Red Cedar Review Vol. 54

“How . . . how do I catch the train to Pakistan?” she asked, in provincially accented Hindi.

The man looked at her funny. “There is no train to Pakistan,” he said.

“What?”

He reached down to light a cigarette. “Have you been living under a rock for four years? Do you not remember the war?”

Janaki averted his gaze, wanting to curse herself for being so naïve.

The man exhaled, and Janaki winced as the foul fumes of cheap beedi struck her face. “You could try biking,” he mocked.

Under eyelids Janaki had trained to be still, her irises lit up. She’d been lucky enough to own a cycle back in her childhood. And if she could cycle up the hill to the school where the teachers wouldn’t give her the lunch the government had promised her even if her family had been starving, where she’d been forced to sit on a gunny sack so as not to dirty the floor, and where she was considered too impure to ever use the toilet, then surely, she could cycle over the mountains Riccardo had told her about.

Perhaps she could even cycle the whole path to Italy. Thinking about it didn’t seem so bad.

After Janaki ran out the station exit, past the Rail Reservation Centre and through the bustling rainbow market of Chelmsford Road, she found a little corner shop selling bicycles.

Next to an Amul ice cream stand, she picked out the cheapest cycle she could find, a sky-blue one meant for schoolgirls. Her frame was small enough that she would fit.

Janaki laughed to herself. “Of a sort.” ∗∗∗

It was about four hundred kilometers from Delhi to the border crossing at Ganda Singh Wala. Janaki covered that in five days.

Delhi seemed to stretch on forever through the first day, but it was nothing compared to the vast expanses of Haryana countryside. She passed by shepherds’ flocks, bullock carts, cottonwhite Hindustani Ambassadors beleaguered on roads eaten away from long monsoon years. The one constant was the stares she 50 deshpande