It was 5-ish in the evening and the day’s heat was still radiating off the cement platform that I had just alighted on to. The yellow signboard read Ernakulam North Railway Station. I looked around wondering whom my friend might have sent to pick me from the station. Having found no familiar faces among the scores of people gathered there, I decided to get off the platform and walk around a bit exploring the place, before giving my friend a buzz. It was her wedding the next day and the last thing I wanted to do was trouble a busy girl with an unnecessary phone call
The heat radiating off the asphalt made the distant palm trees appear to dance a slow serpent-dance to the tune being played on my i-pod, and I walked towards the illusional puddle of clear water that seemed to move away with every step that I took towards it. A small group of sparrows dashed across the sky that had started showing faint traces of the amber that separates day from night. Something appeared on the puddle and it didn’t move away with the mirage. It was definitely not an illusion. A tiny lifeless form, so lifeless and yet looking alive and intact like a freshly fallen autumn leaf. A sparrow. I picked it up to check if there was any life left in it. There was none. It lay there on my palm, hardly weighing anything, its body still warm, grayish brown wings half folded, head falling to a side, and tiny brown beak slightly parted
The i-pod was playing the song by Dirty Vegas that went “Days go by and still I think of you”. I looked around to see several sparrows, lined up on the electric lines and hopping around on the platforms chirping away freely. I directed my gaze back at the one on my palm and the contrast was disturbing. I couldn’t help thinking about what might have been the glory days of this little bird. About how it must have spent its days soaring the sky, escaping hawk attacks, finding a mate, making its nest…Something I had heard somewhere echoed in my head. “every hour wounds…the last one kills”. It is strange how one thought always connects us to another and very soon we find ourselves pulling at a string of thoughts and rolling it into an ever-growing yarn. Memories flashed through my mind of all the kith and kin I have lost on the way. Those warm faces that I will never be seeing again. It feels weird how our times in this world end up being tiny little specks on the timeline. Some of us are remembered for a little longer and most of us are not. Either way, our life span still remains a dimensionless point on the timeline
For a long time people had thought that the world was flat, because whatever was visible to an individual always appeared that way. Now, even though we know that we are living on a sphere, it still looks as flat to us as it did to a cave-man. Maybe it is the same thing with time as well. We always consider time as an infinitely long line moving from left to right. But we live to see only a very small portion of the line – a tiny line segment on an ever growing line. Zoom out further, and it becomes a tiny point on something that goes on and on. So may be if we zoom out enough (zooming out here translates to considering a much larger span of time), our life spans might in fact be tiny arcs (so tiny that that it appears as nothing more than a mere speck) on a gigantic circle. The curvature of the arc is not visible to us since we see only a very small part of it. That would mean that a billion gazillion years from now, I would be on this very same railway track holding the very same sparrow. We are gonna live and relive every moment in our lives over and over again. So the best thing we can do is making our lives so damn enjoyable that it becomes worth living it a million times over.
With that thought, I laid the sparrow back on the asphalt. I will be seeing it again, I thought, self-hypnotizing and self-brainwashing, … all in good time. Same goes for all the people I thought I would never see again and all those magical moments which are now just memories. I am going to relive all of those sweet memories which I thought could only be remembered.
Minutes later I was on the passenger seat of the car which was sent to pick me. The driver looked verymuch like Luca Brasi from The Godfather, only if not a lot meaner and heavier. In fact so mean-looking was he, that I actually SMS-ed the registration number of the car to my girlfriend just in case she never got to hear from me again. I didn't by any means want our Luca to get away with kidnapping and murder. And soon afterwards, after the tension of the moment had subsided and I had gotten comfortable with my chauffeur’s presence, I was gazing out of the window lost again in my dreams
