A photo by Pramod Tiwari taken from Pexels
The last train departed a while ago
sinking in to that blackness of the snowy mountain valley.
A darkness that has no shape nor size, only loaping and ransacking what little remains of the western light.
A darkness that no man can reason.
Lamp posts line the edges of the station, flickering from years of use. The rest no longer work now. The glass covering in shambles and the bulbs pillaged.
With the November mist rolling its tongue across this already dark landscape,
it looks as though all life is simply a struggle.
The sounds of the night birds dot this blackness, unsettling this strange silence that has birthed.
In a darkness such as this, one must return to times old and forgotten.
For in it is the warmth of a whisper, a gentle waft of a scent, a blurry but kind face, an ode to the act of remembrance.
Flashing before my eyes:
The last day at the village school.
The farewell function in college.
The last rites of my grandmother.
The deepening green of the grass and the melancholic blue of the sky.
The river Sriyali and her soft burbles and sometimes gurgles and trickles both in space and in time, whispering to me from a past that I’d filed away amongst a sheaf of paper in a desk.
All life seems like a desperate attempt to hold on to something. Anything. Everything’s fleeting after all.
What should I offer to time that it lets me keep something close to my heart?
Do you know?
An old mother
clasping a walking stick in her hand
shrouded in a torn blanket and in her right hand a low lit lantern as though it were an offering to what dark awaits for her and all the others.
Waiting for the last train for years and years, so long that time itself has forgotten her.
To embrace her only son who never returned from the war.
Everyone waits for the last train. The old mother, me, and you shall too.
But the last train has left and when night settles dream-like over the valley,
the hungry wolf will begin to sniff and snarl.
Will the train never come? you ask.
Yes, it will. It’ll bring people with it: tired drowsy travelers.
And when it is time, and you shall know when, I shall board it.
And away it’ll go into that nameless dark.
– Edited by Satwik Mishra
A Light Through My Window 