1‘The Government has brought on us many taxes, but it gives us one good thing—the te-rain that joins friends and unites the anxious. A wonderful matter is the te-rain.’1 If this instrument of modernity was indeed the object of the peasants and the lama’s admiration alike, it has certainly brought great changes in Indians’ travelling habits and become an intrinsic part of their life with its constant travelling, for business, family duties or pilgrimages. As such it has also become a recurrent literary trope both in colonial and post-colonial literature of the subcontinent. To name a few examples besides Kim, let us mention the purdah compartment that separates Aziz from Mrs Moore and Adela on their way to the ill-fated expedition to the Marabar Caves,2 the express train that allows the struggling villagers of Kanthapura a quick glimpse of the Mahatma and thus re-instils some courage to the community as it reminds the forlorn village of its connection with the rest of the nation,3 the other express train also carrying Gandhi through the Indian countryside via Bhowani Junction at a particularly difficult moment of pre-independence negotiations,4 or even more to the point, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan which in itself symbolises the horror of Partition. Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé stages a less dramatic period of Indian History but still brings to the reader’s attention, as we shall later see, an overwhelming national issue: the condition of women in the society of the late 20th century.5

2As the very title suggests, the train both as means of transport and symbol plays a central part in the novel. The present paper proposes to examine first how Anita Nair’s second major piece of fiction transposes in a contemporary set up the old ploy of the individual stories contained in a frame narrative told to enliven and entertain the audience-cum-narrators during a particularly long and potentially boring episode of their life in common. Then the paper will focus on the part played by the train in the plot of the frame story that links and makes sense of the separate tales narrated during the journey, to investigate finally the significance of the journey and the answer it may have given to the initial interrogation of the main protagonist.

3The setting of the novel is the night train going from Bangalore to Kanyakumari, otherwise known as Cape Comorin. Though this is not strictly speaking a holy place, nor a genuine pilgrimage destination, it is a fairly special place as the novelist is careful to point out in the opening chapter:

At Kanyakumari the three seas meet. The Bay of Bengal, the Indian ocean and the Arabian Sea. A quiet male ocean flanked by two restless female seas. Akhila had heard of how it was at Kanyakumari, only then it was called Cape Comorin, that the headstrong and the restless Narendra flung himself into the churning waters and the salts of the three seas and swam to a rock upon which he sat resolutely, waiting for answers that had eluded him all his life. So that when he left the rock, he became Vivenkananda, the one who has found the joy of wisdom. The saint who taught the world to arise, awake and stop not till the goal is reached.
She had read that Kanyakumari had got its name from the goddess who, like her, had put her life on hold, condemned to an eternal waiting. (L.C., 3)

4For Akhila thus, Kanyakumari is not just an escape to the ‘end of the world’, it is a relevant place for her mental state and expectations, a place playing a comparable role to the Canterbury of Chaucer’s pilgrims. Like them, Akhila and her companions are travelling during the usual season for pilgrimages and holidays when everyone is keen to get away from their ordinary life. Contrary to the pilgrims though, Nair’s travellers are separated from the world around them by the train rumbling through the night, and only get into contact with the rest of the world when it stops at different stations. There, the bustle of life is colourfully described and expresses Akhila’s delight in her adventure. Sights, smells, noises, pleasant or unpleasant, all concur to make the train journey exciting and stimulating. However, the isolation brought about by the train and the double isolation, so to speak, of the ladies coupé (the purdah carriage of colonial times) is also perceived positively in Akhila’s experience since only they can make it really possible. The train, already in itself a means of escape from the unpleasantness of the outside world, provides the further refuge of the coupé from the difficulties inherent in the train just as Boccacio’s characters took refuge from the pestilence and contamination of Florence:

The train was crowded. Even the reservation compartments were not spared. People banged on the doors if they were locked from inside or pushed their way in when someone opened the door to step out. Daytime passengers filled the aisles and insisted that three-seaters could hold four. Through the packed compartment, beggars and vendors wove their way with practised ease. Orange peel, biscuits wrappers and groundnut shells littered the floors. When the train stopped and the breeze ceased, the faint stench of urine wafted through the compartment from the toilets. Akhila heaved a sigh of relief. The coupé was full but at least it was clean. An oasis of calm. (L.C., 219)

