I got up to stretch and the train entered the tunnel. I was disoriented for a second and stood cautiously. I heard the sound before I felt the impact. It was a deafening boom, as if a bomb had exploded. I did not realize that I was stretched against the wall of the divider inside a compartment. The next second I was upside down trying to cling on to the bed. That was the last thing I remembered.

An acrid smell woke me up. I could not move most of my body. Luckily I was on my back and I could see what was going on. My eyes opened to darkness and I tried to figure out where I was. The sounds slowly crept in and I could not understand anything. All I could hear were cries of help and lamentations. I tried to move my arms and found that I was able to. But I could not move my legs. I slowly raised myself to see if I was stuck somewhere. I could not see anything, it was two dark. I slowly tried to feel my legs with my hands. As my hands reached my knees, they brushed against something. It was a hand. My legs were jammed under someone else. I tried to wake that person up. He was either dead or not conscious. A chill ran down my spine. People could be dead around me. People could need me. I tried to pull myself free. I found a chain above my head and tried to pull free with it. Slowly my legs started to get untangled. Soon I was able to pull myself free. I felt for a pulse on the hand. I did not find one. Panic began to set in. I had to find a way out. I saw light creeping through a small opening. I tried to crawl towards that. I found blood everywhere. People already dead or dying. I did not know whether to help them or try and get more help. I decided on the later. I saw a small kid huddled under a seat. He was crying silently. I comforted him and promised him that I will get back and get him out. His mother’s body lay beside him. I reached the light and found that to be a door, but it was wrenched shut.

I tried to force it open, but it wouldn’t budge. I started banging at it, hoping that someone would it open it from the outside. I heard a hissing sound and then a voice asking me to step back from the door. I did and I waited. I went back to the kid to comfort him. After half an hour, they were able to cut a hold through the door. I got out along with the kid. The scene outside was even more gruesome. There were bodies everywhere, some of them in heaps. There was blood everywhere. And then there were the voices, the voices that would haunt me for the rest of my life.

I started walking towards what looked like a make shift medic tent to offer my services as a doctor. When I turned around, a white light caught his eye. I froze. Baba was in the train. The white kurtha flapped around in the wind. I ran towards it, stumbling around bodies. Tears ran down my face. I could not control them. I lifted him in my hands and ran toward the tent. I knew he was dead, but I could not let go. I laid him on an empty bed and tried resuscitating him. He would not respond. I looked around for a defibrillator. I found one and I dragged the bed to it. People were staring at me. I did not care. He cannot die. Not like this. Two doctors pulled me away. They would not let me help Baba. Two nurses removed his body, as they needed the bed. They laid him down on the floor outside the door with the other bodies. I looked at him for one last time and turned toward the person they had placed on the bed. I found a pair of gloves to wear and slipped them on silently. I knew this is what he would want me to do.

As he was working on the patient he asked the nurse if she knew what really happened. She told him that some kind of a bomb had exploded on the tracks and had completely derailed the train. It was the worst they had ever seen. It seemed that there had been only one compartment that had survived. Luckily, it was the minister’s compartment. “It would have been a huge disaster if they had died,” she concluded. I could only nod.

Journey – IV

The TV at the tea shop was blaring some music. I sipped my tea, without showing too much of an urgency. We had to leave the place as soon as possible. The area would be swarming with police soon. The program on the TV changed to a news program. I listened cautiously. I saw Baba on the TV screen. He was boarding a train. The news reader was mentioning that he had come down personally to take the two ministers to his district to show them the apathetic state of the people. The news reader also mentioned that he was traveling second class while our ministers were in a special compartment of their own. The glass in my hands was shaking. I noticed it only when the hot tea spilt over my palm.

I got up. I felt panic creeping in. Baba’s life was not worth taking for the sake of two corrupt ministers. My mind was made up that instant. I had to remove the bomb. I could not let it explode. I could not kill Baba. I started running back towards the railway tracks. I did not care that people were staring at me. I felt someone catching up to me. It was Anand. He forced me to stop.

“What the hell do you think you were doing? You compromised our position. You made us visible.”

