"Hang on, hang on. You've had me sitting here like a brass Buddha, for an hour. Now, all of a sudden, there's a big rush, and I have to hurry?"
"Yes, baba. No time for making Buddha-beg of pardons to the Holy One. You must make a big rush. He's coming! You must be ready.
He's coming!"
"Who's coming?"
Prabaker turned to look along the platform. The announcement, whatever it was, had galvanised the crowds of people, and they rushed at two stationary trains, hurling themselves and their bundles into the doors and windows. From the broiling tangle of bodies, one man emerged and walked towards us. He was a huge man, one of the biggest men I'd ever seen. He was two metres tall, well muscled, and had a long, thick beard that settled on his burly chest. He wore the Bombay train porter's uniform of cap, shirt, and shorts, in rough red-and-khaki linen.
"Him!" Prabaker said, staring at the giant with admiration and dread. "You go with this man now, Lin."
Having long experience with foreigners, the porter took control of the situation. He reached out with both hands. I thought that he wanted to shake hands, so I extended my own in return. He brushed it aside with a look that left me in no doubt as to how repulsive he'd found the gesture. Then, putting his hands under my armpits, he lifted me up and dropped me out of the way to one side of the luggage.
It's a disconcerting, albeit exhilarating, experience, when you weigh 90 kilos yourself, to be lifted up so effortlessly by another man. I determined, there and then, to co-operate with the porter in so far as it was decently possible.
While the big man lifted my heavy back-pack onto his head and gathered up the rest of the bags, Prabaker put me at his back, and seized a handful of the man's red linen shirt.
"Here, Lin, take it a hold on this shirts," he instructed me.
"Hold it, and never let it go, this shirts. Tell me your deep and special promise. You will never let it go this shirts."
His expression was so unusually grave and earnest that I nodded in agreement, and took hold of the porter's shirt.
"No, say it also, Lin! Say the words-I will never let it go this shirts. Quickly!"
"Oh, for God's sake. All right-I will never let it go this shirts. Are you satisfied?"
"Goodbye, Lin," Prabaker shouted, running off into the mill and tumble of the crowd.
"What? What! Where are you going? Prabu! Prabu!"
"Okay! We go now!" the porter rumbled and roared in a voice that he'd found in a bear's cave, and cured in the barrel of a rusted cannon.
He walked off into the crowd, dragging me behind him and kicking outwards by raising his thick knees high with every step. Men scattered before him. When they didn't scatter, they were knocked aside.
Bellowing threats, insults, and curses, he thumped a path through the choking throng. Men fell and were pushed aside with every lift and thrust of his powerful legs. In the centre of the crowd, the din was so loud that I could feel it drumming on my skin.
People shouted and screamed as if they were the victims of a terrible disaster. Garbled, indecipherable announcements blared from the loudspeakers over our heads. Sirens, bells, and whistles wailed constantly.
We reached a carriage that was, like all the others, filled to its capacity with a solid wall of bodies in the doorway. It was a seemingly impenetrable human barrier of legs and backs and heads.
Astonished, and not a little ashamed, I clung to the porter as he hammered his way into the carriage with his indefatigable and irresistible knees.
His relentless forward progress stopped, at one point, in the centre of the carriage. I assumed that the density of the crowd had halted even that juggernaut of a man. I clung to the shirt, determined not to lose my grip on him when he started to move again. In all the furious noise of the cloying press of bodies, I became aware of one word, repeated in an insistent and tormented mantra: Sarr... Sarr... Sarr... Sarr... Sarr...
I realised, at last, that the voice was my own porter's. The word he was repeating with such distress was unrecognisable to me because I wasn't used to being addressed by it: Sir.
"Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir!" he shouted.
I let go of his shirt and looked around to find Prabaker stretched to his full length along an entire bench seat. He'd fought his way ahead of us into the carriage to reserve a seat, and he was guarding it with his body. His feet were wrapped around the aisle armrest. His hands clasped the armrest at the window end. Half a dozen men had crammed themselves into that part of the carriage, and each tried with unstinting vigour and violence to remove him from the seat. They pulled his hair, punched his body, kicked him, and slapped at his face. He was helpless under the onslaught; but, when his eyes met mine, a triumphant smile shone through his grimaces of pain.
