A Backseat in Duronto Express

A Backseat in Duronto Express

Lakshya Singh

It doesn’t matter if the engine, sneakily crawls, or bolts like that cold-sandwiched air blowing past, those weary faces, dispersed on dull green, metallic benches when you are lying still, a dormant volcano, lips shunned , eyes-shut away from the sight of that glass window, on that upper berth 64-B1, which smells, rather fumes of someone familiar, of white-linen soaked in fingertips, vaporizing beneath that strangely cold, grey blanket coiled like the hair of that lady drifting in her late sixties, supping her tea in a plastic cup, glancing at the glass window which stares back at her like a cracked mirror.

With her back hunched as a crumpled sheet of paper, her name, age and a thousand other letters carved on her round face, the ticket collector stares at the blurriness of her eyes: a perfect identity card, passes a faint, nearly invisible smile and then moves away, near a couple with an over-zealous toddler sucking the nipple of his milk bottle, and babbling occasional “Amma, Appu”, which fades away in the bustle of the tires, his mother, dressed in her khaki-kurta probably watching dunes fall back

into little grains of sand on her cheeks,

his dad, pretending to read a book, while rubbing his son`s back.

Upon his arrival, they sit befuddled as an unhinged door, she vigorously searches her handbag, he lays hands on his narrow pockets, nothing, mere lumps of rock tanked like an empty silo, outside their window, inside their throats. They unzip their luggage , bags shut open like their mute mouths, clothes heaped over -another like buried, unspoken words “It will be fine, we’ll be fine, you’ll be just be a video-call, just a few semesters, probably then a 9-5 job away.”

They check over his little pockets, the little fingers, those curly hairs, the bottled milk, nothing. mere ghost spaces and bones intertwined into one. The TTE mumbles and moves away with a slight hand gesture, rather a sympathetic nod read as” Its okay, I understand, anyways.”

It doesn’t matter if the engine whistles or silently drags itself with a thousand bodies floating through time and space, when those fluorescent lights are already shut, the pastel blue curtains drawn and that bottled milk spilt on the floor.