The Train Journey

His eyes grabbed your attention first. Wide and framed with a degree of fear that you know comes out of the multiple stones that life has thrown at him. And a fixed stare, like a deer caught in the headlights, crazed into inaction, until the next sound or sight jerked him around like a puppet on a string. Any sound around would produce a jerk of the head in the direction and a temporary suspension of breathing, like he was expecting the next big rock to be hurtling down at him. A vision of a scared, timid little mouse he should have been. Only he was very far from it.

Crow feet deeply creased the corners of his eyes until they seem to be webbed at the ends. Along with the furrows between his eyebrows that came from constant frowning and squinting, they gave you an impression of a man who had to concentrate intensely on his work. His dark brown face from which his wide open white eyes stared made you believe that he worked in the sun. And then you looked at his hands. The skin was tough and cracked like old leather which someone had neglected to wax and polish. Calluses formed and reformed until the ridges on his palm were a dirty blackish brown. The veins lining the back of his hand stood out like taut wires. He worked with his hands alright, hard physical work that came nowhere near a pen or paper or a keyboard. These were the hands of a man used to hard labor and endless hours under the sun. Usually, with this profession, there comes a sense of equanimity and patience, the hours they keep and the kind of back breaking work they do make these men stoic in their outlook. And this was all at odds with the deer in the headlights that one first saw.

The monkey cap that he wore did little to keep back the confused mess of hair that crowded his head and peeked out from underneath the cap. Drops of sweat kept running down his face but he seemed oblivious to the sweat or the cap that was causing it, so much that the discomfort causing cap was completely forgotten. And the cap was even more out of place considering that he wore only a faded khaki that had certainly seen much better days. Frayed at the ends from too much washing with the brush, it now bore sweat imprints all over as the Chennai heat took over. Buttons mismatched spoke of many a darning and sewing to keep the shirt going and a closer look revealed a darned patch near the shoulder as well. This must have been a proud possession or probably the only possession of the man that he wore it so often and so well. The dhoti that he wore added to the darned faded look while it revealed its age with the yellow brown color acquired over time.

Eyes went to the bag that he held with a death’s hand grip – almost afraid to even set it on the floor. The bag itself seemed to have been stitched out of assorted bits of cloth that had been gathered over time with no thought to patterns being matched or any other aesthetic sensibilities that one often sees around. A functional handle made of the same cloth and a button down top gave away its home made nature. The possessiveness that was being exhibited towards this tattered, worn out specimen of a bag gave away the fact that the man held some prized possession – probably his life’s cash - in it. As the crowd built up in the train, he seemed to shrink into himself until the bag was almost inside him, secure from the prying eyes of his co-passengers and protected from wandering hands.

Every once in a while, he would turn around and look at something behind him and to his right. With the growing crowd, whatever he was looking for was quite hidden from view and this made him agitated, as if he had lost his touch with a reality that he was tied to. At one instant, his agitation grew to a point that he dared to take one hand off his bag and tried to push aside some of the bodies that pressed up against him to create a passageway for his eyes but to no avail. As time passed, his agitation grew and he started fidgeting with the bag, looking for an escape back to his tether or whatever it was that bound him to the spot on the floor. His breath rasped from an open mouth as he mouthed words of protest and discomfort and yet no sound was heard. There was a mighty struggle going on within this shell of a man, one that the crowd around him either saw and ignored or completely missed. Either ways, his struggle grew more intense and pitiful as time passed.

At one point in the journey, the train halted at a major local station and the press of bodies evacuated the compartment in seconds. The man nearly jumped up in his attempt to check whether whatever he had been searching for was still there. As one followed his desperate eyes, one caught sight of a woman and a child and the whole story then fell into place. The woman smiled at him and the man smiled back, almost instantly calmed into a peaceful state, and gone was the frenzy, the panic and the anxiety. The man visibly relaxed in his seat and sank back into it, almost as if he had been holding himself up in his anxiety attack. The furrows in his brow smoothed like someone had smoothed over an uneven surface of sand with a flat palm. The eyes creased up and the crow feet gathered up as if the bird were ready to fly, the lips which had gone parched in the heat drew upwards in what seemed to be the start of a smile. The hollowed out cheeks creased and a deep line formed as the smile widened, starting from his lips and his eyes and then spreading to his face and then his whole body.

