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.