Bhusewal was the name of one station where the train waited for a long time. Burhanpur was another. After that the train puffed its way up steep mountains. It was pitch black outside. The landscape could be heard rather than seen, talking to them through the tormented sounds of the chassis. The whistle, far ahead, howled as if it were in pain. All along the track they could see little dots of light dangling in the darkness as people made their way along with lanterns, or as the train passed houses and huts with carbide lamps still lit.

Later on, he would trace their route on the map with his finger, and he would see that they had crossed the Satpura mountain range that evening.

In Khandwa at midnight the conductor informed them that they would be waiting for the “Punjab Mail” which was on its way from Indore and Mhow.

They got off the train and moved away from the dingy lights on the platforms, walking hand in hand in the darkness as they had on the streets of Bombay. Behind a pillar they kissed each other, unfamiliar, unused to each other, always attuned to sounds or signs that could indicate the train might leave without them.

Then someone walked past swathed in a blanket, swinging some kind of stick or cudgel; it frightened them and Pushpi wanted to sit on some bags on the platform, in the light. And since he had some cigarettes left in the packet, Martin went over to the engine and got into conversation with the driver on the pretext of asking for a light.

And so he finally learned something about the gauge of India’s railway tracks and about the wheel arrangement of their locomotives, their valve regulation types and the size of their fireboxes. He was informed that this very year a standardizing committee was to lay proposals for new systems and guidelines before the highest authority of the Indian railways. The engine which was standing there sneezing beside them, making them raise and lower their voices, was a tank version which had transformed an old 0-6-0 wheeled goods train into a 2-6-4 set passenger train, 76 tons. He heard that the train from Indore could hardly be expected to make up the time because there was a speed limit of twelve miles per hour at Kalakund Ghat near Mhow, and five miles per hour over the Narmada Bridge.

The whole conversation was achieved through key words, repetitions and the number of fingers held up.

He managed to tell the driver something of what he’d seen in the way of engines in the yards in Sao Francisco du Sui.

In full agreement, they both cursed the stoker’s coal.

Pushpi sat with her shawl wound tightly around her when he returned, he himself full of enthusiasm. She was shivering. She looked at him (her huge eyes) and he suddenly had the feeling that she no longer had any idea where they were going. Where she wanted to take him. He was the one who had asked her to go with him, but in fact she was taking him along with her, in some direction or other, in her direction, to her place, the place of her thoughts which had perhaps come into her mind when he had been so desperate to make her his companion: his very own, his, at any price.

Or even earlier, when they had found themselves somehow mirroring each other and seen their own mirror image. So strange, so fleeting, almost incapable of speaking –they had just happened to mirror each other, for just a week in the harbor bought imitation of home and man and woman. He trusted completely, he thought, the fact that it really had been a mirror image. That Fate had been written over what they had seen. And he trusted completely the fact that it existed, this place of her thoughts, the place they were now on their way to. At least to start with! Then they would understand each other, and they would set off into the country. They would travel together. When it came to traveling, she could rely on him. Everything he had learned he would lay at her feet and bind about her ankles. And like mirror writing it would be turned around to reveal clarity, and happiness and adventure, in the mirror of Fate.

He had an almost irresistible desire to fall to his knees and take hold of her feet.

Right here on the platform. Hold them and press them to his forehead, his cheeks. I shall lay the lands of my travels before these feet. Where are we going now? You don’t know? But you do know, you do know! I am holding on to your feet and they will never need to know doubt. I am holding them tight, on a platform in Khandwa.

As if she had stepped up on to the calluses on Martin Tomasson’s hands, where lines crisscross and disappear into the great interior, Central Provinces, 1924.

It was something she had said that made him presume they were on the way to the places where she had grown up, that this was where she wanted to take him. But he didn’t know any more than that, and he hadn’t wanted to ask.

If only they had had the ability to talk. But there was also a sense of truth in the fact that they were not able to. It wasn’t so much the language as the fact that she didn’t want to.

Her reluctance when it came to talking was one of the elements of truth in the mirror image between them. They were among people now, certainly. But he remembered it, the reluctance which made him taciturn as well. He had never met a person who was as careful with words as she was.