5Just as in the Decameron, it is the very isolation that enables the stories to be told. The train cuts off the travellers from their usual environments, and within it the ladies’ coupé shields the women from all masculine interference, and only they make it possible for them to tell their stories. For the stories, like their medieval counterparts are mostly concerned with male-female relationships. However, these stories that are told in the double ‘cell’ of the Kanyakumari Express are no popular or aristocratic legends, fables or tales, but their life-stories in their most honest and intimate aspects. The coupé protects the narrators from the intrusion of the outside world, its sets of obligations and its perversities, and enables them to be their individual selves without fear of any consequences:

Suddenly it didn’t matter. Akhila knew she could tell these women whatever she chose to. Her secrets, desires, and fears. In turn, she could ask them whatever she wanted. They would never see each other again.
There was silence in the coupé. For a moment Akhila had thought they had established a connection. Foetuses jostling within the walls of a womb, drawing substance from each other’s lives, aided by the darkness outside and the fact that what was shared within the walls wouldn’t go beyond this night or the contained space. (L.C., 21,23)

6This enclosed yet moving space that defines the setting of Nair’s narrative, and thus blends together the characteristics of Chaucer and Boccacio’s respective frames of reference, is made possible by the trope of the technical progress offered by the train, indeed in this case ‘a wonderful matter’ combining escape and enclosure in what may first appear as an oxymoronic way but then proves to be a convergence of opportunities. The train offers both freedom and seclusion, solidarity and individuality, thus a richer set up than what was available to its medieval counterparts.

7Since the coupé can house six travellers only, the novel in parts will consist of five individual stories, told by Akhila’s companions each in her turn, while the frame story contains Akhila’s own seen through different flashbacks, until her final gesture of emancipation in Kanyakumari. Indeed, her first assertion of independence was precisely to catch the train in order to escape from what had been her routine for most of the forty-five years of her life: the burden of supporting her whole family since her father’s death accompanied by the smarting feeling of being nevertheless put upon, despised and detested by them for being still a spinster (in a society where consideration for women only comes when they have mothered a son). The opening paragraphs of the novel are particularly significant:

This is the way it has always been: the smell of a railway platform fills Akhila with a sense of escape....
Akhila has often dreamt of this. Of being part of such a wave that pours into compartments and settles on seats, stowing baggage and clutching tickets. Of sitting with her back to her world, with her eyes looking ahead. Of leaving. Of running away. Of pulling out. Of a train that trundles, truckles and troops into a station.... But the truth is, Akhila has never bought an express train ticket until now. She has never climbed into an overnight train to a place she has never been before. (L.C.,2)

8Though a seasoned traveller by commuter train, Akhila sees her expedition in the Kanyakumari night express as the most exciting of experiences. Some trains are more equal than others!

9Clearly, her train journey to Kanyakumari is the backbone of the plot, and the thread that connects the telling of the different stories is Akhila’s crisis of identity that led to her escape and induces her to ask her travelling companions their opinions on the fundamental question which would henceforth direct her own life: can a woman live alone? The five stories she is to hear during this unique night in the wholly feminine world of the coupé are meant to help her make her mind about her future.

10In fact, public transports, even before this night, have played a determining role in Akhila’s life. Her father died, more or less wilfully, run over by a bus, thus forcing his elder daughter to abandon her studies and become the family’s bread-winner. This she did for years, commuting first by bus to Madras. The promiscuity of the crowded bus and the lecherous hands of some travelling companions made her aware, to her shame, of her young body and physical yearnings. The train, with the shelter of its first class carriages helped to pacify her thoughts and eventually also brought the first positive determining event of her adult life: her meeting with young Hari. Their romance was made possible by the unspoken rules of the commuter-trains and grew day after day thanks to the time that was thus afforded by their commuting, the only public space they could be seen together without causing reprobation. It was also in a train taking them back to Madras after their only lovers’ week-end to Mahabalipuram, that Akhila made the heart-breaking decision to part with Hari forever, due to their, potentially, scandalous age difference. The recurrent topicality of Akhila’s background past thus puts special emphasis on the dramatic significance of her journey to Kanyakumari, and on the seriousness of her query, hence on the equal seriousness of the five stories told by her companions in the perspective of revealing many aspects of the fate reserved to contemporary Indian women.