“Baba is on the train…..We cant let the bomb explode now.”

“Just because your father is in the train does not mean we should sacrifice our mission. You know that our people are more important than our family. And we cannot defuse the bomb without the commander’s orders.”

“No, he is not just my father. He is a good man, a great man. He would be helping a lot more people than those two ministers can harm. We cannot kill a man like that.”

I might have to kill him if he didn’t agree. And this wasn’t the place. There were people staring at us, though they were out of earshot. My hands gripped the gun on my back. It all depended on what he would say now.

“You are right. His life is not worth the life of two politicians. Lets go, we don’t have much time.”

My hands relaxed slowly. I looked at him in the eye. He looked back and nodded. We turned and started running back. We had less than 45 minutes. I didn’t know how fast I ran, but when we reached the railway tracks we were completely out of breadth. I looked around for people, but the placed looked barren, just as we had left it. I started walking towards the bomb, when I felt something hit my lower back. I looked down and saw a blood stain forming on my shirt around my stomach. I tried to turn around, when I felt another hit below my shoulder blade. I fell down on my knees. The bomb was a few feet away. I tried to move towards it. We had been taught to think in the same way. He could not have shot me in the streets. The last thing I felt was a searing heat below my neck.

“Sorry, Raghav. Can’t let you do it. Your Baba’s life is not worth the life of those two politicians. They have to die. Today.”

And he had no choice left aswell. It was too late to go back. He placed the gun inside his mouth and pulled the trigger.

To be continued…

Journey – III

There was atleast three more hours of journey. My thoughts drifted back to my childhood and to Raghav. I always wonder what he is upto now. We havn’t spoken in about 15 years. He did keep in touch with me for a few years after he ran away, through letters and rare phone calls. But after one really jittery phone call, he had completely disappeared from my life. If you are wondering who Raghav is, he was my friend, my brother and my hero.

Baba not only gave me a home, but he also gave me a brother. He gave me a family. I don’t know what made Raghav like me, but the first day we met he told me I was his brother and he had always treated me like one. For some reason Raghav hated his father, I could never understand why. I found Raghav to be the kindest person after Baba. He was so much like Baba and he hated that. I thought we were just kids then and it was normal. But it was only much later that I realized how serious Raghav had been and by then, it was too late.

I had always been a good student at school, always topped my class. But Raghav was in a league of his own. He was a genius in his own right. The teachers at school were at awe at his brilliance. He could anticipate the teachers long before they even came to the point. He would ask questions for which the teachers would have no answers and he would come with answers on his own. He never behaved like a kid. Everything he did was purposeful. He had been in this school all his life, but he had no friends. He was never arrogant towards others. He was always willing to help others. But he kept his distance. I was the only person he spent time with and I did not need any body else. I began to idolize him. I wanted so much to think like him, act like him, be like him. I became his shadow.

The only visible flaw was his anger. He used to get angry when you mentioned his father to him and more so if you compared him to his father. The teachers couldn’t help but notice how similar he was to his dad and that only infuriated him more. When we were about 14, things started to change fast. He became more and more reclusive. He would go for long walks and he won’t even let me join him. I followed him one day and saw him talking to strange people. I felt both hurt and afraid. I was hurt that he did not trust me. I was afraid for him. Our board exams came and Raghav turned in 5 blank papers. When the results came that he had got zero’s in all subjects, it broke Baba’s heart. I had topped the district. That night Baba sat on his arm chair as usual. I could see the pain and the hurt on his face. And on the other side I saw Raghav. He had a smile on his face. That was the last time I saw Raghav.

To be continued…

Journey – II

I don’t know what I was doing in this pig-hole of a place. We have been living in this place for a week now, with no contact with the outside world. And we were to never leave the place, till we were ordered to. Our only contact was a radio. And we waited patiently for the final order.

I don’t know what I have been doing most of my life. How did I end up here? Wasn’t I destined for greater deeds? Wasn’t I supposed to be as great as my father? Did I acknowledge his greatness? Did I ever think that he is a great man? My father, who never loved me. My father, whom I hated so much…. so much so that I did everything against his beliefs. That is why I am here. He is the reason I am here. They called him Baba. I had never said that word out loud in my life. “Ba….”

