She Will Build Him a City by Raj Kamal Jha

Author:Raj Kamal Jha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-12-18T16:00:00+00:00

MAN

Train Fear

Will he find Balloon Girl in the AIIMS mortuary?

Instead of an answer in his head, all he feels is fear. Like he has never felt before.

No, that’s wrong, he has felt fear like this only once. Long ago, at a railway station.

He sits in a train, next to a window. He is a boy, he has both parents.

~

He is nine years ten years old. His father, his mother and he are on a train to where he doesn’t remember. What he remembers is that his father cannot pay for air-conditioned or first class so they are in the general compartment, all windows open, his nose pressed against the bars, the iron-red paint peeling off in flakes, the heat from the engine and the fierce noonday sun floating inside, into his hair and his eyes.

The train has stopped at a station. They have run out of drinking water. Father gets off the train to fill the pitcher with water from the station’s tap. Through the window, if he leans his head, he can see a row of taps and a very large crowd, passengers waiting, jostling, to fill their pitchers, bottles. His mother tell his father to hurry up because the train stops for just one or two minutes.

His heart begins to race, what if the mighty train with twenty, thirty coaches, two giant black engines, drivers with oil smeared on their faces and hands, as they lean out of their cabins, begins to move? The guard will wave his green flag, blow the whistle, there will be no one to stop the train.

His father has disappeared in the crowd at the tap.

He will lose his father.

Mother, I don’t want water, he says, I will go thirsty, please tell him we do not need water, please tell him he should return soon, the train will start to move.

Mother laughs, you are not a baby any more, she says, you are a big boy now, why are you worried?

He cannot see his father, the vendors are pushing their trolleys away from the train, he hears the piercing whistle, that’s the guard, he must be waving the flag. The train begins to pull out.

The sun blazing in the sky disappears, falls off the edge of the earth, day turns into night, blackness enters the coach through the window, cold and dark, he will never see his father again.

The train is gathering speed, the platform is now a living thing, pitch black, spread out all the way to where the sky meets the trees and the earth, heaving, rising until it curls up from the ground to the clouds, looks at him with many eyes blazing, many tongues in a mouth which is now as big as the night sky itself, opening wide as it descends, moving along with the train, as fast, until it’s right in front, it snaps, bites off the bars of the window, enters the coach, swallows him and while he is travelling inside this monster, the only sound

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