At least sixty-six people died today when two cars of the train running between India and Pakistan caught fire. This train has never run on time; in fact, sometimes it doesn’t run for months and years. It has followed another sense of time or history altogether, its movements charting the moods of our leaders and the sad fate of two neighboring nations. Today’s fire was a result of bomb explosions. A friend wrote in an email: “A mother from Faisalabad lost five of her children.” What can be said about this–who will explain to that woman why this continues to happen? And the poverty of my own sociological response … that in countries of the West death comes by airplane but that in poor places it is only a train-ride away.

Express photo by Praveen Jain. Also read.

Here is Sagarika Ghose writing about the Samjhauta Express when it had, once again, resumed running:

Through the fog, with a chill wind clattering at the windows, a train leaps through the night, constantly hooting. The decorated Samjhauta Express, complete with coloured buntings at the windows, arrived here this evening to screaming children and flashing cameras. But the mood on board was neither syrupy nor sentimental.

Shrugs Syed Yakoob, a telemarketing operator based in New York and Burhanpur, on his way to visit relatives in Karachi, ‘‘Politician ka mijaz kab thanda or kab garam ho jaye, ye kisi ko nahin maloom.’’ (No one knows when politicians turn the heat on or off).

Shouts of khuda hafiz followed the Lahore-bound train as it pulled out of Delhi. As wafts of smoke from Bidi No. 30 (‘‘They crave this bidi in Pakistan,’’ boasted Haji Abdul Salam, a mill worker) drifted through the compartments, the travellers settled down for the gruelling journey ahead.

Arrival at Attari at 4.30 am, a six-hour wait for visas and Customs, then onto Wagah, another six-hour battle with immigration and Customs, finally, pulling into Lahore early evening.

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My friend and colleague Joshua Harmon has a book out soon! May he be blessed–nay, kissed–by the goddess of first novels!

Set in a region of northern New Hampshire that for several years in the 1830s declared itself an independent nation, Joshua Harmon’s debut novel traces the real and imagined travels of Martha Hennessy, a girl wishing for a life beyond her family’s farm. In language as varied and musical as the Connecticut River the title invokes, Quinnehtukqut interweaves Martha’s story with those of the dreamers and drifters whose lives intersect hers: an American soldier scarred by the first World War, a mythical and murderous tramp seeking lost Indian gold, a man haunted by his memories of Byrd’s expeditions to Antarctica, an industrialist longing to become a woodsman, and an old woman forced to leave her home due to the planned flooding of a valley. Elegiac and lyrical, evocative and visionary, Quinnehtukqut reveals how people inhabit place and how place inhabits people through its vivid study of the New England landscape.

“Joshua Harmon has written a wonderful first novel, austere and beautiful, daringly original, and deeply mysterious, like history itself.” —David Means

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