3

When Shankar, exultant at his new post, stepped down at the station, it must have been about three in the afternoon. The station house was very small. An earthen platform; the platform and the area around the station house were enclosed by a barbed-wire fence. Behind the station house were his living quarters. As small as a pigeon-coop. The train that had brought him moved on towards Kisumu. Shankar felt as though he had been cast adrift in a boundless ocean. He had never in his life imagined a place so desolate.

At this station, he was the sole employee. There was not even a single coolie. He was the coolie, he was the pointsman, he was everything.

The reason for this arrangement was that these stations were not at all profitable yet. Their existence was still experimental. The railway company was not prepared to spend much on them. One train in the morning, one had just now passed—and for the rest of the day and night, there were no more trains.

Consequently, he had a great deal of leisure on his hands. The only real task was to take charge of the station. The previous station master was a Gujarati man who knew English well. He brought out some tea he had made with his own hands. There wasn’t much to explain about the handover. The Gujarati station master was very happy to see him. It seemed from his manner that he hadn’t had a companion to talk to for a long time. The two men paced up and down the platform.

Shankar asked, “Why is it all fenced in with barbed wire?”

The Gujarati gentleman replied, “Oh, it’s nothing. Just because it’s a desolate place.”

Shankar felt the man had concealed something. He did not press the matter further. That night, the gentleman invited Shankar to a meal, preparing roti for him. As they sat down to eat, the man suddenly cried out, “Oh no, I’ve completely forgotten!”

“What is it?”

“There’s no drinking water at all. I completely forgot to get some from the train.”

“What? Is there no drinking water to be found anywhere here?”

“Nowhere. There’s a well, but its water is terribly bitter and brackish. It’s no good for anything but washing dishes. They deliver drinking water from the train.”

Some place this was. No drinking water, no people. Shankar could not understand why they had built a station here at all.

The next morning, the former station master departed. Shankar was left alone. He did his work, he cooked and ate, he stood on the platform when the trains were due. In the afternoon, he would read a book or lie down and sleep on the large table. As the shadows lengthened towards evening, he would pace the platform.

The station was surrounded on all sides by a vast, limitless plain, a forest of tall grass dotted with yucca and acacia trees—in the distance, a range of hills stretched across the entire horizon. It was a scene of great beauty.

The Gujarati man had warned him—he was not to go wandering alone in these fields.

Shankar had asked why.

He had not received a satisfactory answer to that question from the Gujarati gentleman. But the answer came from another quarter that very night.

Having finished his supper early in the evening, Shankar had lit a lamp in the station house and was sitting down to write in his diary—he planned to sleep in the station house itself. The front glass-paned door was closed but not bolted. Hearing a sound, he glanced towards the door and saw, right outside, with its nose pressed against the glass, an enormous lion! Shankar remained seated, rigid as wood. The slightest push would force the door open. And he was completely unarmed. There was nothing on the table but a wooden ruler.

The lion, however, merely stood there silently, gazing with curiosity at Shankar and the kerosene lamp on the table. It did not stay for very long, perhaps two minutes—but it felt to Shankar as though he and the lion had been staring at each other for an eternity. Then, slowly, unconcernedly, the lion moved away from the door. A sudden rush of awareness returned to Shankar. He hurried over and slid the bolt on the door.

He now understood why there was a barbed-wire fence around the station. But Shankar had made a small mistake—he had only understood in part; the rest of the answer was to be delayed by a day or two.

It came from another direction.

The next morning, he told the guard of the morning train about the night’s event. The guard was a good man; after hearing everything, he said, “It’s like this everywhere in these parts. Twelve miles from here there’s another small station like yours—it’s the same situation there. Here, the things that go on—”

He was about to say something more, but he suddenly stopped and boarded the train. As he was leaving, he called out from the moving train, “Be very careful, always—”

Shankar grew pensive—were they trying to cover something up? Was there something more than just lions? In any case, from that day on, Shankar began lighting a fire every day in front of the station house on the platform. He would go inside and shut the door before dusk—sitting up late into the night to study or write in his diary. The experience of the night was strange. A dense darkness would descend upon the vast plain; the night wind, catching in the branches of the yucca tree on the platform, would make a strange sound; in the fields, at every watch of the night, jackals would cry out; some nights, deep in the darkness, the roar of a distant lion could be heard—it was a strange life.

This was the very life he had wanted. It was in his blood. This unpeopled wilderness, this mysterious night, the sky filled with unfamiliar stars, this premonition of danger—this was life! A peaceful, safe life might be for a harmless clerk—but not for him.

That afternoon, after seeing the evening train off, he was about to enter the kitchen in his quarters when he saw something on one of the support posts and leapt back three paces. A massive, straw-coloured spectacled cobra, seeing him, had reared up, its head extending almost a foot out from the post. If Shankar’s eyes had fallen on it two seconds later—then—no, what could be done now to kill the snake? But in the next instant, the snake slithered up the post and disappeared into the thatched roof above. A fine state of affairs. Shankar now had to go into that very room and start cooking his rice. This was not a lion, that he could shut a door and light a fire against it. After some hesitation, Shankar, having no other choice, entered the kitchen. He hurriedly finished his cooking and, after eating his meal before sunset, left the room and came to the station house. But what guarantee was there even in the station house? If a snake decided to enter through some crack, what could stop it?

The next day, a new coolie from the guard’s van on the morning train came to unload his sack of provisions. Twice a week, the railway company sent rice and potatoes from Mombasa to its employees at these remote stations—the cost was deducted from their monthly salary.

