Life's Train-ing

The sun was nothing less of a dragon spitting fire that afternoon, and that did not seem to affect me at all. I was just eight years old, and in the next few minutes, we were going to be on a train. I was ecstatic at the prospect of gazing through the grilled windows of the train as the trees and fields ran past. I walk, almost skipping, alongside my mum and I can see my dad walking quite a few paces ahead of us. Some might even have assumed that he was just there by himself. I think it is just a dad thing. He stops in front of the black digital board on which red letters appeared to move. As we reached up to him, he picks up the luggage and says, “Platform 4.” Amma reminds him to get a water bottle and some snacks because she is the one that takes responsibility for keeping us from starving.

Appa goes to this little but loaded stall just at the entrance of the platform. Mother and I put the bags down and wait for him. I watch towards the platform where this huge trail of big blue compartments stands still. A young man sitting by the window meets my eye, and he looks at me and smiles. I smile back meekly as I remember amma telling me to be cautious of strangers, I avert my eyes from him and see some people are running towards one direction along the platform. They are probably late, I assume. My father comes back with a water bottle and a little plastic bag with some snacks. He hands the bag to my mother, and as she tucks it away into her handbag, he drinks a bit of water. The train which was still now started to move slowly. I watch it in fascination as it chugs away from the station. I’m disappointed as well as the loud whistle of the train was not sound like it usually was.

BOOM! THUD! CHIRR!! A loud noise of something falling is followed by a continuous unpleasant scraping of surfaces. As the sound seems to be moving closer, I watch as this comes into view. This guy is holding on to the dull yellow steel bar by the door of a compartment, which was meant to help people get on. But, on this occasion, this guy was not helped at all. Half his body is scraping the platform floor as he holds on to the bar for his dear life. The train, on the other hand, is gathering a bit of speed as I see one other person. He is running parallel to the train, a compartment behind the guy being dragged away. He stretches his one hand, almost leaping in the air as he gets to the space between the bogies and pulls the emergency chain. He pushes himself away from the train, loses his footing, and crashes onto the platform right in front of me. The screeching noise of the wheels is deafening as the train slows down. CRUNCH! The guy scraping the platform floor was now out of sight. Several people were running towards the spot. It was too late despite the heroic efforts of this other person who was still on the ground, his face buried in his hands.

As for an eight-year-old me, I was left petrified. I was visibly shaking as my dad put his arm around my shoulder and took us towards the subway. I never looked back. We reached our platform, our train arrived, and we were walking again now towards our compartment. I could not wait to be on the train for a different reason altogether. Fear, anxiety, I did not know what these words meant but I was feeling it. I kept mumbling and pestering my dad to get on the train in any compartment as soon as possible. My dad, one way or another, managed to drag me along, and we settled in our seats. They understood how much it had affected me. I went silent. I could not eat anything my mum asked me to because I was still very disturbed. Maybe it was the suddenness of the tragedy, or maybe it was the nightmarish imaginations that I was cooking up in my head, or maybe it was the feeling that everything was still just as normal as before any of it happened. When I opened my eyes again, it was dusk. The sun was gleaming with a golden glow now. It was not as harsh as it had been that afternoon. I thought I as well, like an adult was over it, but I was very wrong. This memory continued to haunt me in every single train journey for the next couple of years until other memories pushed it to the bottom of the stack.

I hit me again at a deeper level in 11^th grade. It was during our winter break that my class advisor called me one morning out of the blue. She gave the news that I had lost one of my closest friends. It was heart-wrenching. I felt like I was haunted by a dementor; it just drained the hope and happiness out of me. She explained that he was trying to save his friend, who got caught in a whirlpool and that both of them could not get out of it. It gave the same feeling that I had felt that afternoon at the train station.

I think that explains everything about him as a person more than I could ever explain. He was a friend that loved and cared unconditionally. I was so proud of him that the grief of his loss was even harder. It also got me thinking more about this train incident that all of a sudden seemed like a fresh memory. I was thinking about the person who was trying to the guy this time, though. Imagine if you had to do something that daring and precarious for a person you did not know. He was probably driven by instinct because everything happened in an instant. I think it takes more than just the heat of the moment to have acted the way he did, and I was and am still amazed by it. This perspective of these two incidents transformed a lingering fear in me into a positive lesson learned, a passion for being compassionate to people and being there for at least the ones you love at the time of their desperate need.

Even the darkest of skies appear beautiful with its embedded twinkling stars. I firmly believe that the kind-hearted and compassionate people are precisely the twinkling stars of an otherwise dark and chaotic society. Watching people acting out of the pure goodness of their hearts imbues us with hope for a better humanity and a beautiful world.

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