Ladies Coupe by Anita Nair Page A

asked.
    ‘No, don’t worry. I will latch the door once the last passenger comes in. I’m not sleepy yet,’ Akhila said.
    ‘Goodnight’ floated from berth to berth; woman to woman.
    ‘Sweet dreams,’ Prabha Devi giggled.
    ‘I don’t dream, ever,’ Janaki said wistfully.
    ‘I do, I think. But I never remember what I dream,’ Margaret said.
    Akhila heard their voices drift somewhere in the distance. She was back to staring out of the window.
    Akhila shut her eyes and tried to let the rhythm of the train lull her to sleep. And into the past …
    Appa was a quiet man with bowed shoulders and a grizzly head of greying hair. An income-tax office clerk who counted the passage of time by the number of brown files that crowded the ‘in’ tray on Monday and moved to the ‘out’ tray by Saturday. From morning to evening, he
shuffled through the hours demanding little from them or anyone, except that they leave him alone for one day of the week.
    To Appa, Sundays were a full-fledged weekly dress rehearsal for that day when he would retire and could live life on his own terms again. He should have been a scholar; someone whose job it was to pore over ancient texts, blowing the dust from stacks of palm leaf on which a sharp writing tool had imprinted the tenets of life and religion. Mumbling, memorizing, devising corollaries that allowed him to travel through the inner alleys of his mind while life wrapped itself silently around him.
    Instead of which he was thrust into the middle of an office where someone always had something to say to him: a taunt, a jibe, an insult, a titbit of trivia that in some convoluted fashion was a reflection on him. He was the butt of jokes and much laughter. They laughed about the way he walked, the clothes he wore, the food he ate … why, they even laughed at the way he suffered their mockery. He stomached his humiliation silently in the misguided belief that if he didn’t react, they would finally leave him alone. Instead, it merely incited his tormentors and provoked them to subject him to greater ridicule.
    Besides, there was the matter of bribes. A file moved from one table to the other in that office only when its passage was aided by the greasing of palms, a little lubrication to smoothen its transit. Except, Appa did not take any bribes. Which meant the files on Appa’s table took longer to leave. He put his signature on a file only when he had read every word and checked every figure until he was satisfied that everything was the way it was meant to be. Some of the clerks grumbled that he was doing it wilfully; that while he might not want to accept bribes, what business did he have preventing them from taking any. ‘If he keeps delaying every file, who do you think is going to pay up?’ they demanded.
    The others – crafty ward officers and sometimes taxpayers with incorrect figures – scorned Appa for his foolish integrity and said, ‘It is not as if you have to do anything. Just do as we all do. Turn your head the other way and don’t ask any awkward questions. For this you will be paid handsomely. What kind of a man are you? You don’t know how to milk an opportunity.’
    But Appa always did what his conscience asked him to. So he bowed his head, hunched his shoulders and said, ‘I have to live with myself and this is the only way I can do it.’
    Appa often talked about his superior, a man called Koshy. ‘How does that Koshy sleep at night?’ he would say. ‘He is so corrupt that he’ll ask for a bribe if you ask his permission to sneeze in his cubicle. Even the files that I have verified and signed, he will set aside on his table pretending that I have found a major discrepancy in the computation and that the only way to clear the file will be to pay me a bribe. Only this afternoon, I heard him tell someone – I don’t take any bribes, I don’t know about other people in this office. Who does he mean by that? Me. And all those people go away thinking that I am