Lights of Eternity Part – 1: Return to Ahmedabad

The sound of the train whistle echoed in the compartment as a cold-drink vendor hollered at the top of his voice and clinked the bottle opener against the bucket full of ice and then against glass bottles of soft drinks creating a musical note to allure the minds of the people who were wiping the sweat of their foreheads. It was a hot afternoon and the wind blowing in from the open windows didn’t provide any respite from the heat. In an attempt to cool off, a middle-aged uncleji had ditched his shirt and was snoring away to glory only in his vest while the children sitting in front of him giggled at the sight of his pot-round belly moving up & down.  The fans overhead whirred at top speed drowning out the conversation being carried on beneath them.

A boy dressed in blue jeans and a short sleeved white & green checkered shirt was sitting on the side lower seat, oblivious to all the happenings in the compartment as he was engrossed in a book about constellations. As the cold-drink vendor came near him, he clinked his bottles a little loudly to gain his attention and he was rewarded with an annoying glance from the boy. Not losing hope the vendor asked – “Ek thanda de du saab? Bahot garmi hai aaj.” The boy raised himself from his reclining position, his sweaty arm made a squelching sound as he unstuck it from the blue rexine train seat and said “haan ek cola dena.” He inserted the handmade bookmark to mark the page he was reading and moved his fingers through his hair out of habit. After paying the vendor he took the first cool swig and his mind flashed back to the sangeet ceremony where he had been drinking cold-drink and then a fuschia-clad enchantress had picked up the same bottle, given him their two-tap signal, and then had proceeded to drink from his left over cold-drink making his heart skip several beats as she looked straight into his eyes while her lips took in his taste.

Sameer Maheshwari grinned at the memory and then came back to the present with a sigh. It was a matter of months, but to him it seemed as if years had passed since he had met Naina or heard her voice. Tragedy had hit when they had been least expecting it. One moment he was whistling with sheer happiness in the anticipation of meeting his love and the next moment he had lost control over his life. His world had come crashing down and such was his fortune that the one person who loved him the most after his Nanu had not known of the tragedy that had befallen on him. With Nanu gone, Sameer had been a shell of a person and had not even uttered a faint whisper while he was being packed away to Delhi by his mother and step-father.

But today Sameer was finally on his way to Ahmedabad just before the final exams. He had lost weight and his body looked leaner than usual. It wasn’t that he didn’t have enough to eat, but food had lost taste and he could hardly swallow a morsel. His mother tried hard by making his favorite food but the constant taunting from his step-dadi and step-father going on at the table on how the good-for-nothing boy was wasting away time and life, turned the delicacies cooked by his mother to tasteless grass. His eyes still had the pain of loss but combined with that there was a new determination to fulfil his responsibility towards that one man who had taken up his responsibility always. He placed the empty bottle of cold-drink beneath the seat and opened the book again. His fingers traced the bookmark and a small smile crept on his lips chasing away some of the shadows of pain.

It was a gift he had received from Naina after he had mentioned to her in his letter that he had taken up reading about Nanu’s business and a few other books to kill his time in Delhi. The bookmark was a simple cut-out of their picture from Puja Di’s sangeet ceremony. The sneaky eyes of the camera had clicked their picture when they were dancing together and Naina had equally sneakily stolen that photograph from the bunch of pictures that had arrived at her home post wedding. She had cut out their picture and pasted them on a white painted cardboard, drawn a red heart above the picture and put a golden string through the small hole at the top. When he had opened the envelope and saw the small bookmark his heart had stopped beating for few seconds. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes of Naina’s face and had felt as if she was right there in-front of him. His eyes had turned moist as memories flashed before them, but his lips had curved into a wide smile.

The train whistled again, and he looked out to see the station approaching. He hadn’t told Naina that he was reading about constellations; he had chosen this particular book because he remembered how her eyes had twinkled like the brightest stars while watching “grehnakshatra” in Mt. Abu. He smiled in anticipation of impressing his behenji with his new-found knowledge on nakshatras and lifted the book up to place a quick kiss on the bookmark, while the uncleji just woken up by his wife rubbed his eyes and wondered why the mad boy was kissing a book. Sameer quickly put on his boots, pushed the book back into his bagpack and pulled out the only suitcase from beneath the berth. Impatient to see Ahmedabad again he went and stood by the door. The porters dressed in red ran along with the train as it pulled into the platform and a shrill voice announced the details about the approaching train over the speaker.

He looked into the whirling moving crowd of people and soon his eyes spied two familiar faces; this time his face split into an ear-to-ear grin. He jumped off as soon as the train slowed down enough and was immediately enveloped in a hug from his two dearest friends Munna and Pandit. As they exchanged pleasantries and Munna fussed like a mother over Sameer’s lost weight, he just soaked in the happiness he was feeling on meeting them. He dragged in a long breath and exhaled smiling all the while, but his eyes wandered over the surroundings searching for Naina, hoping against hope that she would have come to meet him. But she wasn’t there, how could she be after everything that had happened…