He did not arrive

It was a very cold evening.

I reached the station a little too earlier to receive Dilip. Dilip had written to me that he would come by the last train-2115 UP which was scheduled to arrive at 9 in the evening. Dilip was my friend. But both of us had forgotten each other as we forget many things in life. The streams of our lives had carried us to different shores and we had been separated from each other. We had belonged to two different worlds and never need to cross to the other’s. Perhaps demands of life are more impelling than the needs of friendship. It does not mean that I had been living a friendless life. Some had become my friends in the mean time and I enjoyed their friendship and I loved them also as it was natural to love my wife and children. Life is weaving through relations.

So, when after twenty years I received a letter from Dilip informing me that he had intended to come here to meet me, I was puzzled. I frantically tried to feel what this meant. The very first sense that confronted me was a sense of absurdity. But this vanished instantaneously and I tried to wake myself up in a far off past to find who and how this person had been to me. I started connecting the worn memories into a living feeling. Twenty years was a long time. I started musing on our friendship and in a few days I was able to enter in my past and discovered that I had lost a world-that had been more mine than this one I lived now.

How old was Dilip now? He had been four years older than I. Was he too old to be recognized? He informed me nothing about himself. Even he did not find it necessary to write how he had come to know my whereabouts. And why he was coming? I got tensed. I looked at my watch. There were a few minutes for the train to arrive. I started walking along the platform with some restlessness. Very few persons were there on the platform. I lit a cigarette and as I puffed my tensed smokes before my nose-the green light appeared on the signal post.

The train was coming. He was coming. The train stopped on the platform. Suddenly I became numb. Some persons got down and the persons waiting with me for the train got in. There were two ppeople near me who had just got down from the train. I went near them. No –Dilip was not there. They were all known to me living in my neighborhood. The train was shown the green signal. Suddenly I could gather myself and frantically seeking Dilip in the silent void in the platform. Was it really that Dilip did not come? I got satisfied that I searched to my best. I had nothing to do if Dilip did not come. I lit another cigarette.

The last train began to move and soon vanished in the dark. I stared on the two rear red lamps as long as they could be seen.

Creation

He touches not-as he senses the world as his touch.
He is, because he is all.

But he is alone,
and by his self’s loneliness he surpasses him and all.
He thinks not, but broods his self-
as a single and lonely star
broods to evolve an infinite sky.
He creates millions of cells from within
in a wonderful efflorescence of his imagination
and achieves a wonder, his body,
once hidden in a dream.
In an overriding silence
where everything is in a still within,
he opens his secret eyes,
and makes all open to love.

No train to return

I felt tired not because of any extra pressure in my office. Actually there was not so much work for a long time and I had to find some involvements to get busy only to get rid of a monotony that erased my sense of being. The fire was not so hot as to burn the passion of existence. The same old hall with innumerable fans hanging from the ceiling, the tables with the burdens of heaps of files, and the same faces that can never want to be brightened with anything around them, instantly determined the mood of this office. I, like all of us, had unknowingly been turned as prisoners in the jails of our lives.

If I had the privilege of leave travel concession I would have gone to the hills and forests. It would be something else not known to me as this pain of arthritis. There had been no breakthrough in the last twenty years. Time was mere machinations. I remembered the days of childhood. It appeared to be a fairyland. But one can not go back to the station he left once.

The office was over. But I was not hurried as I knew that I, as the same person, would have to return to the same place the next day. Suddenly I felt desperate after reaching the station. I bought a ticket for Jangalpur. It was 30 km ahead of my home station. A sense of freedom grew in me. I did not have any plan. I wanted simply to reach beyond my known existence. There was 10 minutes more for the train to leave. So I bought a cup of tea. I never took tea in the train. But time was different. It was new. The train, the people, and the tea-stall –all was new. Even I discovered that I saw them for the first time. The train started. I sat by the side of a window and enjoyed the world outside-the very same world I had been seeing for the last twenty years.

Slowly the dusk fell and the world outside appeared to be badly erased. I felt sleepy. I did not know when I passed my home station. My instinct roused me just when the train started leaving my station –where I had got down unmistakably for twenty years without fail.

