Grey's Anomaly
Expectations aplenty, always, I embark on the journey on wheels. Anything quirky and out of the ordinary is welcome and the Gods of the quirks are mostly generous.
So that day I had settled myself on the upper berth, propped on my elbows, peering down. This feeling, when you can squirm invisibly into others’ life is what I imagine; it must be, to be THE God. I even shushed at a boy snatching away her sister’s chocolate. So god-like, you know what I mean?
A salt and pepper haired man with a weary face was asleep on the lower side berth. He had his head resting on his shoes. Here arrive the quirks I was telling you about. In the general compartment this might have made sense but in the air conditioned ones! He immediately positioned himself as the object of my observation, although he almost put me off the study, sleeping for 12 hours straight that too during the day.
I scrambled down to daze out of the window for a while and occupied the seat in front of Mr. Quirky. By then, the grey haired man had gotten the boy to share the chocolate. Since the first mutual smiling at each other, all he had done was to read comic books while eating a lot. You would think he would offer me something atleast. So when I bought a bag of munchies for myself I didn’t bother him either.
That, the bag of munchies is of crucial importance to this story, because it summoned the moment in which he broke the ice. I guess it probably made me important enough to him, for him to be friends with me. “You stare out of the window an aweful lot”, he spoke to me excitedly.
‘Great first line’, I told myself. “I like looking into the dark, the stars as much as the trees, mountains, landscape, and all the static beings whooshing by”
“The stars are nice. Do you know about Sirius?”
“Sure, the brightest star, the Dog Star”
“The dog star. That’s why Sirius Black became a dog in his animagus form!”
The dog star was fine but what animagus, who Sirius black? I assumed he must be some comic book character as he had abandoned his comic books and appeared pretty excited by the new information about Sirius.
“Yeah yeah...that too but I find its astronomical importance more fascinating.”
“Oh... like what?”
“You know how the ancient Egyptians based their calendar on its helical rising. Also, how the appearance of Sirius marked the beginning of hot summer for the ancient Greeks”, I rambled on smugly.
He kept staring at my face as if I was Sirius and it had finally dawned upon him how important I was to the world. Or was it to him, like reading a comic book, the cartoon character being me? Anyway, I took that as a sign of interest and rambled some more. The chocolate he held in his hand had began to melt and slowly trickle down his hand, the look of wonderment frozen on his face. A change from being around people suffering from the fast-life induced aprosexia, I soaked my soul in the focussed attention I had from him and began narrating astro-fables to the man way past his salad days. I was indeed having a good time. By now my audience had swelled to include the boy and his sister. They helped themselves with the munchies while I was “pretending” to be knowledgeable, staring into the night, pointing to the stars and the rest. Like a wise fabulist, I guided their fantasies about the ancient men and their ways. The observer was gone; the performer had taken charge, now immersed in her act.
In between my act, the man read one of the stations aloud as it whooshed away and swore at his watch. He immediately began packing things and I was sort of was taken aback. He had built premature possibilities of great quirks, were they to be left unfulfilled? He carefully placed the shoes that he had previously used as a headrest in a frayed bag and unearthed a pair of flip-flops from the same. He then poured some water into his hands, slapped it onto his head; fished out an ancient crumbly comb from his pocket and pleasantly combed his already dead limp hair. Still ignoring the bemused me, he turned towards the window and apparently checked out his appearance, also ignoring the mirror hanging in the wall opposite to him. He bared his teeth and ran his tongue over it. “Ready” he declared buoyantly to me as if I were to push him down the ramp this very moment, he would overshadow the show stopper. On second thoughts, I guess he would.
He had packed his bags in time as the train approached his destination. He flashed the ‘goodbye’ smile.
And then it went something like this.
“You made the boring journey really fun! Especially the way you scared the boy, simply superb. He didn’t think twice when I asked him to share his chocolates with me. All I had to tell him that you would climb down and whack him hard if he didn’t. Ofcourse, all the grandmotherly storytelling too. Otherwise I would have mostly slept and rest of the time maybe I would have read some more comic books or eaten junk food, which are the only things I look forward to during train journeys.”
You couldn’t tell if the train ran on steam or not at the rate I was vehemently smoking fumes of embarrassment, stuck in this ineluctable banter.
He handed over a journal to me saying it might fascinate me and then he walked away clumsily, as clumsy as himself; his oversized trousers fluttering, which he wore upto his neck by the way; his flip flops slapping hard onto the floor.
***
Later, much later I wrote an email to one of the youngest scientists at ISRO, not about his fascinating article in some journal but about his quirks and how he made the best audience I ever had for my quirky tales from the space.
Brazen and jaded, but the youth is still warm,
Crude yet wise, thou hath all the charm.
****
NOTE: This story took birth in my head and now shall live its life here on LJ. In short not a true incident from my life nor from anybody else's.