11Story-telling is still one of the vivid traditions in contemporary India, even though the cliché of the village story teller under the banyan tree, so familiar at a time in drawings and literature as well, may be a thing of the past, and given that the extensive web of railways crisscrossing India still support mostly steam-engine trains, and that distances are vast on the scale of the sub-continent, journeys may appear long, slow and tedious by European standards; before the advent of portable cds and individual mp3s in the last decade of the 20th century, Indian travellers had no inhibition to talk, question or narrate to each other, so that the set up designed by Nair is not a contrived piece of plotting but rather a fairly realistic staging for the multiple narration. As one of Kipling’s characters already noticed ‘there is not one rule of right living which these te-rains do not cause us to break. We sit, for example, side by side with all castes and peoples’ (Kipling 1987: 76), the party in the ladies coupé consists of women coming from different backgrounds, who otherwise, would probably never have met, let alone spoken to each other. Beside forty-five years old Akhila, a civil servant in the income-tax department, the coupé shelters Janaki, a grandmother in her sixties, married for forty years, whose husband travels in another compartment, Margaret, a school teacher, and Prabha Devi, a rich housewife, closer to Akhila in age, Sheela, the teenager alienated from her parents through her devotion and loyalty to her grandmother, all middle class and town dwellers, but coming from different walks of life and from very different pasts, and finally, Marikolanthu, the village girl turned servant to English expatriates, with the most tragic experience compared to the sheltered lives of her five companions. Together, they represent a cross-section of contemporary Indian society albeit in its more privileged strata and thus the stories they are to tell—their stories—will not only enlighten Akhila in her search for an answer to her quandary but also throw some light on the present position of women in at least some of the most literary visible sections of the Indian population. Except for Akhila, all the women are travelling under some kind of obligation strictly connected with their position as wives, mothers or daughter: Janaki and her husband are escaping from their son’s household after a rather unpleasant visit, Margaret has taken her husband to a health farm, Prabha Devi is joining hers to attend a family wedding, Sheela and her parents are taking her dying grandmother to their ancestral home, Marikolanthu is taking herself and her son to her new job. Thus, already by this very situation, even before the stories unfold the women’s feelings with regard to the question ‘can a woman live alone’, an objective element of answer is hinted at: whether wilfully accepted or not, family demands are always there to condition women’s freedom of movement or independence.

12Besides, the second class ladies’coupé in which they find themselves is a great equaliser, taking them at least one step down the ladder they belong to, thus somehow blurring their social identity and focusing more on their individualities. Most of the women passengers are there for want of better accommodation due to the extreme pressure on availability at this particular time of the year. Normally their social and financial status would have booked them a first class berth. This is true of Akhila herself, Janaki and Prabha Devi, who otherwise would never have travelled with someone like Marikolanthu. Indeed only Akhila will actually speak to her in the last leg of the journey, and hear her story—the most strikingly revealing of the abuses that women are exposed to—once the others have reached their destinations.

13The five different stories of Akhila’s companions are told in five separate chapters interspersed with the writer’s fragmentary telling of Akhila’s own, so that the other women’s experiences can be more or less loosely related to the topic highlighted by the story itself. For instance, Janaki’s married life and companionship with her husband of forty years, their relation to their married son whose home they have just fled, is set as a parallel to Akhila’s parents’ marriage and its impact on her own relation to her family. Prabha Devi’s secret yearning for learning to swim and her achievement despite her family’s disapproval is echoed in Akhila’s dream of escape, materialised in her secret trip to Kanyakumari and thus anticipates in a way her final move when she reaches her destination. Sheela’s support to her grandmother in order to allow the old dying woman to preserve her femininity to the last suggests the necessity for Akhila to accept her own with her desires and needs, Margaret’s emasculation of her detestable and potentially dangerous husband through overfeeding him points to strategies of evasion from familial traditional pressures that Akhila could envisage to avoid her brothers or sister’s interferences. All these stories, of course, illustrate in diverse ways men-women relationships and thus bring an element of answer to Akhila’s ardent questioning at this critical moment of her life: ‘How can I who have never spent a week away from my family, survive a future alone?’ But it is the last one, which she alone will hear, that gives a definite answer. Marikolanthu’s tragedy points to the great inner strength that women can muster in order to survive and build a life of and on their own:

