The journey…
I have left them behind.
Those days had come back in my mind. The floors felt like they would transform the whole world into the world of the past. And I want to talk to someone.
I am caught in the smell of the sheer mundanity of this train and its people. The unclean toilets emanate this terrible stench that is giving some sort of anaesthesia to my senses.
I float.
I feel that I am living in some sort of a reverie out of which I don’t feel like waking up.
Open eyes.
Obscured mind.
Maddening reality.

That same journey…
I am sitting in a train. The bustle of human presence and the smells of nature combine with the mixed moods here in this small box of this world moving on four wheels. I can’t stop smiling thinking of something funny my cousin had told me when we were swinging in our garden about twelve years ago. She had said about this man with horns who came in the afternoons at 3 o’clock, singing, with a huge shoulder bag, and took away small children in this bag if they got too naughty. And they never came back. And that night, I had dreamt of getting kidnapped, and in the rest of the dream I was Sinbad flying with a roc.

And I did not know that I was losing days.

The now…
I thought God existed. I thought he walked around amongst us, he breathed with each one of us, the same number of times. And he was us. But now, I don’t know where he has been buried. He has been buried, they say. And I want to believe them.
I won’t cry.
I will go back to that world. That without Pa. My Pa, who decided to bring me into this world, give me his little finger, protect me in the room called the-embrace-of-his-dark-hairy-arms, scare me with firecrackers, buy me cakes, sign my report card, read the entire newspaper and create a sight of it again and again, so much so that I would remember that sight of him leaning back on the easy-chair in that gray t-shirt even when I’d have developed non-functional sense organs and lost my memory at the age of eighty eight.
He went somewhere, without even telling me that he won’t be coming back. I don’t know where he is; in the ground, or with the planets, or walking aimlessly near some mountain. But this image keeps flashing in my mind like a film-without-sound, in which I see him sitting on a milestone. And I convince myself saying that he is on his way to some other world which he is supposed to reach, which is ’60,000 thoughts’ away from ours. Those priests had told me so.
Unsurmisable imaginations.
Blurry, colourless dreams.
I am still floating.
My knees still feel like iron.
It hurts, this.