One of a million stories...

In India, a train is full of its million stories – each pique in its own fashion distinguished by its characters, their shades and origin. These characters, they are mortals, more mortal then others for they are born in the journey and they die in the journey. A train is an entirely different continuum refrain from the world that exists outside and so the characters do not have any existence elsewhere… For the people who live these stories, time ceases while they run between places and everything outside is just a dashed haze scuttling backwards.

*

There is a woman sitting on the floor of the train. Her sari is dirty and patchy, there is a baby flung across her body as if a mere piece of cloth. The man sitting across her is perhaps her husband and the girl playing with her sari, her daughter.

The woman seems half asleep, staring into the blurred blankness of the world that is passing by. Her eyes are half closed straining to resist the air or perhaps just bored of the melancholy of the journey. Her husband is busy with a brown powder in his palm – a small, smelly addiction that makes and takes many of their insignificant lives.

The small girl lifts her mother’s sari when the man’s free hand comes round slapping her in the face. How dare she reveal something that is his? While she cries, her father is taking account of the powder he has lost. When he realizes that he has lost most of it, he slaps his daughter again, infuriated. The girl cries harder and throws herself round her mother for comfort.

And then the baby starts wailing waking the mother from her stupor. The baby seems to have woken up the entire compartment from the dull sleep of summer noon, too. His father seems not to have heard his wails; he is still fuming over his lost treasure. The mother pushes the girl away exchanging nervous glances with people in the train.

She takes a look at the baby and without bothering lowers her blouse to expose her breast. Her chocolate skin is shining in the noon sun, glistening with sweat. The cries are muffled in her bosom. Her husband takes a cursory glance and then ignores this time.

The little girl watches quietly for a minute and then turns back to the world outside, dejected.

All the male eyes have turned to the exposed body of the woman. She is feeling the avid stares of the males but does not seem discomforted by them. Perhaps she is used to the lechers, has been her entire life. The monotony seems to have caught on again. The only din is of the iron running inefficiently on the iron as it always has… a stop is coming.

The City of Crows

One has to wake up to crows in Chennai; it is not the crow of a rooster. The roosters are extinct, perhaps cawed to far away North Pole by the crows. Crows can be found everywhere in the city from its distant northern fishing shores to the hallowed hip IT centers down south. Their presence has overwhelmed that of sparrows, parrots and of any other obscures species.

Nevertheless, I’ve made efforts to see some sparrows – one day they are there, other they are not. One fluttered in the mornings on my window, eyes wide open in caution fluttering its wings with all the urgency in its tiny world. I think it was surprised at its own agility, until that villainous crow beaked it from the grill of my window. I haven’t opened it since.

One must always watch one’s path in Chennai for it could be in the trajectory of a crow’s flight and then one can’t afford to crash into a crow… And yes, while one is at it, one must also watch for the black birds sitting on high places for everything that falls from the heavens is not rain.

There is an uncharacteristic mix of ravens and city crows in Chennai. The two usually do not get along well. Here too, the ravens keep watching them from distance waiting in an eternity for their turn. They cock their heads on either side trying to get a better look, of course, they can’t see straight faced. It does seem curious when a crow watches you inclining its not-so-slender neck at an awkward angle. I can always follow its gaze on me as if I am the fiesta it has always been waiting for, or as if it is suspicious of my intentions. Why does it not fall down… it always knows when to lift up, expand its wings and glide smoothly, laughing at my human silliness.

“Why can’t you, why can’t you fly… you ugly black bastard? When you are as black as me, and with those limbs… aren’t they wings?”

“I think you would look good on that new statute of Shivaji Ganesan!”

Perhaps it recognizes me… if that is a particular one that sits on my window. Does it have a memory? But then what could a silly avian store in that tiny brain, all it needs it for is to survive. Then again, was that story about pitcher and stones true?

The city is full of fish which they actually conspire, plan to steal. Steal? Yes, it isn’t there’s, is it?

Anyway, I think they are wonderful planners – these Chennai crows. Always working in gangs, some crows distract the human from the fish meanwhile the others start poking the fish with their beaks. Afterwards, I hope, the meal is shared… even if it is not, fish is abundant here.

Meanwhile, ornithologists and naturalists have been quoted saying that the population of the Asian Koel is on a steady rise here, in Chennai.