It is at times amazing to think what a train journey can do to you.
Here you are, with a hundred others, all jostling for the precious 30
minute comfort to their work place, staring out of the train window to a
rare treat of countryside greenery, and contemplating the day of
insults, barbs and wires and tired homecoming that lies ahead. The world
rushes past you like a comet on steroid, and snippets from sepiated
lives and separated lives leave their footprints on the muddy by-lanes
of your heart. So there you have, naked children fighting or playing
along the train tracks, poor husbands squatting and puffing their
uneventful lives away, and poorer wives washing clothes stained with oil
and poverty.
And all you do is register them, capture those
moments, like the glimpse of the of the first fairy you met in senior
school- to whom you never spoke and whom you never forgot. You want to
create this free flowing narrative out of life that's whizzing past you,
a narrative that would be cathartic before the tragedy that gets played
out everyday. After all, you have so much suffering in front of you, in
the slums and shacks, the perfect material for a write- up, one man's
misery is another man's poetry.
And right at that moment, you
see yourself on the verandah of a green and gold building. Clad in a
greyish T and shorts, you see a mirror in a 13 year old boy waving
calmly to the train passing by. It is not a frantic wave, not one to
draw attention, or a war cry to everyone occupying the window seat, to
get noticed. It is a Morse Code to himself, a calm resignation, a sea
Captain's assurance to his storm ravaged ship- that "I" exist. He'll be
there when the next train passes by, and then the next, and then the
next....Every wave, gesture and smile a testimony to the thousands
beside the windows that he is "there". A slap on the face of his
classmates for the alienation he faces in school; a silent retort to
the huge groups he cannot belong to. It is the corridor to the world
where he is the King, the Knight, the Day and the Rain. Where he will
save princesses and breathe fire, where dragons are toothless and
witches powerless. It is that 7 seconds of fame that we all crave for-
in the congratulations of teachers and a sudden smile of recognition of
the woman we are wooing.
And yet, maybe that kid is nit
alone in his solitude. Loneliness is the worst species of termites,
devouring the soul and gnawing away at the heart. What could be more
tragic than a young heart ostracized inside the classroom, and an
outcast in the neighbourhood. What could be more painful than the
realization that you are mocked because you speak not in your mother
tongue, but in a language they will pay to learn later. it is then you
escape to a world of words, your words, others' words, words as swords,
words as oxygen cylinders- Madonna's words, Dicken's words, words which
whisper, words which wail. The world you inhabit is where women smell of
new books, where MTV International and VH1 are church songs and where
GOD Moonwalks to HISTORY. News paper clippings, Hollywoood trailers are
your friends, and you unburden the secret of the new girl in the school
bus in the last page of the maths exercise book.
You look at
the young kid and all these images flash-flood into your mind. Its like
arranging a nightmare in a sequence, so that you don't miss any details
while recounting it to your beloved, an effort to remember things you
wanted to forget once. By the time, all visions, revisions slither away
inside the snake pit of the subconscious, the sight of the 13 year old
"new" you has also gone by. And all that remains, is the sound of the
fleeing train between two stations.
