Strange View

It’s always in the train that I’ve seen her; she is as frail as her bleak voice. Freckled to the extent that a hot coal iron would be needed to remove the deeply engrained lines, embossing a mosaic that’s so vain. She dilly dally’s in the strained local train, balancing on her hunch a bag as weighty as her old tired bones. The crease around her thin lips has settled so comfortably that they sketch a smile, which stays on her perennially. The black on her head has been replaced by grey, few they are, but loyal they stay, looped tight in suffocating purple. She mumbles in a language that is barely audible…

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I stand everyday at platform number two, with a fixed gaze I stare at the dotted red of the indicator, as usual disobeying time, my sleepy self makes one of those futile promises to some unknown entity that tomorrow I will rise not at a shameful hour and run a marathon. Alas! I oversleep….
I stand, pause…try strolling at the crowded platform awaiting the arrival of 11:48 ST, nearly shriek each time I catch the glimpse of her sliding oh so smoothly befitting the width between the platform and a wall that stands brave to all the betel spittle.


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Yes there is little space for me to squeeze myself into, do not dare to glance at my watch, hurriedly get my ‘Inheritance of Loss,’ close my mind to the chaos which the second class compartment produces with utmost ease. Its when I hear that incomprehensible feeble voice, struggling to be heard, trying to win victory over the barbaric vocal chords, that I put Kiran Desai aside and focus all my attention on to this woman, who is weather beaten, but yet keeping in pace with the racing time that is slotted into stations, arriving at a jiffy. She trudges her way through the cramped alley of my compartment, selling Mehendi, Aam papad and scores of other things which neither my ears nor my eyes can grab.

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It’s been two years since I’ve been watching the antics of this woman, I do not know her name I do not know what she tries to claim. But yet in an obscure way I feel I know this stranger, have built a silent bridge that connects me to her life. She looks the same every time, somehow I feel that she has always worn this look, somehow I feel she personifies courage, for, she returns each day to the wretched local train selling what people never intend to purchase. I often place myself in her ground, and declare each time that I would have never returned to this forsaken land, if I was her.
Life is strange and it teaches you in strange ways…this woman who defies the rest that she deserves in her old age, teaches me to move on irrespective of the odds. Her slow but steady steps teach me that one need to pave his own way through the rigid crowd, her unheard voice teaches me that there is always someone willing to hear you out, then no matter how stark a stranger he/she is to you.
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The train comes to a halt, destination reached, people alight the train, she sighs, looks around, gets her soda glasses off, and smiles as now she can see her world clearly sans the mad rush around, she places her bony self on the hard wooden seat and counts her meagre silvers, a figure that never seems to increase. Smile stays on; soda glasses rest on her bosom, hazy vision looks around without a speck of dejection.
I smile, as always, curtains down…a scene in the celluloid of life reaches interjection.

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