Growing Up and Growing Old is
Not the Same Thing.


December, 2008.
Karachi.




The sheer humanity of a train station.

The people are the journey.
The people are the stamps, the tickets, the scars.
Life stories of poverty and misery, arriving on Platform 11 at a quarter to two.
The certain pervasive hopelessness that blackens the broken gate signs, the ticket booth,
the red stamped seat 41, carriage 20.
The glittering dream has unraveled away from them,
like snipped nails.

Like snipped nails this train station: old and dirty,
forgotten and forsaken.
Weary eyed travelers, weary eyed visitors,
like the odorous, cramped waiting room of a hospital
collectively receiving news of death.

Like a collective hopeless sigh this train station.
Trains to go places except each place is like this place.
No 'anywhere but here', for everywhere IS here.

Faded green camouflage-print carriages,
carriers of people's souls
holes.
The monster rolls in, a lazy serpent.
Snaking its ways through the dirt and mud and murk,
hissing stress,
steam.
Rolls in and closes its weary tired eyes.
Despaired wrinkled faces sigh out in swishes of black chadors,
dusty blue shalwars.

Here is like Everywhere,
anywhere else like Here.
there is no destination.

It cannot be a journey, if it does not have an end.

Amidst tired eyes are orbs,
Gold young eyes cradled in weary arms.
Gold young eyes that find glitter
in the cobwebbed eaves, the mildewed ceilings,
the shattered television, the bent metal mug of chai.
Gold young eyes shimmering
like pearls.

Like pearls this train station: like an oyster this world.
Like an oyster, their tiny leather seat
on an overcrowded, overburdened train carriage.
Like a pearl, the 5 rupee coin clutched between small fingers,

like Hope,
their innocent faces.

..............................

so how can it be the end?

I wrote this on the train station waiting to pick up somebody, while I was in Paki over the winter.
To say I was overwhelmed by the palette of colors, the diversity in people, the vivacity in their faces..is an understatement.
I cannot come close to capturing that feeling, but if i could,
I would like to go back sometime and sit on the desolate, broken green bench, perhaps occupied on the other end by a homeless malang, drink chai straight from the nearby dhaba,
and write about the poor lost souls that wander around me.

Yeah.
Now that i've had my calling, ima head to bed.

cheerio,
(not the cereal, I prefer good ol' Nesquick like the spoilt lil kid that I am.)

-eeda