The woman was a picture of calm, a perfect foil to the nervy man. A gamin face framed by her saree drawn across her head in a traditional fashion, wide forehead that was accentuated by her hair drawn back tight with a large red bindi, large eyes outlined by kohl and a pixie nose that pulled up while she smiled. A long neck and a slender frame completed the picture but with a toughness that comes from having worked her way through life daily and without asking why. Her saree too had seen better days but was obviously a special one that she had saved for the times she went out with her husband. One hand held another bag which must have carried most of their clothes and other belongings, a tattered specimen that fought for antiquity with the bag that the man held. And her other hand cradled her child that was busy drawing imaginary castles in the air with saliva from a finger that returned unfailingly for a refill into his mouth every few seconds. The child was dressed in his Sunday best, new clothes that the parents had spent on while skimping on themselves. The woman’s hands were full of glass bangles of varying hues, green, red, yellow and violet, from wrist to elbow. The bangles clinked and clanked every time she moved her hands. She was squatting on the floor of the compartment with her back to the wall, obviously used to sitting that way for hours and seemed perfectly at ease. Her feet peeped out from beneath her, bare and dusty with a silver toe ring on the second toe that was surprisingly clean and sparkling.

It was obvious that she was the man’s sheet anchor, the calm placid lake soothed and comforted the nervy jumpy fish that leapt out of the water every now and then but returned to its comforting depths soon after. For every tough hand that life had dealt him, she had been there, resolute and enduring in her calmness. Her smile was sufficient to bring the sun out from behind the clouds. The day began and ended with her smile and in her ever giving warmth, he slaked his thirst. The hard day out in the sun was forgotten and so was the measly money that the contractor never paid on time, all because of her smile. It made him run back home every day, only to see her smile. It was his one special treat that life had bestowed, as if to make up for all the other things that it had thrown at him.

She smiled that same reassuring smile at the man and went back to feeding the child a soggy biscuit. The child only interrupted his masterpiece to take a small bite of the biscuit and then returned to his art. After a few minutes, the child tired of his castle and decided he wanted to take a walk. The woman tried to restrain him but to no avail. The child tried to march on his wobbly, stubby feet, both hands now firmly stuck into his mouth, not in the least fazed by the motion of the train as it sped along. Two steps later, he had found himself close to the open door of the compartment which would normally have been choked with people but now was completely empty. He took one look at the road side rushing past and swerved and made straight for the door. The woman screamed his name and reached out but the child was just outside her reach. He ignored her calls like he usually did and wobbled his unsteady way to the door. The man heard his wife scream and took all that happened in one look. He dumped the bag that he had been holding for dear life onto the floor, uncaring of what happened to it and jumped to reach the child who was barely a couple of steps away from the door now. Flailing hands managed to catch the child’s legs and the man hauled the child in unceremoniously by the hand and leg.

Relief at the disaster being averted was soon overcome by anger and the man set the child down and raised his hand to strike the child. The child, blissfully unaware of the drama that had been enacted, took one wet dripping hand out of his mouth and pulled on his father’s unruly hair. The action broke the tension and the man shook with laughter, the release triggered by his son’s one act, and gathered him in a hug. The woman who had moved close and was standing by ready to stop the man’s hand if he were to strike, took in the scene and simply gathered her two men close. They stood that way for moments, completely isolated from the world around them. And then reality closed in. The man looked for his bag which he had dumped onto the floor in his haste. It was no longer there. He broke away from his wife and child and went to the place he had been sitting and searched around there. Not finding the bag, he then tried to ask the people sitting nearby in his own language. No one understood him and even if they did, they did not bother to reply. Unnoticed by the man, his neighbor had picked up the bag and had moved to the forward door of the compartment. As the man frantically tried to communicate his question to people around, the train pulled into the next station and the thief stepped out with his prize and escaped into the crowd unnoticed.

Completely unnerved at losing what must have been his life’s savings, the man finally gave up in defeat and tears ran down his eyes. Sobs choked his breath and shook his thin frame with their intensity. Life seemed to have dealt its most cruel blow yet and that too at the most opportune time. The last straw seemed to have been reached and the man sank down onto the floor in abject despair. The woman, his wife, who had been silently staring at the goings on, now moved close to him, gathered him close and held him to her chest, rocking him and murmuring soothing words of relief while tears found their way down her cheeks. The child continued its play with a string from the bag that had caught his attention and at the sounds his parents made, he raised his face up and pulled on his mother’s saree. The woman, torn between her sorrow and her need to comfort the man, mustered up her smile, a beaming beauty that satisfied the child. And he went back to his thread while his parents struggled to find the next step in this morass of life that they had stepped into.

 The train blew its horn and sped through to the next station while time and maybe life itself had stopped for a couple of its passengers ….