The Two-Seventeen Down

Vasant Kadam checks tickets on the Mumbai suburban railway and introduces himself less by his job than by his devotion to the working timetable — a thick, cloth-bound ledger of every train's movement down to the half-minute that he has, without exaggeration, close to memorized. He tells you plainly that this is a story about a train that is not late, not haunted in the way people usually mean the word, because it runs on time, every single time he has ever been aboard it — and that this punctuality, he wants you to understand before you decide what kind of story this is, is the whole of what makes it terrible. He boarded it the first time entirely by accident, at the ragged end of a double shift, and he still checks tickets on this railway today.

Soaked and exhausted after a sixteen-hour shift in the monsoon, Vasant sees an unscheduled service light up the platform board and boards it out of pure habit, punch still in his coat pocket, reasoning that the railway must simply be running a relief service nobody told him about. The carriage is ordinary and undramatic — a mill-shift worker, two women coming off hospital duty, a boy in a carefully ironed Sunday shirt riding on an ordinary Tuesday, all of them tired and real and unremarkable — and he punches their tickets without a second thought, the way his hands do on any train. It is only doing his end-of-week reconciliation days later that he finds three ticket stubs from that ride folded into his own coat pocket, stamped with a punch rosette his own tool has never made and cannot reproduce, one of them dated three days after the night he rode.

He logs the discrepancy the way eleven years of railway discipline has trained him to log everything strange, and receives back, through perfectly ordinary internal post, a correctly worded acknowledgment from an office designated only by a code — housed, the directory board insists, on a floor that does not exist in a building he knows well. A colleague reads the letter, shrugs, and reminds him that paperwork in a bureaucracy this old passes through hands that often don't know what floor they're standing on either — an explanation so plausible, so exactly the kind of mundane truth this railway runs on, that Vasant lets the matter go. He rides the two-seventeen a second time only because the unresolved entry in his own report book itches at him the way an unbalanced ledger itches at a bookkeeper — and recognizes, still riding, still nineteen, still proud of that same ironed shirt, the boy from the first ride, in the same seat, thanking him again with the same small formal nod.