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At five past five, it whines and rattles into its click-click rhythm, swaying with the weight of squashed bellies and breasts and arms reaching up to hold the rod overhead. Pressed to the window, she grips its rusted bars, her brows in an unconscious frown as dawn scenes flicker and are swallowed by the wind. Someone shouts at her to move away. Let some air in! But there is nowhere for her to be but that square inch of floor muddy with urine, thickened with dirt. Minutes later, the train slows and people push and curse their way out into the mild accents of breeze that soothe their sweaty skin. They step over the railway tracks, past little boys with running noses squatting on the tracks with their pants down. At the high up platform of the railway station, they climb in a thick stream, and then the river of bobbing heads disperses.

She crosses the road to a yellow, four-story house, and rings the bell on the third floor. A boy opens the door and yells, Mama! Ironing woman!

She can see suitcases bulging on the marble floor. The family is going on a holiday.

That afternoon, they wait at another platform and watch the train from Delhi wheeze in. Coolies clamor for bags, their thin dark wrinkled bodies smelling of fumes and sweat and nights slept on pavements. A sleepy couple emerge from a dark door, staggering with bags, babies, water bottles. They shake their heads at the coolies, annoyed at their persistence. Twenty rupees to the taxi stop, and that smaller bag for free. Still the men are ignored. The parents turn to speak tiredly to children who want chocolate bars and home. Yes, yes, what do you want?

And then to an eager shopkeeper, How much is that Cadbury bar?

Twenty-five.

Alright, give me one.

Emptied of Nike swooshes and streaked hair, the train smells of sour iron as it groans slowly to the shed. Girls and boys clamber in with scrawny brooms, and bony fingers pounce on aftermints. Always they hope that there will be, like that time months ago, books under a seat, worth twenty-two rupees at the scrap paper stall.

An hour later the train moves quietly out of the station, following an announcement that nobody cares to understand. The boy reads on the top bunk where pillows and blankets protect him and Danny, The Champion of the World from the air conditioner's chill. His parents sit lumpily on the hard blue seats below, reading newspapers and shivering. When the ticket checker comes around, they will tell him to do something about that air conditioner.

So when my uncle was in college, he was studying one night alone in his room—on the ground floor—and he heard this tinkling, like a woman wearing jewelry walking by…seriously!

In the second-class compartment, a group of high school students tell ghost stories, their voices riding on the rush of wind. Another train tears by in a sudden speed of dark red. Then there is quiet as the rice fields return, and the girls pause with remnants of disbelief on their faces to watch the cinema of crooked telephone poles and cows with white skin draped over their bones and bunches of straw and mud huts where the sky arcs to the ground.

No, really, my uncle said he actually heard the jingling of bangles outside the window, and when he went and opened the window—I would never have the courage to do that!—there was nobody.

They can hear the faint twang of an ektara, like a guitar but humbler, the instrument of poverty and devotion. It grows sharper and sharper, until they can follow the dips and heights of notes and an accompanying voice. A beggar walks slowly down the aisle, his mouth open wide and his eyes half closed as he sings, and a boy with stumps for legs drags himself after him with a beat up tin bowl held up for coins. The girls look out of the window until they pass, appreciating the scenery.