Out of Order by Charles Benoit

said as she stood up, “I just think they’re neat. Now I’m going to see if they’ll let me do something stupid and climb up to the engine. I’d ask you to come along but I’m sure there’s a rule against it.”
    ***
    Jason tied the grimy curtains together and wedged the knot under the top horizontal bar of the window. The side doors were propped open and the hot, dry air of the Rajasthani plains blew in, providing the sun-baked car with an illusion of relief. Although more passengers had boarded the train at the small stations along the route, the car was quiet, the mid-day heat and the gentle rocking of the train lulling the riders into a lethargic doze.
    With variations on the theme, the view from the window remained the same. A line of hills was visible on the horizon, indicating where the flat farmland came to an end, and towns too small to earn a stop blurred by in seconds. Despite the heat and the dust, neat, green rows of some hearty crop ran away from the tracks, the mile-long fields separated by dirt roads or pump-fed irrigation ditches. Shacks appeared at unpredictable intervals, thrown up by the side of the tracks or plopped down in the middle of the field, not large enough to store a motorcycle, yet Jason knew they probably served as homes for the army of workers that dotted the landscape.
    The few men he saw stood stork-like, with a bare foot propped against a bony knee, arms pulled tight across their chests as they leaned on homemade walking sticks. They watched as teams of women attacked the arid soil with pointed sticks or loaded the unknown harvest into the back of an ox-drawn cart, the tall wooden wheels replaced with bald truck tires. Some men chatted on cell phones and a few slept in the shade the rare tree provided, but most were content to just watch.
    While the men wore an assortment of tattered slacks, tee shirts, jeans, and white cotton dhotis, the women all wore saris, the neon-bright colors and festive patterns shining through the dirt and sweat. Under their saris the women wore tight half-shirts that covered their shoulders and upper arms but left their stomachs bare.
    Ancient women—one bracelet-covered arm balancing a heaping basket of dirt, the other drawing the end of the sari to veil a leathery face—snaked through the fields, the men pointing with their chins where each load should be dumped. Jason wondered if the saris they wore were the gift of a dutiful, stork-standing son.
    Although no one seemed to have a problem staring at him, he felt uncomfortable studying the saris of the women who walked down the aisle of the train. At the station in Jaipur he had smiled when one girl, looking up suddenly, caught him admiring her form-fitting yellow sari. The girl’s eyes widened in horror and, covering her face, she ducked into the crowd.
    From what he could tell from his sidelong glances, the sari was wrapped around the waist, somehow creating a row of pleats in the process. The older the woman the higher up the waist the sari was wrapped, with girls in their twenties daring the sari in place on their hips. It took him an hour to notice that there were different ways of wearing the final length of fabric. The fashion conscious preferred a style that swung up from the left hip, across the chest and over the right shoulder, with the most elaborately decorated section of the sari hanging below the waist. The old women on the train—and everyone he saw in the field—passed the final yards of fabric around their backs and over their left shoulders, pulling a portion up onto their heads to serve as a veil, a toss of the fabric separating the trendy from the traditional.
    Vidya had never worn a sari, happiest in tight jeans and midriff-bearing tops, a look that matched her attitude.
    He thought about the sari balled up in the bottom of his backpack and the friend who asked him to hold on to it, the friend he thought he knew.
    Attar had made it clear that he believed Sriram had cheated him