Chapter 8

The silence lingered. I realized I was jutting my head out in an odd angle, felt the growing discomfort, and settled back onto my backpack. I sniffed to catch the breath of alcohol, but even the wet smell of my soaked bag had disappeared now. The air was clear.

The old man had been the culprit, after all.

A smile formed on my lips. Beneath me, the passengers started to talk. The brahmin woman right below me wanted to know what happened. I turned my face just in time to witness the younger of the women utter, “Such a stench,” to the passengers opposite, her face contorted into a disgusted mass of folds. The older woman by her side looked on with a tranquilent smile. The boobie was holding one of her earbuds in her hands, and looking back and forth at them intently. I knew where to look.

“Was he the one? It has been smelling for a long time now,” said the husband below me. So my sheet had not been clean either.

“Turned my insides around for a long time,” the younger lady commented, gesturing about her stomach to stress the point. She turned up and looked at me, as if asking me to pitch in my thoughts. I turned away and laid back.

They conversed in a similar vein for a few minutes. It was time for their pent-up complaints and conjectures to spill forth, now that the ice had been broken and the accused was out of earshot. I listened to their grievances with my eyes closed, spat out too vehemently to prove their innocence, taking turns from an individual target to drunkards in general. I considered unwrapping the handkerchief to take a closer look at the injury, but decided I was too lazy to sit up and act. I retrieved my mobile and resumed playing PUBG.

I made it a point to take in deep breaths at intervals, just to appreciate my innocence in the fresh air. I wondered what was happening to the old man. Nobody seemed to miss him anyway.

I lost myself in the game long enough to lose track of time, my earphones sparing the trouble of listening to the elders droning on below. I was so engrossed in the virtual battlefield, scavenging weapons and reading maps and blasting heads, that when I shifted to turn on my side and caught the sight below, what I witnessed for those few seconds appeared almost out of context.

The middle-aged women were nowhere to be seen; they must have left for the restroom. I saw the boobie’s pretty face dipped a little to her side, her eyes rolled up to mine in alarm, her sensuous lips pouted around a plastic straw that was sticking out of the neckline of her top. Her right hand held the hem of the cloth a little off her skin to allow for the conduit and conceal it. The strap of her bra peeked out. A moment passed when we stared at each other, me stopped short in the act of turning on my side and she with her lips wrapped around the banned variety of straw, not slurping anything in.

She recovered in a flash. She sucked out the straw, and it disappeared promptly into her showy kurta in no time. A drop of shimmering liquid escaped the quick movement and specked her chin. She ran the back of her hand urgently over her mouth, rubbing it away, lowering her gaze to where the old couple must be sitting below.

A sputter of machine gun fire filled my ears, followed by a dying whine.

I never took my eyes off her as she went about her business in a relaxed manner, spooling the chords of her earphone and stowing it into her handbag, primping her extraneous shawl, checking her mobile briefly, all the while taking care to keep her eyes averted from me. I was still looking when she stood up and trudged out of the compartment.

The disgusted voice of the old woman shot out into the silence from below. “Wonder how many litres of the scum he’d loaded up. It still stinks.”