The coolie who came to unload the sack of provisions was Indian, his home in the Gujarat region. After putting the sack down, he gave Shankar a strange look and, as if afraid Shankar might ask him something, he quickly climbed back onto the train.

The coolie’s glance did not escape Shankar. Some mystery was bound up with this place, a mystery no one was willing to reveal to him—as if revealing it were forbidden. What was going on?

Two days later, after letting a train pass, he was about to enter his quarters—and came within a hair’s breadth of stepping on a snake’s neck! The same straw-coloured spectacled cobra! It could have been the one from before, but there was no proof it wasn’t a new one.

That day, Shankar thoroughly inspected the station house, his own quarters, and the surrounding grounds. The whole area was pitted with large holes in the earth; in the courtyard of his quarters, in the walls of the kitchen, here and there on the unpaved platform—everywhere there were holes and cracks and mounds of earth dug up by rats. Still, he could not make sense of it.

One night, he was asleep in the station house. It was very late. The room was dark—and suddenly, Shankar’s sleep was broken. Some sense beyond the five awoke for an instant and warned him that he was about to face a terrible danger. In the deep darkness, a shiver ran through Shankar’s entire body. Why couldn’t he find the torch? It felt as if there was an indistinct sound of some kind within the darkness of the room. Suddenly, his hand touched the torch and, like an automaton, he swung it forward and switched it on.

In that same instant, he sat frozen on his bed, rigid with fear and astonishment, still holding the torch.

In the space between the wall and his bed, its head held high, momentarily dazed by the sudden glare of the light, was the cruellest and most venomous serpent in Africa—the black mamba! The snake had risen nearly two and a half feet from the floor of the room—which was not so surprising, as a black mamba is known to chase a man and strike at his neck. Shankar had also heard that to escape the clutches of a black mamba was tantamount to a rebirth.

Shankar possessed one virtue from his childhood: he did not easily lose his head in a crisis—and even in the gravest danger, he could maintain control over his nerves.

Shankar understood that if his hand so much as trembled—the moment the light moved from the serpent’s eyes—its daze would pass, and it would attack at once.

He understood that his life now depended on holding the torch with a firm and unwavering hand, its beam fixed on the serpent’s eyes. As long as he could hold it like this, he was safe. But what if the torch moved even slightly to one side or the other?

Shankar kept holding the torch. The serpent’s eyes burned like two grains of light. What terrible power and rage were expressed in its slender, jet-black body, held erect like a whip!…

Shankar forgot everything around him—the furniture, the country of Africa, his job with the railway, the line from Mombasa to Kisumu, his own country, his father and mother. The entire world had dissolved, shrinking to those two glittering points of light before him… Beyond them, all was emptiness. Darkness. An emptiness like death, a darkness like the world after the final cataclysm. The only reality was that great, venomous, hood-reared serpent, capable of injecting fifteen hundred milligrams of potent venom into a wound with each strike, and lying in wait to do so….

Shankar’s hand was tingling, his fingers growing numb; from his elbow to his armpit, his arm seemed to have lost all feeling. How long could he hold the torch? Perhaps those two points of light were not the serpent’s eyes… but fireflies, or stars… or…

Wasn’t the torch battery growing weak? The white light seemed to be turning yellow and dim… But the two fireflies, or stars, burned as brightly as ever. Was it night or day? Would the dawn break, or would evening fall?

Shankar pulled himself together. The burning gaze of those two eyes seemed to be hypnotizing him. He must stay alert. He knew that even if he screamed in this vast wilderness, there was no one to hear him—his life depended on the strength of his own nerves. But he was failing; his arm ached and grew leaden, as if paralyzed. How much longer could he hold the torch? Let the snake strike if it must, but if he could just lower his arm for a moment, he would feel such relief now.

Just then, the clock chimed three times, tong-tong. It seemed Shankar’s life was fated to last only until three in the morning, because as the third chime sounded, his hand trembled and moved—and the points of light before him were extinguished. But where was the snake? Why hadn’t it rushed at him?

In the next moment, Shankar realized that the snake, too, had been momentarily hypnotized, just as he had. This was his chance… Faster than lightning, he leapt from the table, flung open the bolt on the door in the darkness, and threw himself outside, pulling the door shut behind him….

The morning train arrived. Shankar had spent the rest of the night on the platform. He told the train’s guard everything that had happened. The guard said, “Let’s go and have a look inside the station house.” Inside the room, not a trace of the snake could be found. The guard, who was a good man, said, “Let me tell you, then. You had a very narrow escape last night. I didn’t tell you before, for fear you’d get scared. The station master before you—he also fled from here because of the snake infestation. Before him, two station masters died in this station’s quarters from snakebites. Where the black mamba of Africa makes its home, people don’t come within three leagues of it. I’m telling you this as a friend, don’t tell the higher-ups you heard it from me. Apply for a transfer.”

Shankar said, “But it will take time for a reply to the application to come. Do me a favour. I’m completely unarmed here. On your way back, leave me a gun or a revolver. And some carbolic acid. Drop off the carbolic acid on your return journey.”

He had a coolie get down from the train, and the two of them spent the entire day plugging up holes everywhere. Upon inspection, it seemed that the snake had emerged the night before from a hole in the corner of the western wall of the station house. The holes belonged to rats; perhaps the snake from outside had entered a hole during the day in search of them. They plugged the hole up thoroughly. From the guard of the down train, he got a bottle of carbolic acid—he sprinkled the acid everywhere in the room and around it. The coolie gave him a large staff. Within two or three days, the railway company sent him a gun.