Going to Goa
Tina Curran
The sun was already burning down on the open station the morning I left the Burmese monastery. I would board the train to Goa, a two-day diagonal journey across half of India. I was heading off to find the friends I’d separated from a month ago in Nepal, wearing a long skirt that tied over my soccer ball-sized belly, carrying everything I owned in my small collection of cloth bags, carrying a being inside me.
I was used to traveling alone; this was my second year in India and Hunt had joined me only for those few momentous months that had left me not really alone now: never, for a long time, alone again. I’d had a dream one night at the monastery in Bodh Gaya. In the dream I held her. For the first time I knew she was a girl.
The train was crowded with people and animals, so crowded that many of the third-class men and boys hung out the windows and sat or squatted on the roofs and between the cars. I found a little compartment that matched my second-class ticket and was happy to see what looked like a mother, grandmother, and baby within. The baby wore kohl and earrings and ribbons and a little dress and she cried and wriggled with discomfort as her mother and possible grandmother poked in most of her various orifices with Q-tips, turned her this way and that, and generally made me sure I knew exactly how to be a mother, and this was not it.
The journey was long but the churning turning of the wheels below me provided a comforting texture, the security of being on the way somewhere, like being safe in some private space that you carried with you.
The rocking of the train finally reached the mother and the grandmother, and as they dozed the baby settled and she and I regarded each other. I interested her a little but maybe not enough to warrant a change of expression. What was she thinking? She gave her mother’s knee a little kick, as if to say, this is my person, at my command; her sareed mom shifted but didn’t wake, and baby turned a sly look to me. Now she smiled.
The journey continued, the wheels turned in their constant rhythm. Baby’s eyes closed, and so did mine, and after a long while we pulled into a station, somewhere vast in the middle of nowhere in the middle of India. The sun was lowering in the sky. The mother and the grandmother were opening packages and pulling out tiffin carriers. I was hungry and I’d long since finished all the food I’d brought. And I had to pee, badly. I stepped out into the potent sunlight, holding on to the thin vertical bar as I lowered my body carefully down the steep steps to the gritty ground, hoping to find a toilet and some food in the sprawling field of a station.
The squat toilets were set up at the end of the open-air platform thick with families and children and luggage and great piles of goods. There was a pipe with a tap and running coldish water. I washed my hands and gritty face and looked around for food and chai. I remember, at that moment, feeling at home in this strange land.
It was just as the skinny vendor handed me my change that I heard the sound that sent a chill right through my hot and clunky body. The train was starting to move. I had a good sense of where my car was, and I was at least a hundred feet down the tracks, and yards from the tracks, and the train was, very very slowly, yes, moving. There had been no warning, or I hadn’t heard it in the jumble of sound around me. The train moved, slow great wheels turning.
For a moment I froze, my feet rooted to the dusty ground, my heart banging strangely against the hardness of my belly. There was no way I could get to the train I thought, how could I get my feet to move, my breath to begin. There was no way this could turn out all right, no way my baby and I could be safe. I can’t run fast enough, and if I try I’ll trip, I’ll fall.
The people around me were strange to me; country folk, few of them spoke English. My bags were on the train, my clothes, my contact lens solutions, those few bits and pieces like some delicate last thread connecting me to my past, a past that yes I’d been running from, but a past that suddenly was all there was to get me to the future. A jolt of energy ran through me and I almost began to shake.
I ran.
I was running, waving my samosa above my head, yelling “Wait, wait!!,”my great belly moving ahead of me like the grate on the front of the massive black engine. As I drew near the train I became aware of the dozens of pajama-clad men and boys hanging on the outside, cheering and urging me on. I was their entertainment; even, for the moment, their hero. I ran along beside the hissing dragon, trying to get to my car, and my motion began to get slower or the train’s to get faster. I was losing our race and the only thing for it was to grab for the nearest bar that marked a doorway and try to get up, and dozens of hands helped and pulled and hoisted me, surely saving me from pulling my arm out of its socket or worse. I was aboard, cars behind my own, but I was aboard.
A goat baahed at me as I finally left the last third-class car and entered my own, where the relative space of a floor covered with people eating their lunch seemed luxurious. My compartment contained another old woman now, and a man who must have been her father he was so wrinkled, but there was my seat, my pile of bags, the baby asleep on her mother’s lap.
I looked out the window and breathed and settled and found myself watching the black-haired tiny girl, absorbing the weight of her, the heavy completeness of her, the absolute surrender with which she lay against her mother’s body, the abandoned softness of her mouth, partly opened around a half-forgotten thumb. And the mother, head bobbing, softly snoring, holding the child in her silked and bejeweled arm, just tightly enough. She loved this tiny girl child; she wasn’t a bad mother. She hadn’t gone running with her fragile baby through the furious heat and dust because she lost track of the time in the blazing sun on some half-assed journey across a continent to find some meaning and some friends, to try to create a family as she ran away from one. We were both trying for something, so different, so the same, all jumbled together trying to stay afloat in some great river that contained her and her baby and me and mine and all the people on the train and other faces receding forever into the distance, even my mom and dad, even my Polish aunts and uncles, even Hunt, wherever he was. It included us because we were the river.