Speaking was simple, simplicity itself. Lying was the soul of speech, which made it easy. Everything became easier, and full of images and comparisons. Sometimes it was the soul of truth which lied for the sake of truth. It became easier, in any case.

Pushpi shivered, and he tried to say something to her.

“The train should be here soon.” He lit his last cigarette.

Later, with his finger on the map, he would tell himself that Khandwa was a place where he wished they had tried to talk. And where he wished that he really had held her feet in his hands.

The train from Indore rolled in. After a little while the station coolies came, bearing cases and bundles from the train, followed by travelers who were changing trains. A few children trying to sell the previous day’s unsold fruit had also woken up and stepped out from some unpatrolled corner of darkness, and were crisscrossing between the carriage windows on opposite sides of the platform, each clutching their basket. In the crush and the babble of voices, Pushpi suddenly got into conversation with a passenger who had just arrived. Then she spoke to another person. Her voice became shrill as she tried to make herself heard. She and Martin managed to get on board and found their seats, but she carried on talking, now it was to a couple of the coolies who were pushing and shoving each other and everybody else, some trying to get on with luggage, some trying to get off again without luggage. She was still making enquiries about something through the window bars as the departure whistle blew. She looked anxious for a long time, sitting there opposite him in silence as the train struggled to gather speed.

She sat silent and thoughtful, but then she had done that for the entire journey. Then after a while she looked at him almost appealingly and said: “Next station. We get off, achcha?”

He nodded. He tried to make a joke, waggling his head from side to side in the Indian gesture of confirmation which actually signified agreement depending on the circumstances. He didn’t know where their tickets were meant to be taking them, or to what.

The next station was called Khirkia, and lay in darkness; the distance had been short, and the dawn was still several hours away. They were the only passengers to alight. The platform was deserted. The stationmaster said something to Pushpi, sounding concerned or perhaps accusing, before he rolled up his flag and disappeared through a door. But she led Martin out into the darkness beyond the station house. They caught a glimpse of a dog; it barked at them, but couldn’t be bothered to get up. They arrived at a place which might have been common land or an uninhabited, unused piece of ground, with grass, trees, and thorny, dried-up bushes. In one direction the moon was shining like a jellyfish from a bank of cloud. Pushpi said:

“We’ll stay here till it’s light.”

And she sat down, as if silence and sitting still were her great plan. He sat down as well, held her close. But then she tried to explain:

She had realized that in the direction the other train had come from you would reach Omkareshwar. That lay by the sacred river Narmada. Omkareshwar was a temple on an island in the river, and there were several temples there. She really wanted to visit these temples, since it turned out they were so close. She had always wanted to visit them.

And it would be good for them, for him and for her, to go there.

It would be very good for their journey if they traveled there.

They could catch the train back to Khandwa. From there a train in the opposite direction, north towards the river, get off at Mortakka. From there it wasn’t far to Onkarji which was the village on the southern shore directly opposite the island of Omkareshwar.

These things had suddenly been laid out before her and she hadn’t managed to think quickly enough. She was sorry about that, now they would need to buy extra train tickets to get back. But did they have enough money to do that?

Martin assured her that the money was there. He would follow her to the place of her mind, he thought, however things turned out. He didn’t know any other place. In any case, there were not many hours left until the dawn. He spread his khaki jacket out on the ground. With the lining downwards to keep the outside looking decent for traveling. And they wrapped themselves in her shawl. Other items of clothing which he pulled out of their bag were rolled up to serve as a pillow. With care and self-control they managed to get the big shawl to cover them both all the way from their feet right up to their shoulders; because he was the tallest, he anchored the material to the ground with his heels. Their arms were left free to swat mosquitoes. And experience told him that a piece of cloth of that thickness wouldn’t prevent the mosquitoes from burrowing in to find a place to attack. A piece of cloth like that hardly even gave an impression of warmth. But the warmth was there all by itself, the blood heat that gives the scent of warmth, the Braille-written individual of those scents, always shaping themselves into a legible form, emerging from the warm front of memories, from hands and lips; the storm, all at once, of memories. A person made up of tastes, or of muscles. Carefully at first, constantly listening to the darkness out there, they tumbled into the act of intercourse. It was a confirmation or a liberation, yet it was neither one nor the other. When they rolled away from each other panting, it was a free for all for the mosquitoes and the moonlight. The shawl lay across them like a yellow angel. The mosquitoes weren’t wasting the night sleeping either, he noticed after a while. This night, his first on solid ground in the country’s interior, the night when they finally lay beside each other again. He kissed one of her ears over and over again and repeated her name, the new one which had turned out to be her real name. Then they sat up and wrapped the shawl around them like an Indian tepee on a page from a book by Fenimore Cooper. It wasn’t until they were sitting there that they heard rustling footsteps no more than ten meters away. They sat very quietly and finally made out what it was. It was two cows that had woken up from their sleep somewhere close by and were grubbing about in the blue moonlit grass with their muzzles.

