The stranger lowered his voice confidentially. “My dear fellow, is it a good place, though?”

He emphasized the critical word by saying it in English.

“Very good,” Zia said with a wink. “Very, very good.”

The stranger crooked his finger and beckoned Zia closer. He spoke into Zia’s ear:

“My dear fellow: I am a Muslim.”

“I know, sir. So am I.”

“Not just any Muslim. I’m a Pathan.”

It was as if Ziauddin had heard a magic spell. He gaped at the stranger.

“Forgive me, sir…I…didn’t…I…Allah has sent you to exactly the right porter, sir! And this is not the right hotel for you at all, sir. In fact, it is a very bad hotel. And this is not the right…”

Tossing the foreign bag from hand to hand, he took the stranger around the station to the other side-where the hotels were Muslim owned, and where cuts were not given to the porters. He stopped at one place and said, “Will this do?”

HOTEL DARUL-ISLAM

BOARDING AND LOGING

The stranger contemplated the sign, the green archway into the hotel, the image of the Great Mosque of Mecca above the doorway; then he put a hand into a pocket of his gray trousers and brought out a five-rupee note.

“It’s too much, sir, for one bag. Just give me two rupees.”

Zia bit his lip.

“No, even that is too much.”

The stranger smiled. “An honest man.” He tapped two fingers of his left hand on his right shoulder. “I’ve got a bad arm, my friend. I wouldn’t have been able to carry the bag here without a lot of pain.” He pressed the money into Zia’s hands. “You deserve even more.”

Ziauddin took the money; he looked at the stranger’s face. “Are you really a Pathan, sir?”

The boy’s body shivered at the stranger’s answer.

“Me too!” he shouted, and then ran like crazy, yelling, “Me too! Me too!”

That night Ziauddin dreamt of snow-covered mountains and a race of fair-skinned, courteous men who tipped like gods. In the morning, he returned to the guesthouse, and found the stranger on one of the benches outside, sipping from a yellow teacup.

“Will you have tea with me, little Pathan?”

Confused, Ziauddin shook his head, but the stranger was already snapping his fingers. The proprietor, a fat man with a clean-shaven lip and a full, fluffy white beard like a crescent moon, looked unhappily at the filthy porter before indicating, with a grunt, that he was allowed to sit down at the tables today.

The stranger asked, “So you’re also a Pathan, little friend?”

Ziauddin nodded. He informed the stranger of the name of the man who had told him he was a Pathan. “He was a learned man, sir: he had been to Saudi Arabia for a year.”

“Ah,” the stranger said, shaking his head. “Ah, I see. I see now.”

A few minutes passed in silence. Ziauddin said, “I hope you’re not staying here a long time, sir. It’s a bad town.”

The Pathan arched his eyebrows.

“For Muslims like us, it’s bad. The Hindus don’t give us jobs; they don’t give us respect. I speak from experience, sir.”

The stranger took out a notebook and began writing. Zia watched. He looked again at the stranger’s handsome face, his expensive clothes; he inhaled the scent from his fingers and face. This man is a countryman of yours, Zia, the boy said to himself. A countryman of yours!

The Pathan finished his tea and yawned. As if he had forgotten all about Zia, he went back into his guesthouse and shut the door behind him.

As soon as his foreign guest had disappeared into the guesthouse, the owner of the place caught Ziauddin’s eye and jerked his head, and the dirty coolie knew that his tea was not coming. He went back to the train station, where he stood in his usual spot and waited for a passenger to approach him with steel trunks or leather bags to be carried to the train. But his soul was shining with pride, and he fought with no one that day.

The following morning, he woke up to the smell of fresh laundry. “A Pathan always rises at dawn, my friend.”

Yawning and stretching himself, Ziauddin opened his eyes: a pair of beautiful pale blue eyes was looking down on him, eyes such as a man might get when he gazes on snow for a long time. Stumbling to his feet, Ziauddin apologized to the stranger, then shook his hand, and almost kissed his face.

“Have you had something to eat?” the Pathan asked.

Zia shook his head; he never ate before noon.

The Pathan took him to one of the tea-and-samosa stands near the station. It was the place where Zia had once worked, and the boys watched in astonishment as he sat down at the table and cried:

“A plate of your best! Two Pathans need to be fed this morning!”

The stranger leaned over to him and said, “Don’t say it aloud. They shouldn’t know about us: it’s our secret.”

And then he quickly passed a note into Zia’s hands. Uncrumpling the note, the boy saw a tractor and a rising red sun. Five rupees!

“You want me to take your bag all the way to Bombay? That’s how far this note goes in Kittur.”

He leaned back in his chair as a serving-boy put down two cups of tea and a plate holding a large samosa, sliced into two and covered with watery ketchup, in front of them. The Pathan and Zia each chewed on his half of the samosa. Then the man picked a piece of the samosa from his teeth, and told Ziauddin what he expected for his five rupees.

Half an hour later, Zia sat down at a corner of the train station, outside the waiting room. When customers asked him to carry their luggage, he shook his head and said, “I’ve got another job today.” When the trains came into the station, he counted them. But since it was not easy to remember the total, he moved farther away and sat under the shade of a tree that grew within the station: each time an engine whistled past he made a mark in the mud with his big toe, crossing off each batch of five. Some of the trains were packed; some had entire carriages full of soldiers with guns; and some were almost entirely empty. He wondered where they were going to, all these trains, all these people…he shut his eyes and began to doze; the engine of a train startled him, and he scraped another mark with his big toe. When he got up to his feet to go for lunch, he realized he had been sitting on some part of the markings and they had been smudged under his weight; and then he had to try desperately to decipher them.

In the evening, he saw the Pathan sitting on one of the benches outside the guesthouse, sipping tea. The big man smiled when he saw Ziauddin, and slapped a spot on the bench next to him three times.

“They didn’t give me tea yesterday evening,” Ziauddin complained, and explained what had happened. The Pathan’s face darkened; Ziauddin saw that the stranger was righteous. He was also powerful: without saying a word, he turned to the proprietor and glowered at him; within a minute a boy came running out of the hotel holding a yellow cup and put it down in front of Zia. He inhaled the flavors of cardamom and sweet steaming milk, and said, “Seventeen trains came into Kittur. And sixteen left Kittur. I counted every one of them just like you asked.”

“Good,” the Pathan said. “Now tell me: How many of these trains had Indian soldiers in them?”

Ziauddin stared.

“How-many-of-them-had-Indian-soldiers-in-them?”

“All of them had soldiers…I don’t know…”

“Six trains had Indian soldiers in them,” the Pathan said. “Four going to Cochin, two coming back.”

The next day, Ziauddin sat down at the tree in the corner of the station half an hour before the first train pulled in. He marked the earth with his big toe; between trains he went to the snack shop inside the station.

“You can’t come here!” the shopkeeper shouted. “We don’t want any trouble again!”

“You won’t have any trouble from me,” Zia said. “I’ve got money on me today.” He placed a one-rupee note on the table. “Put that note into your money box, and then give me a chicken samosa.”