Notes...

A train of antiquated coaches form the northbound express. You are nestled about the western footboard. Between a man who in unable to stop talking and a mother with an inconsolable child.

Lean a bit further in and you can breathe an air of hundred smells. Of grime and food. Sweat and odour. Some of it yours.
There is passion to this heat that makes you muse for a brief instant to take off your wet T-shirt. No! Veto. The man beside would not spare any residue of the words from underneath his restless tongue.

Instead push yourself a bit further out.

A breeze sweeps across every time the speed gathers. And dissolves your sweatlings. A pleasant respite.

In the travelling horizon the sun hangs bright. And dying. A warm crimson severs the vision every time the sun is unmasked from behind the huge trees.

Stop crying
Stop crying
If you don’t stop crying, you wont have chocolate.
Crying becomes louder.
Stop crying NOW.
Spank spank
Crying at the loudest human pitch possible.

If you push the crying to the background you can hear a shake of an middle aged opinionated talk, vendor shouts and a cheap walkman. But the most beautiful of all the sounds is the ghostly cavernous echo of the train passing on a bridge, a heavy rumble from beneath.
Of aging metal against dying might. The waves of the empty sea.

Some gaze back, some don’t. Some are still at work,while some return from work. On old mopeds and dirty bicycles. Some barefoot in herds. Washing their dirt at bore wells.

Kids usually look back. In amaze. In excite. In bewilder. Sometimes in all.

The fields are the cathedrals of green and yellow. Paddy and sugarcane predominantly. The curved road that forms the highway of zipping vehicles flanks them. Sometimes it disappears and you just hear the vehicles. Sometimes the road comes so flirtingly close to the rail track that you could pass a lighter if someone asked.

Constant clanks of the wheels against the rail. Strange sense of rhythm.
The fading light invites the chirping birds. The distant hills grow faint, as the clouds saunter together. An invisible coldness descends. There is adolescence to this tranquil.

How many worlds make a world? Infinite? But there is no world. Only an idea. Of the world. That idea is you. That idea becomes you.

Dust unsettles as the air graduates speed.
That smell of the rain before you can hear it.
The first cloudburst hits the heated ground with merciless fury.

The man behind shrieks his heart out..... 'Shut the damn door'.

(Onboard tanjore express, South India. Summer'05)