, watched as he extricated it sideways, telescoping the handle inexpertly and rendering the wheels useless. “Is this the kitchen?” he asked as he tugged at the appendage. On affirmation, his kind face rose higher on its bones. “Ahhh,” he sighed, appreciatively, and pushed on to the café car where he asked two questions: “Is this first class?” and also “Is there a toilet?”

The café car was full of solo riders. They heard his questions as a resolution to be less alone on this journey north. The young woman sitting at the table across the aisle from the one where the man deposited himself questioned her choice of seat. But when, minutes after the train pulled out of the station, the man returned from the toilet, stripped to the waist, holding his trousers, shirt and jacket in his hands and wearing only a pair of athletic shorts, she just raised her eyebrows. Benign and comic, the half naked man elicited more absurdity than discomfort. Unexpectedly, the early morning commuter train played at trans-continental express — a tried and true stage for expedited camaraderie and inevitable intimacy. In the café car sat an important character, relishing the mobility of his comfort.

The train emerged from a series of tunnels and revealed the lightening sky. The Indian man lounging at the first table of the café car in just shorts and dress shoes removed his spectacles and wiped his face with a handkerchief. Squinting, he studied the fine print on his ticket as if it were a runic communication. The possibility seemed likely: that in the minuscule designation of time, date, train line there were more answers. He held the ticket close to his face but eventually put it back in a shabby billfold. He replaced his spectacles, which were heavy and monochrome and would have been fashionable on a man of fashion.

“Is it stopping at Peterborough?” he asked the young woman next to him.

“It is,” she replied, and left it at that.

Over his shoulder, a manicured golf course flashed by. A bank of early autumn morning fog was rising just a few degrees below the sun. The moon, still a visible sliver in the east, held the opposite window, in front of which the young woman returned to her computer screen. The Indian man was rummaging in his case. Various articles escaped and lay on the floor between his sockless feet. There were many scraps of paper among them, as well as a few bent pens, a tin of talcum powder, a calculator and a fruit that could have been an aubergine or a plum but was, in either case, misshapen.

When the train made its first station stop, he turned again to the young woman across the aisle. “What is it?” he asked, pointing to her computer. And then, in clarification: “What kind is it?” and “What operating system?”

As he asked these questions, he was looking directly at her, his face open and eager and younger than his middle age. But the answers she gave made him turn his head and gaze into a middle distance of epiphany. His interest grew with the knowledge: “Ahhhh. I-mac. Mac-book. O-S-ten.” He nodded, understanding, connecting the answers like train cars.

She eyed him surreptitiously. His greying hair, smooth and cropped close; a tight pot-belly of unmottled mahogany; his flabby chest, hairless and teated, and across it looped a single stringy strap, bandolier style, fastened to some undergarment beneath the shorts. The word lunghee came to her mind and she knew it wasn’t right. She decided there was a sage on board. A sage with an exaggerated respect for operating systems unknown. Amitabh Poirrot on the London North Eastern. She didn’t ask him what the word was for the string, or for the loincloth that his athletic shorts approximated. She knew the word Brahmin.

“The sun is rising,” he announced after a few minutes, so she engaged. Game now, she spoke platitudes of the beauty of a train journey through beautiful countryside. He asked where she was from and she returned the nicety. He was from India, he said with the same wide grin of comprehension. When she asked if he had been in England long, he replied, beaming, “I was born here.”

The ticket collector stepped into the corridor between them. He looked at the Indian man, an apparition from the bathhouse, said something in a low voice that ended in ”…mate,” but the Indian man didn’t react. Only when the guard had passed through to the next car did he retrieve the rumpled white Nehru blouse from the seat next to him and pull it over his head. He was speaking again to his neighbor. What did she do? Was there a college in Peterborough? Was it possible to earn a degree on the computer? “Ahhhh,” he nodded with the smile of intellectual gratification.

He rose again, visited the toilet, returned to his seat. It was only his second trip to Peterborough, he said. “Is Hampton nearby?” She didn’t know, but that, he explained, was where he would be doing some home assessments. For a moment the myriad questions entailed in such an inspection seemed to hover around him in a lexical halo, and he resembled a lovable character in a primary school educational cartoon. Hi friend! Who lives in your house with you? Does your nan live in your house with you? Does your dog live in your house with you? How many baths are there in your house? Is your garden small? Is it large? Does the roof ever leak when you are lying in bed trying to remember the name of the lake where you learned how to swim when you were a child visiting relatives and they laughed at your English bathing suit?

Now he was pulling his suit pants over his athletic shorts, returning to three dimensions. He tucked in his shirt, fastened his belt and was once again — suddenly, convincingly — a man on a business trip.

The train was arriving at the next station stop and the woman was packing her computer away. She gathered her empty coffee cup and her jacket and rose. “This is Peterborough, “ she said, expecting enthusiastic confirmation of this truth. Instead, he grunted and bent to his shoes.

“Have a great day,” she said as she headed for the rear of the car, but the Indian man had disengaged. He muttered goodbye, without lifting his head.

She was first out the door. When she reached the window where the Indian man sat, she stopped, waiting for him to meet her eye so she could remind him: “This is Peterborough.” But he did not acknowledge her, just stared straight ahead, his face a forgotten template. Passenger. Commuter. Foreigner. Then the train pulled away, leaving half of its questions on the platform.