Sleepless at the station

It began like one of those suspense stories: It was a dark stormy night -

The train halted at a little village station in the dead of night. I was the only passenger to alight onto the dark empty silent platform. I saw a woman holding a lamp for the train disappear into the darkness. The station clock informed me it was 2 in the morning.

Hefting my bag onto my shoulder I trudged along the dim single platform open to the blurry stars. It had been raining and the air was cool and sweet. I entered the station's small empty hall with its closed ticket counter and PCO, and I started down the staircase that led out. Because of the heavy rains the electricity had failed and the only light offered was by a fuzzy crescent moon in a cloudy sky. Yet it was enough for me to see that there was no auto rickshaw waiting outside, no motorcycle for hire. Only darkness and silence.

I returned to the station's small hall to ring Mashak, a local autorickshaw wallah I know, but the ping in the receiver told me his phone was out. In rising panic I wondered how I would get home. Home is only a twenty-minute walk away, but the station is some distance from anywhere on earth. I thought of myself walking alone along a lonely dark road in the dead of night. I began to realise I would have to spend the night at the station.

I looked about me. The station master, who is actually a young woman, gave me a sleepy look and retreated to her cabin, where she put her head down on her desk and went to sleep. The man who runs the kiosk-sized canteen and another big man who's always at the station both looked at me in a friendly way. The big man offered to drop me home on his bicycle for fifty rupees. The canteen wallah stretched out to sleep on one of the two benches, urging me to make myself comfortable on the other one. Feeling like one of those sad mad homeless women I settled into a plastic chair that I got from the station master's room, and rested my feet on the bench. I looked about for rats, but there were only three small puppies which the station had adopted. The big man fed them the remains of the lassi he was drinking. Two of them cuddled up and went to sleep. I watched the third chase a cockroach for some time.

Then there was a sudden silence and total darkness. The generator, which was feeding the dim lamps, had been switched off. The canteen wallah snored. I fell into an uneasy sleep. Sometime in the night a train thundered through without stopping. We all slept.

A little before 5 I heard a rickshaw and then some foreigners climbing up to the station, chattering in cockney English. They were there to catch one of the few trains that stops here.

As I walked home, aching in every bone, I wondered what they thought of this sleepy little village station that's so picturesque in the daytime, but which has no coolie and no noisy PA system and very few trains they can catch. And I remembered that I had just returned from a frightened city where the terrorists had thrown grenades in the railway station and had almost blown up the Taj hotel, killing many foreigners.

I guess it's a good time to holiday in a place so off the map that trains simply hurtle through without stopping.