Page 49 of Six Days in Bombay

“I’m so sorry,” she said, handing me back the painting. “I can see that this painter meant a lot to you.” Her voice was sympathetic.

I needed a moment, and I was grateful that she didn’t fill the pause with conversation.

The porter came to take the tea things and make our dining car reservations. Agnes asked if eight o’clock would suit me. For a moment, I couldn’t speak. I was flattered a woman as cultivated as Agnes would want to dine with me. I nodded.

When the porter left, she said, “Of course, you have something to wear?” She looked pointedly at my uniform.

I looked down at my white uniform with its even whiter apron.

In a softer voice, she said, “You’re expected to dine in formal wear.”

I suddenly remembered the green gown my mother had made. “Yes! I do have something!” I felt my way to the bottom of the trunk, opening it more discreetly this time.

Agnes parted her pink painted lips and smiled. “That will do nicely indeed.”

***

Cherrywood tables. Tulip-shaped sconces. Plush armchairs. The dining car of the Arlberg Orient Express was far more glamorous than the one on the Viceroy. Agnes was wearing an evening gown the color of an Indian blue robin. Her only jewelry was a wide rhinestone collar. When I walked behind Agnes to our seats, men in their black tie and tuxedos followed us with their eyes. As I had at the Singh party, I felt self-conscious exposing so much of my cleavage, but at the same time, I enjoyed a peculiar thrill from the attention. I thought of Amit and how he’d wanted to protect me from the lusty stares of men. It made me smile.

After a four-course meal of lobster bisque, roasted capon with dauphine potatoes, endive salad and crushed strawberries with cream, I was as full as I’d ever been. By the time we returned, the porter had converted our car into a sleeping compartment. I took the top bunk. I quickly fell into a deep sleep, dreaming of men in black tie selling brass lamps and oud from a stall in the Grand Bazaar.

The next morning, I went to the dining car for a simple breakfast of boiled egg and plain toast with tea. Agnes told me she never ate breakfast and was sipping a cup of coffee when I returned. Again, the porter had transformed our cabin back to sitting quarters—no evidence of the beds they’d been just an hour before. The morning newspaper lay on each of our seats. Agnes was reading hers. I picked up mine.

At last count, the bodies of thirteen passengers and twenty crew membershad been found at the site of the Hindenberg disaster. The dirigible is dead.

The American filmShall We Dancewith Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers was a hit at the box office.

A date had been set for the wedding of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson.

The Republican Party was losing the Spanish Civil War and Franco was winning.

I stopped reading to gaze out the window at the green hills and small villages rolling by. I tried to picture Mira sitting opposite my seat instead of my Albanian cabinmate, and I felt as intense a longing for her friendship as I had felt for my mother’s love.

Mira had often talked about traveling on trains just like this one. She’d described it right down to the mirror above the corner sink. She told me she always left a tiny drawing tucked behind the mirror of every compartment she had slept in. “One time, I drew the face of the porter who was assigned to my compartment. I was tucking it behind the mirror when he caught me doing it. He just winked at me.” She’d giggled, and I’d laughed with her. She said she wore the most outrageous outfits to the dining car—peacock feathers in a sequin headband or layers of chiffon so voluminous that diners would have to make room for her along the aisle.

I stood and went to the corner sink. I felt along the edges of the mirror to see if I could feel a gap where something could be hidden. There was no gap. It would have been impossible to slip anything between the mirror and the veneer wall. Puzzling. Perhaps Mira was having me on.

“What are you doing?” Agnes set her paper aside. She was once again in her pale green skirt suit and hat, looking—perfect. Her empty coffee cup lay on the table. She fished around for her cigarettes and lit one.

“Well—” I came to sit down in my seat again “—I think I was told something that turns out not to be true.” Now I felthorrible. It was as if I were calling Mira a liar. “But perhaps I simply misunderstood.”

Agnes looked thoughtful. She tapped cigarette ash in the glass ashtray that was imbedded into the table. “Things are never as they seem, you know.” Odd. It sounded similar to what Dr. Stoddard had said to me. Agnes rolled her cigarette on the ashtray rim. “Take a look at my trunk. What do you see?”

I looked up at the luggage rack and cringed. My tweed trunk, sagging in places, with its tarnished latches, and her smart one—a waxed cotton canvas in warm brown, outlined in leather with brass tacks, and three gold initials: C. R. S.

“It’s a beautiful trunk. I’m not sure I could ever afford it.”

“Is that what you see?”

I raised my eyebrows. What more was there to see? But I took another look. And then it dawned on me. “The initials are different from yours?”

She released a cloud of nicotine, letting the smoke swirl around her, as if she were a genie fromOne Thousand and One Nights.“If my name were Agnes Kelmendi.”

I frowned. “But you told me…”

“Or perhaps Agnes is my name, and I stole that trunk.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

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