WHAT IS NEW IN THAT?

WHAT IS NEW IN THAT?

He would sleep, as he thought it would put a barrier to his woes in his wakefulness; rather nightmares would unsheathe and jab their sharpened tips into his sleep to wake him up badly shaken. He used to think of his sleep as parking a battered car after a day’s travel; but then clusters of kilometers stored in car’s Km indicator would unwind themselves and float all over the speechless interior of stationed car. The packs of kilometers would decode themselves into painful time blocks of the past travel, and collide with each other to form a farrago. This would throw sleep in a discard off him.

He, in the midnight hours of this day, was sitting at a bench on a platform of N Delhi Railway Station. He was there to take any train that would take him nearer to that far flung bucolic town, where 42 years before from now, he was orphaned; he a child of just 9 in 1967 when his old father, without having made any provision for his immature children, had departed taking pains of a heart attack in his chest. The family of orphans was given shelter by a brother in service. Years rolled by thus. Orphans grew into young educated people; this was what the responsible brother thought helpful aid to his siblings. The siblings of his thus grown up were made by their respective lucks into smart, selfish and heartless persons. Were he an exception? Well, quite difficult to say that, he thought; may be with a pinch of salt perhaps, he added to his thought. This herd of orphans were now married capable persons leading comfortable lives. Nature didn’t spare some of them; it didn’t spare at all one of them. This, not spared by the nature of the herd of orphans, was sitting here in N Delhi station to go to the place from where the story of his life changed, or say started.

He, however, could not stand the heat, rush and filth of the packed train, and got down at Kanpur. He took a rickshaw for reaching a hotel. The rickshaw had to first pass a confused segment of traffic near the railway station. Somebody was just arguing with a rickshaw puller for 1 Rupee though he appeared least interested in recovering the rupee from the man; just arguing for the sake of killing time; in fact he was smiling as he argued; some fruit sellers made a round in the middle of the road completely blocking the traffic; they were selling at unbelievable low prices; they were not even looking to whom they sold, and from whom they received the money; money coin was never given a look to see the denomination; a truck with hanging out cloth covers probably covering cotton or something inside stood right in the middle of the road at the centre of the circle of fruit sellers. A visitor to the city, however, would be astonished to find that beyond this farrago near the railway station, slowly the city developed into a well planned labyrinth of roads lined on both sides by malls and markets. A visitor exiting the confusion near the station, and entering this planned section would be at a loss to account how so suddenly the things would change; could regular planned city roads suddenly end up into a pond where everybody becoming weightless was swimming his own way in coexistence of floating vehicle tyres, broken plastic chairs, unusable electric wires and so on?

The man, however, could not either stay long in the hotel as well, running out of money as he was. So he returned to the railway station and sat on a chair in the train ticket reservation complex. He just drowned himself in thoughts, oblivious of the suspiciously looking cloth bags that stood on the chair besides his. Only when a man inquired of him as to whether he would be sitting there for sometime so that the inquirer could leave his cloth bags to his care, he came to himself. He looked at the torn cloth bags, exuding the assurance of explosives in them; but he, not bothering, affirmed the inquirer. The fear in the man had just dried away. He sat there expecting the explosion as a feeling less defeated and barren kingdom. He looked over the probable assortment of explosives as if it were a cloud of dust heralding arrival of the invading horsemen army under the hammering foots of which he would perish in impending minutes.

The mother of these people- a child of bucolic Punjab- died in 2005 in Chennai in a bricked and roofed enclosure or call it a refuge of some sort bought for her by the above N Delhi Railway station waiting passenger, mother as she was of him. He right then was thinking- if a graph of his mother’s woes and her age was drawn; her woes, sufferings, defeats, illnesses, affronts, denials, cruelties of nature and of people to her and all other of that ilk, then it would be difficult to ascertain what exactly blessed her with death ultimately; as the curves, funnily scaling and dipping like serpents had taken a note of her death and rushed to a converging point, her termination point of age. It was like so many hands trying to extrude in a ticket window. None of these curves wanted to remain left behind and thus become conspicuous. None of them wanted to lose to others to become incriminated.
So when it was fully confirmed that she had finally departed, the orphan turned self made people started by ordinary post- err- ordinary trains, as there was no need to hurry and also troubles in ordinary train journey would be compatible with how they valued her. One of these upstart original orphans, while meeting the younger one, (remember the man waiting at New Delhi Railway station, the same fellow) told him, “ You made the most foolish mistake in buying that roofed enclosure for her. Look, now what would happen of you?”“ And how true he was. What he said was happening now after a lapsed of five years.

Well Sirs, I don’t know beyond this about that man waiting for a train at N Delhi Station. And When I narrated this short story and sent it to a magazine, the editors replied, “ What is new in that?"

THIS PIECE HAS NO RESEMBLANCE TO ANY PERSON. THIS IS JUST FICTION