Half an hour or perhaps a whole hour after sunrise a group of women came along with bags over their shoulders, cutting fodder on the common land. They also carried long rods with scythes on the top, and cut down branches from the trees. They nodded shyly. Pushpi led Martin to a stall beneath a straw roof in the village where they were serving a kind of smooth porridge for breakfast. It was cold porridge, and tasted dry and fresh, like pine cones. She left him sitting on a stool, surrounded by village speculation, and went to the station to find out about departure times. Later in the day they walked along the earth roads in one direction or another, and looked around. She left him again, and came back with some news. They should stay in Khirkia for one more night. She had spoken to a person who was willing to let them make use of a watchman’s hut with a rope bed and blankets.

There was a more important reason for them to stay. A traveling cinema was going to show a film in the village.

They could just as easily catch the train the following day.

This woman called Pushpi appeared to him, to his emotional understanding, less and less like a lover, more and more like a sister. He thought about this time and again. For him it was as close to a grasp of the situation as he could get.

They arranged things so that they could be alone whenever possible. You were always one kind of traveling couple or the other in this country.

If you were traveling as a couple you were either a married couple, or the bride was being abducted. Lovers who ran away together were nothing out of the ordinary, but demanded particular ceremonies. For the sake of simplicity they said they were married from then on.

From Mortakka ox carts traveled in the direction of Onkarji. It cost a couple of rupees.

They traveled at night. They sat in the ox cart and gazed up at the starry sky. When there were deep ruts in the track, he held on to her forearms. The man who was driving had wound a scarf around his head. He knocked out his pipe more and more often, and filled it up with the aroma of good wishes. The scent of benevolent intoxication floated over his shoulder. From time to time he sang. There were several passengers, now and again Pushpi drew her shawl over her face when the comments from the driver and the passengers became too outspoken. It was remarkable how well the oxen could find their way in the dark. Sometimes the track was mud, flying in all directions, and sometimes it was a paved track that had been well used for thousands of years. It was the engineers of absentmindedness who had paved their way to the temple of Omkareshwar. In the early dawn they arrived at a village perched high above the banks of the river, like a breeding ground for birds. A village in India was something much bigger than the villages in southern Sweden. A village here was more like a town, a parish, a municipal community.

Steep, narrow steps led down to the river. Out in the water, which was flooded with fiery yellow light from the East, lay the long rocky island which was called Mandhata, with the white towers of the Omkareshwar temple. Pushpi took him by the hand and led him to a door. There was an inn through there, she said, a dharamshala. Only a long-legged, half-naked figure, apparently emerging from a reading book, seemed to have been awakened. He showed them in turn to different sleeping compartments on the ground floor. In almost all of them lay men, but in some there were women too. In Khandwa Martin had bought four strong, closely woven blankets, with Pushpi’s help. They divided these between them and went to bed. It was really too late to sleep. Soon they would see the first pilgrims clambering down the steps and hear them greet the day, wading out into the river to shoulder height.

He presumed she was lying there dozing as he was. The sun flew like a spear, straight into the sky’s drowsy longings. He saw people starting to sit up, mumbling and gathering together their belongings, then adopting the most remarkable positions: one of his neighbors simply raised his feet in the air and stood on his head without saying a single word. Straightened his legs and stood there balancing on his forehead like a tuning fork.

(Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy)