There is a futility about the incessant comings and goings of trains every day at the railway stations. It horrifies me as do the chance encounters with strangers who, unlike trains, unravel deep secrets about themselves and, for no particular reasons, decide to abandon their journeys.
I have never enjoyed waiting for trains after my encounter with a young man on the half-deserted platform of a railway station. It was a cloudy evening and crows were swirling in the sky. The first time I saw him, his cheeks were cupped in his palms. His chin rested on his chest. Perhaps, he was trying to hide his youthful looks. His gaze was fixed at the ants feeding ravenously on bits of sweetened breadcrumbs near his feet.
He looked like one of those rookies in the army who spend a day in transit on the platform of a railway station, waiting for a train to take them to the war zone where they fight and die for the sake of peace, dignity and honour. Who would have thought that a fortuitous encounter with him that evening would change me forever?
I was living as a recluse in a hermitage, which was a two-day bus journey from the town. I had renounced all worldly enticements and was on my way to my hermitage to spend time in seclusion. I had found contentment and lived abstemiously in contemplation, devoting most of my time to teaching young monks at the monastery. I taught them literature produced by the wise masters who had preceded me at the school and were superior to me in rank and order. Years of rigorous training, I thought, had begun to bestow spiritual gains and I had started to experience, what the wise man, my Guru at the hermitage, called “inner bliss”.
Mine was a life devoid of any worldly adventure. But I must confess that despite enjoying my time at the hermitage, I never gave up exploring different places to gather and assimilate varied experiences, and to know different people and their lives. Such infrequent travels were not only spiritually rewarding but necessary for a person of my disposition because they helped me experiment with diverse methods of teaching and arrive at conclusions based on lived experiences and not just bookish knowledge. Besides, during these sojourns I met my old friends who, not to my surprise, invariably shared the sordid tales of their crisis-ridden lives with me, thinking that I would offer them unique solutions. In the course of our conversations, they would constantly tease me, saying that I was luckier than all of them and that they secretly wished for themselves a sequestered life, such as the one I was living. Little could I tell them how daunting it had been for me to renounce family and friends very early on in life and to shun everything and stay away from civilisation for months.
My friends would confide that, at times, they wished to run away from the humdrum of daily existence, their jobs, wives and children. I knew that their wishes were transitory, their desires fleeting, their ailments momentary. The lure of money and worldly enticements would bring them back to their realities. When I told them that I was as ordinary as they were, they thought I was being sarcastic. They accused me of vanity. “You are living a bachelor’s life. You can still have fun,” they taunted me. I knew they were struggling to come to terms with the fact that they weren’t young any longer and that it wasn’t possible for them to be adventurous and perform rakish acts. “Middle age is not as bad as people say it is,” I would always say to comfort them. Not convinced by my explanations, they blamed me for not being able to understand their problems. My teachings had no effect on them. I realised that I was no longer one of them. They branded me an outsider, an escapist.
Late that evening, when I walked into the railway station to board the train, I felt an uneasy desire to end my fast and silence.
The war-town was a night’s journey by train, and from that town I was to catch a bus to the village from where my hermitage was half-a-day’s pony ride. The hermitage sat atop a barren mountain overlooking vast terraces of uncultivated farmland.
I had not spoken to anyone for days. Words were an unnecessary burden. During the past several days, I had kept mostly to my room, going occasionally to the public library near the district town hall.
As I settled in a corner on the side of the platform, waiting for the train to arrive, I saw the youth sitting in a frozen posture on a bench. A half-empty cup of tea and some fried slices of bread sat unattended next to him. Flies swarmed around the sugary rim of the cup.
A man at the tea shop close by eyed me, expecting me to buy a cup of tea. He enticed me by stirring the boiling tea in a kettle that sat on a stove. I was overcome by a sudden burst of temptation, despite my ability to resist the small and beautiful pleasures of life, like sipping tea on serene wintry evenings. I took out a shawl from my bag. The small puddles of water from the rain which had fallen in the morning were yet to dry. There was room for two more people on the bench on which the young man sat with his head down, elbows on his knees and cheeks cupped in his hands. He wore a T-shirt and cargo pants and didn’t look like either a tourist or a native.
I knew that the only people who went into the war-town those days were soldiers who came from different towns and villages of the country. Some people believed that the war had ended, while others argued that it would end once the troops retreated. New army units were sent to the town every month. Many of the young recruits were sent as replacements for the dead and the wounded, while others were deputed after training to gain experience in combat and warfare and prove their mettle against the enemy forces and insurgents. Month after month, hundreds and thousands of unemployed youth enrolled in the army. They hoped to survive the war and then return to their homes, spend time with their parents and siblings, get married, have children and live peaceful lives. For them, life meant dodging bullets.
I remembered meeting a young soldier in a train years ago, much before I had relinquished the world of pleasures and temptations for a life of asceticism. The soldier was my companion on that journey in the sleeper compartment of the train. We had spent the night talking about marriage and education, as the train rumbled alongside fields of corn and sugarcane. He had spoken to me about the advantages of being a soldier. The money was good, he had said. Most things were subsidised. Housing was taken care of by the government. In the morning, we had breakfasted on steaming hot potatoes.
At first, I thought of settling in the second-class waiting room near the platform. The chairs were empty, and a couple of scrawny-looking porters were sleeping on a rug in a corner. Draped in a tattered blanket, they had shrunk their shivering bodies into a cocoon to keep warm. Somehow, I was overcome by a tearing urge to have a cup of tea and sit next to the young man. I felt like ending my silence. I was unsure of how to do so. What should I say? How do I greet him? Was he asleep or just tired? Had he noticed me? Except for the whistling kettle on the stove at the tea shop, the platform was unusually quiet.
Vexed by my habitual indecisiveness, I walked to the tea shop and extended my hand towards the vendor for a cup of tea. He smiled and placed a cup on the wooden tray and pointed to the pyramid of freshly fried bread rolls. My shrug conveyed that I was in no need for grub. He smiled and didn’t insist. I placed some coins on the tray, picked up the cup of tea and walked towards the bench wondering why the tea vendor continued to make a kettleful of tea when there weren’t any passengers around. The station staff had their own pantry. The two sleeping porters were the only people in the waiting room. No other train was to arrive or depart that evening except the one for which the youth and I waited. The chart indicated that this was the last train to arrive. Most of the passengers would get down and disappear within minutes, leaving possibly only the two of us to board it for our onward journey to the town.
The tea vendor went about his chores with utmost devotion. I realised that he had not spoken a word to me. I turned around and looked at him and saw him attending to the tea and bread rolls as if he knew tea addicts and famished travellers would emerge miraculously in vast numbers and gravitate towards his little tea shop. Intermittently, he fanned the pyramid of breadrolls with a newspaper to keep the flies away. The expression on his face showed his conviction and belief in his occupation. He knew something that I did not. His look betrayed hope and confidence.
I sat beside the young man on the bench waiting for him to notice me. I sipped the tea pretentiously to catch his attention. The youth rubbed his face with his hands and turned sideways to look at me. I smiled gleefully. Happy at my success, I tried to steal the smile from the tea vendor’s face and betray an expression of affectionate composure, refusing to believe that in this process, I had become a thief. A smile thief! There was no doubt in my mind that the smile of the tea vendor was far superior. Even his silence was more appealing than mine. And I thought I was the only one who could speak even in silence and that the young man would eventually say something to me, smile or perhaps react in some way, even go back to doing what he had been doing all the while, which was to wait for his destiny to hand him the inevitable.
The youth looked emaciated. Close-cropped hair, slender fingers, a bony torso, pronounced cheekbones, triangular ears, dark complexion and deep brown eyes. His appearance conveyed that he was distraught. Was he facing a dilemma? Somehow I had a feeling that he wanted to be elsewhere that evening. Overcome by sympathy for him, I asked, “Aren’t you feeling cold?” He didn’t respond. “I hope I am not an unwelcome bother,” I added, hoping to strike up a friendly conversation. “The train should be on time,” I continued, looking at the big wall clock that hung on an iron pillar. I was anticipating a friendly response. I had developed a knack of figuring out a person’s situation by just looking at the expressions. Was he regretful for being in the military? It appeared so to me. And now headed towards the war zone, was he guilt-ridden because of the choices he had made, and unnerved at the uncertainty ahead? After all, the life he was going to lead was fraught with many perils. Guns would become his toys and he would have to reconcile to new habits, such as being aware of the surroundings even when asleep, sleeping little, surviving frugally on tasteless foods and wearing a bulletproof vest under his camouflage uniform. Was he scared or excited?
Sometimes the temptation to talk about the hard times can be irresistible, especially when one is at peace with oneself.
My musings took me back in time when I had just joined the hermitage as a junior teacher. One of my disciples was a young monk with graceful boyish charms who I relished tutoring. He was a loner and seldom asked questions. He used to go out into the village to nurse the sufferers. And then he would return dismayed. There were none in the village — either diseased or infirm. Everyone was happy and healthy. Ours was a hermitage surrounded by happy villages.
One day the young monk quietly vanished from the village and went across the border where, for a long time, people had been fighting one another over barren land. He never returned. Who would have imagined my teaching to have such an effect on the young monk or, for that matter, other students like him who had given up the material world and had vowed to embrace and practise asceticism?
We took everybody who came to us into our fold and taught them how to relinquish things which most people thought were necessary. We taught them the virtues of detachment. The training was not easy. It involved penance, fasting, waiting, warding off sleep and dreams, and spending days in confinement. The masters were methodical in their teaching methods which involved arduous tasks and practical assignments at the end of each session.
Many students weren’t able to pursue the training and the studies, and eventually left the education midway. In some cases, I couldn’t exactly tell if they left out of disgust or other worldly compulsions. Perhaps some of them either lacked the perseverance to go on, or didn’t believe in the doctrines we preached. Or was it that, as teachers, we had failed to help the students imbibe the teachings of the great masters? It was distressing to see some students leave without prior permission. After all, we were always compassionate towards them. It was not in our nature to stop anyone from leaving. A few fickle-minded students, however, would give lame excuses, requesting to be discharged from the school at the hermitage.
Unruffled at the high student dropout rate year after year, we continued to teach how to differentiate between good and evil, and make virtuous choices. The good pupils surrendered and didn’t question our methods and ways. They did as they were told.
Before disappearing, the young monk had asked me, “Master, what is love?” I had narrated a story to the class that day, thinking that it contained an answer to the beautiful question. In the evening, I had asked some of his friends if they had seen “someone” in the village. “There is a girl he ogles at,” one of his friends had said. I knew that the boys played pranks on one another. Sometimes they even wove imaginary stories about what they saw and heard in the village. But the harmless lies they muttered were only to tease one another. “Is it profane to desire someone in our world, master?” the young monk had repeated his question, even after listening to the story I had narrated. Did he suspect that my story was nothing but a mockery of his inquisitiveness? Did he want to know the truth about love or experience love? I wish he had returned to the hermitage that day so that I could reveal to him the truth about love. Perhaps he wanted to share a secret with me — a secret which, he thought, would become an impediment and prevent him from seeking the meaning of his life, if it was not shared with a confidant; in his case, his master. I felt dismayed when the young monk never returned. I waited for days. He was by no means an ordinary student and his prospects as a monk had become evident to me the day he left without either a note or a message. And he had left me with a mountain of a question. There were a thousand answers to the question he had asked, but on that occasion not even one answer was clear to me. That day and the days that followed, I felt gloomy every time I was asked a question about love and desire.
(Excerpted from A Fistful of Earth and Other Stories, with permission from Rupa Publications)