The knock on my door woke me up from my trance. “Raghav, we have to go now. It is time.” We gathered our stuff carefully. It was a half hour walk from where we were holed up. I tried not to think. But images refused to disappear.

He was happy in his life once. A life filled with laughter, music, joy and love. In a night he was orphaned. The night he refused to take her to a city hospital because of his ideals, his stupid ideals. His father’s ideals had killed his mother. His father had killed his mother. The center of his life had disappeared. And soon, so did his life.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I stopped. I could see the train tracks now. As I looked further down, I could see the tunnel. It was a hot day and I could see the heat rising as waves from the dry earth. The earth the politicians had sold to the devil. And the people of the earth suffered. I was fighting the good fight. I was fighting it my way. I was fighting it against my father’s ideals. We reached the tunnel. There was no life for about 2km on any side. The two metal rods we had placed on either side of the tracks last night had cemented well in place. We had two hours. We needed only a half.

We took the C4 from the bag and fixed it on both the poles. I rigged up the detonator on either side and I passed the steel wire across the tracks and hooked it up to the detonator. The tricky part was to test the sensitivity. I tested the tautness and adjusted it. The wire should hold on, on contact with the train and not snap immediately. I turned both the devices on. We took some foliage and covered the two sticks. They looked odd in an otherwise barren area. But they were more yellow than green and would be good enough. I stood up and took a final look down the tracks. I could barely see the light from the other end of the tunnel. We had another hour and a half. We started back to my place.

The train had two of those politicians. I knew the consequences of my actions. Thousands of people will die. Children will be orphaned, families obliterated, brothers lost,…. But millions of others will be saved, saved from these two politicians. And it would send a message to others of their ilk. He could not close his eyes, because when he closed them, all he saw was red. They did not go back to that house. They had nothing left there. They walked towards the bus stand. They had a bus to catch.

To be continued…

Journey – I

I got into the train as my wife left the station. I settled down into my second class seat. My wife still did not understand why I did this every year. She had forgotten the early struggling days, but I did not. I could not. Baba had never traveled in anything more than second class and never did even now. He was never the one for luxury. Always said that man should never ask for anything more than he ever needed. He lived 350 days a year forgetting everything that Baba had taught him. These two weeks were his own and Baba’s. And as fate would have it, Baba was on the same train, a few compartments away. He never came to my place, a palatial mansion in one of the most expensive districts. I knew he never would. But I was going to Baba’s place, to the house I had grown up in. As the train started moving, my thoughts went back to the first time I met Baba.

It was one of the hottest summers he had seen in his 10 year old life. There was no place under the shade. The station was thronging with people. He had not eaten anything for the last two days. But he sat patiently in a corner, looking expectantly at the horizon, like the hundreds of others – waiting for the train to arrive. He had heard about him in his village. His father had heaped praises about him, a time when everything was good about his life. A life where there was laughter, music, joy and love. In a single night he was orphaned. His world had changed. He had seen things a 10 year old had only seen in his worst nightmares. He had nothing left to live for and he was too young to realize that. He had traveled through 4 villages to meet him. He looked up, as a distant whistle went off. He could see smoke from a train. The first time he saw a train in his life, but it never struck him then.

People around him rose in unison and rushed towards the train. People with garlands in hand, people raising slogans in praise, people beaming with pride… The train came to a stop and an image came out of a compartment. He had never seen an angel before, but he was sure that he was one. Dressed completely in white, with long flowing hair and a smile so radiant that it lit up the entire world. He got up and started walking towards him, when he suddenly felt his legs give way. Before he realized, he was on the ground. He felt the hot sun across his face, as he tried to get up. His hands were no longer where he thought they were. And a mellow darkness swept all around him, as his eyes closed.

When he opened his eyes, he saw his angel smiling upon him. He saw him asking something. But he could not hear anything. He looked blankly at him and smiled. He knew his angel was there to take care of him. He knew Baba was there to take care of him.

To be continued…..