The sixth passenger rolled her magazine and said, ‘I’m not telling you that women are weak. Women are strong. Women can do everything as well as men. Women can do much more. But a woman has to seek that vein of strength in herself. It does not show itself naturally. (L.C., 221)

14The train journey to Kanyakumari ends with Marikolanthu’s story of poverty, exploitation, rape, single motherhood, depression and final recapture of her own destiny thanks to the generosity of another, English, woman, her employer, who gives her the opportunity to reconstruct herself and her family with her son.

15 Faced with the wide ocean and the sea breeze in this highly symbolic place of enlightenment, Akhila is left alone to confront her identity crisis, think and shape her own future, ‘wait for the answers that had eluded [her] all [her] life’. After the enclosed space of the ladies coupé, the open world is there for the taking and Akhila is ready to enjoy life freely as she wishes.

16Her stay at Kanyakumari may look like a holiday, a welcome break from her usual austere routine, with its hotel, its restaurant, her ‘room that faces the sea’, the beach and the time it affords to muse and meditate, even to have an adventure, but it is a lot more, a turning point in Akhila’s life with no return to the status quo:

45-year old spinsters have a reputation [...] and so it was with Akhila. Elderly spinster. Older sister. Once the breadwinner of the family. Still the cash cow.
But Akhila is certain that she won’t let her family use her any more. Look at me, she would tell them. Look at me: I’m the woman you think you know. I am the sister you have wondered about. There is no more to this Akka.6 For within me is a woman I have discovered. (L.C., 28)

17If the open ending of the novel does not give a clear-cut answer to the interrogation about the protagonist’s future, as she is ready to catch her train back to Bangalore, it lets us see however that she has found the answer to her question and decided that a woman of her age and condition can live independently though preferably not alone, since the closing paragraph of the book (written in a significant and dramatic present tense) is devoted to her attempt at re-establishing contact with Hari, her first and only love, whom she had renounced reluctantly years ago, in fear of general disapproval.

The telephone on the table near the bed rings. Akhila walks towards it. Her heart races. She wonders: could it be him?
Hari’s voice is low and cautious, incredulous, too.
‘Hello’ she says. ‘This is Akhila. Akhilandeswari’. (L.C., 290)

18Both from a dramatic and symbolic point of view, the train journey to Kanyakumari has provided the opportunity to draw a broad picture of the woman’s condition in today’s India. Not only does the ploy of the train as the setting of the narration allows for the social and age diversity of the characters (three married women of different conditions—a grand-mother, a rich housewife and an educated working wife who are mothers—a single mother, a teenager and the working spinster protagonist), not only does it provide the neutral mutual ground that makes their telling of their tales possible, but also by the sheer fact of transporting them through the breadth and width of the Indian countryside and the cities dotting it, it expresses the universality of their experiences throughout India. The modernity of the train together with the stress laid on the intensity of the pressure exercised by patriarchal tradition on women’s lives emphasize the unfairness of the paradoxical quandary confronting contemporary Indian women. Anita Nair’s use of the novel in parts enshrined in a problematic frame story is not mere transposition of an age-old device, its specific context is in itself an instrument and a comment on the social picture she draws. Just like her medieval predecessors’ Anita Nair’s writing is caustic, often satirical and mostly unsentimental in its observation of human foibles; her feminist denunciation of the injustice done to Indian women, even belonging to the privileged and educated classes, is no less striking for being staged in the exceptional condition of the train journey that accidentally regroups some representative characters in the occasional sorority and solidarity of the ladies coupé, an institution which has apparently been recently abolished in the past few years since the novel was conceived.

19Finally, is it to stretch the Bakhtinian notion too far to see in the ladies coupé that encapsulates all these life stories coming back from their respective pasts for Akhila’s benefit in her present identity crisis, a typical chronotope, ‘a place where the knots of the narrative are tied and untied’,7 albeit a chronotope in motion?