Out of Order by Charles Benoit Read Free Book Online Page A

subway: “Giving money to beggars keeps them beggars.” He wanted to believe it was true, but as a sideways glance caught the milky eye of the old woman, he wasn’t so sure. A break in the traffic ended his moral dilemma as the auto-rickshaw rocketed ahead.
    “There’s the train station there,” Rachel said, pointing at the image in her guidebook and then at the massive red brick building at the end of the block, a second fleet of yellow and black auto-rickshaws lined up ten deep out front. He paid the driver with a wad of multi-colored bills and together they worked through the maze of cabs to the main entrance.
    Although it was busy, with luggage-laden passengers crisscrossing from every direction in the open lobby and porters in sweat-stained red smocks pushing handcarts stacked ten feet tall with taped-together suitcases, after the cab ride Jason found the train station calming. Rachel insisted on getting the tickets, not wanting to miss a moment of the train experience, and, despite the signs that stated that the taking of photography was strictly not to be advisable, she snapped a dozen shots, half of trains, the other half of empty tracks. They found their train—the Pink City Express—just as it started to lurch forward, laughing as they stumbled aboard.
    Now, as Rachel stood in the open doorway, the train racing past miles of treeless farmland, Jason gave up on sleep and pondered his stupidity.
    The trip had been a mistake, something he knew before he had even left Corning. He wasn’t the kind of guy who got off on exotic passport stamps and tales of white-knuckle escapades in strange-sounding places. He was a relax-by-the-hotel-pool-and-build-an-impressive-bar-tab-while-working-on-your-tan kind of guy. With just ten vacation days a year, he didn’t have room in his life for an adventure. He thought about the time difference, wondering what was happening at the clubs he always hit at Daytona Beach, but gave up when he decided that no matter what it was it was better than riding a train in India.
    He didn’t have to stay with Rachel. He could take his share of the buyout and hook up with another tour group, one that had a set itinerary and no auto-rickshaw rides, and leave her to her trains, salvaging something out of this mess. But as he watched her holding tight to the handrails, her ponytail bouncing as she leaned out into the desert-dry wind, the back of her pants dipping down to expose the swirls of a tribal-style tattoo on tanned skin, he knew the trip would be better with her around.
    The car was only half-filled, the airline-style chairs tilted back as the other riders—families, business types, and a few tourists—were lulled asleep by the hypnotic clacking of the rails. Across the aisle an older woman stood to remove a water bottle from the open, overhead luggage rack. She wore a green, tight-fitting tee shirt under a lighter green sari, part of which she draped over her shoulder, adjusting the end to serve as a headscarf. The material was a light cotton, the simple pattern machined along with the cloth. Jason pictured the sari he was carrying with its heavy silk and detailed embroidery and thought about its significance.
    When Jason had unrolled the bundle back in Corning he was amazed at what he found. It was a little more than a yard wide, but it stretched from the front door of his apartment, past the kitchen, down the hallway and halfway into his bedroom. The intricate, hand-stitched gold and silver design filled only the last three feet of the fabric, but a thin-lined yellow and black pattern ran the entire length of the sari, ending at a cloth-covered button at the corner. There was something familiar to the designs, something in the pattern he had seen before. He studied it for an hour before giving up and refolding the sari, the bundle somehow larger than the one he had unwrapped.
    Sriram had said it was a tradition for sons to give their mothers saris but Jason wondered if the tradition