The Little Girl And The Train

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The little girl and the train It’s only when you add 1 and 1 and get infinity that the arithmetic makes sense to Zelma, says C. Y. Gopinath November 2, 2009

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If you want to understand the connection between a chestnut-haired schoolgirl from Belgaum and a locomotive train, you must first understand about numbers. Zelma’s problem was always with numbers. Multiplication tables, calculus, ordinal and cardinal numbers, sums after sums after sums. Zelma and arithmetic were wary adversaries circling each other. There was only one rule: you couldn’t run away. I have seen a few sepia photographs of Zelma from those days, a little girl with clear skin and eyes, some freckles, a sunny sky above her, and definitely no inkling that all she had to do was reach up and most of that sky would be hers. If there were any dreams, they might have been simple typewriter dreams ending with a carriage return. Girls like Zelma in those days could always count on at least a secretarial future. Attending school cost too much, so Zelma would have to study at home and then sit for exams at some institution. Where one of the papers would be arithmetic, for sure. Ewart Lazarus, family friend, frequent visitor and — according to the doctors of those days — soon to die of an incurable pulmonary disorder, always made time to help Zelma with her sums. Zelma ought to have been awed that such an important man, the managing director of a British power supply firm, actually deigned to rescue her gallantly and with such kindness from her girlish mathematical thickets. I don’t suppose Zelma could have anticipated how subtly mathematics would turn to chemistry. One day, Ewart, 24 years older than her, proposed marriage. She was still a schoolgirl when she nodded yes. We’ll always be there for you, a distressed relative whispered to Zelma at her wedding. If for any reason things don’t work out, remember you’ll always have a home here. It was

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generally assumed that Zelma was a giddy, impulsive girl with no idea what life was about, and would one day deeply regret having said yes to a man with a death sentence on his head who would surely be gone before two years were out. But their numbers were wrong. Zelma and Ewart, with nothing left, gained everything. Living became a celebration of itself, always running one step ahead of cataclysm. They made a home together with patience and affection and not very much money, the little girl and the older man. On weekends, they would forage in the bylanes of Bombay’s Chor Bazar, finding art and craft under the rubble and the rust. I think that the great reaper, who only takes life because he loves it so much, must have smiled and weakened when he saw these two. For 34 years, he let Ewart be. And Zelma — “I was always mentally prepared for widowhood,” she told me once. Ewart couldn’t bear the thought of Zelma alone and vulnerable in a crafty, malevolent world. The man she had once depended on to get her sums straight now began teaching her not to depend on anyone. By the time he died, in 1988, Zelma had already understood the power of the well-made wish. Anything can be yours, if only you dream it well. She was already a senior officer in Voltas, but more than that, she had discovered her own wings. On loan from her company to the United Nations, she was heading up IMPACT, an initiative against preventable disability in India. A considered audacity was the chief colour of the Zelma I met about a dozen years ago. With Ewart gone, she once again had nothing left to lose, just as when he’d been alive. I was not very surprised when she revealed to me, over lunch one day, that she was thinking of three railway bogeys, equipped with a surgery and medicines and doctors, which would travel to remote villages to treat children crawling in the dust because of disabling diseases

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like polio. The train would be called the Lifeline Express. I didn’t ask her how one human being could accomplish such a daunting enterprise, because one doesn’t expect Zelma to waste her time answering such questions. First the yes, then the rest. If you watch Zelma carefully, you can learn many things, not about trains or arithmetic, but about the art of living, and the special skill it requires to make a difference in someone else’s life. At the height of her Lifeline project, there was a moment when she despaired of the train ever happening. I asked her why she didn’t share her troubles with her team at IMPACT. “Never ever let them know you’re worried,” Zelma admonished me severely, “ for then they’ll lose heart too and it’ll become nobody’s baby. And,” she added unexpectedly, “never let them see your jubilation, for then they’ll assume it’s your baby, not theirs.” The train, blessed by a thousand hands and covered with millions of wishes, has already completed eight expeditions, to corners as far-flung as Bihar and Tamil Nadu. Zelma doesn’t really understand how it has brought so many willing hands and hearts, such high-flying medical skills and so much love together in the service of those for whom every step is a lifetime. She puffs up a little with pride and warmth when she talks of the train’s most recent landmark, but I have never once heard her refer to it as “my train”. Like Alice in Wonderland, she feels linked to objects and events immensely larger and more inexplicable than she. In some mysterious way, she understands, their existence and hers are entwined. The questions of numbers came back again recently, when someone demanded to know how many people and children the train had served, and at what cost. Mathematics again but no Ewart to do the totals. Zelma stood her ground, and asserted that with or without

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numbers, the train must and should run. The numbers are there, and in the thousands, but they say nothing. It is only when you add 1 and 1, and get infinity that the arithmetic makes sense.