One-Week Story, Part Three

Wednesday. I sit with a rumpled newspaper in my lap and a Hindi pulp novel with a gaudy front in my hand that I bought from a Wheeler because I was afraid I'd forgotten the language altogether. You'd laugh at this pretentiousness if you were around, but it's a good four hours till you arrive and I'll have read it and binned it by then. There is a dog that insists on sleeping under the bench with one paw over my foot, and I've changed into something cleaner and am avoiding everyone's gaze. The delay doesn't bother me, but this station is smaller than I thought. What I miss the most here are the overhead announcements crackling into life suddenly and then zooming away. Like startled crows. Like that sudden feeling in my stomach when I called from a phone booth and tapped and tapped my fingernail on the wall through an eternity of static, and then you answered.

Get a mobile, you said.

I never know what to say to things like this. In my head I play out beautiful meetings and dialogues with a world of meaning in them, and then you say, Get a mobile. Just like the first time I told you I was leaving, and asked if you would meet me, and you said, Book the tickets. Nothing more and nothing less, just a brusque sentence. Almost an order. Which is perhaps why I have to wait for an evening of intoxication before I can tell you what I need to. About trains. About grass. About stagnation. About running away. Only then are the decisions made.

All my life I have wanted to sit in a station like this, I'm glad I'm doing it again. That first time I didn't tell you about, I ran away and sat in a station much like this, only in a different place and with overhead announcements. I was younger and being sized up by coolies because there was no empty bench and I was sitting on a newspaper spread on the floor, all alone. I had a comic book and a mineral water bottle and a firm belief in things happening for the best, which has now changed into that persistent feeling of idiocy, but I'm here, aren't I. The station turns bronze for a brief moment as the sun goes down and because there will be no use for the cloak room and a sleepless night, I put up my feet and go back to the novel. There is always someone waiting at a platform, squatting on the floor with a faraway look in their eyes, so I'm not alone. Trolleys trundle by with sacks on them once in a while, but soon they are part of the landscape too, and the entire station waits.

I've been told that time slows down in anticipation of that one definite moment when things start happening too fast for a minute to hold them all within it, and since that is exactly what will happen in a few hours I am willing to be a part of the stupor for now. The entire station waits, and I wait too, only I know the novel will add that air of nonchalance I'm hoping for. You'd definitely laugh at this pretentiousness if you arrived in time.