I reached Jangalpur at 10 pm. It was a silent place and it was very dark everywhere. I found none on the platform. So I went to the office of the station-master. He was almost an old man. I asked him if he could give information of any hotel there. He stared on my face as if he found something queer in me. He told “There is no hotel here and it can not be as this is a small village-near a jungle.” I soon realized that I would not get any shelter here in Jangalpur. Suddenly I felt helpless. I asked the station master about the next down train for returning to my home. He told “The last down train left half an hour ago.”

So I found no train to return.

Stars

In a moonless night when I sat under a tree pining for what I never had and could not get in time's future-they, the stars were seen above the tree, aloof, alone and far.
Aloof-as they were stripped off all the needs-this world could create. Alone as they got lost in their own selves. Far, as to protect themselves from a sense of physical nearness their imperial dignity. As I was in my thought the following questions came to me...

Do they ever speak?
No-they are the notes of a celestial music,
singing an eternity.
Can they be heard?
No-they are playing the silent bosom
of a naked infinity.
Do they ever listen?
Yes-the secret parleys of destiny's steps
with the eyes of a hidden night.
Who are they for me then?
They are the hints of my hidden address.

My journey

I have been lost in age and so I must have a beginning. But where is the point to begin with? There is only whirl of events with gust of senses about me.

Sometimes I am pinched between ghosts of the present and a non-existing blank future. The poignancy of the pain is the only touch of reality. There is no sense of a trace behind and no waiting space ahead in a future.

I have been in time where footprints are not laid in a visible path. It is only dust of moments. I am scattered in innumerable pieces from stars to worms where the infinity is lost. I was not born nor could I die in my plenty's procession and everything is here but nothing makes a presence.

I am constantly praying to that someone at the steer for a stop or for a taking off to a high unknown, which no imagination can conceive of, leaving below all the falsely luring horizons.

The horse rider of the night

Sometimes it takes time to decide on trivial matters because perhaps mere reflex of life becomes too numb to react. Otherwise there was no reason for me to sit on my chair staring at the dark sky even when the clock struck twelve. The world has gone into sleep and dreamt in the subliminal light of the street lamps. It had been drizzling since evening but the gust of strong wind was threatening an eternal night. So I had to get up. The light of my room, it appeared, was audacious within an engulfing night. I closed the doors of my balcony, put off the light and lay on my bed. The darkness of my room shivered as the lightening outside was as aggressive as the strong wind. But I lost all the ways to reach the shore of an unknown land which people call sleep. I was like a ship that lost direction in a stormy sea and was trying only to get afloat.

The wind was growing stronger and its frequent gusts on the window-panes evoked a mythical world never frequented by any living being. The clock struck one and then I heard the sound. It was approaching very fast-the sound of hoofs of a galloping horse. In seconds the horse stopped below my balcony. I could hear her neighing.

I got up and opened the doors of the balcony. I looked down on the street. There was a fierce lightening and in that flash of shocking light I saw the horse-rider. He looked up on my face and said "Hey, I'm here. Sleep, my dear, sleep the night. The dreams of the night are never dead."

"But, who are you?" I asked.

He laughed sitting on his restless horse and uttered in the lightning across the sky "You are my life and I am your time".

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One can miss many things in life or postpone them for a future. But one can not postpone his future. Sometimes we like to extend our present to the area of future. But this is foolish because there is nothing as such –which we call present.

So I can not miss my last train today. If I miss it today I'll miss my destination. There can not be two morrows with one destination.

There are not many people in the platform waiting for the last up 2115 train when I reach the station in the evening. It's a cold day. Some coolies or gang men have lit a fire outside the railing of the platform and are sitting around it for warmth. There is no air of hurriedness as is generally usual in other times in a railway platform.

This is the last train. But for people who will board it tomorrow on the way it will be for them the first train. Some will get down and some will alight. Some will reach for the first time while some will leave the place for good.

It's coming with its convincing head light.

It enters but like someone who is oblivious of his nobility. It has stopped by my side with its soft and personal hissing sound. I enter into my compartment keep my suitcase on the bunk and sit by the side of a window.

It has been signaled a minute ago. But the driver has, in the last minute, felt for a talk with the guard. Suddenly I feel it a breathing time. But why? I do not know. And I get down on the platform for a cup of tea as I feel it urgent. As I am seeking for a seller –the guard begins to sway his hand holding the green lantern. The train whistles and moves. Slowly I get in.

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