The Woman

It was going to be another warm winter, the sun glaring in through the train window was still quite oppressive and the heavy wind blowing in still enjoyable. I sat looking outside the window at the passing trees, the flowing walls plastered with cowdung and the railtracks, the railtracks playing a game of meeting and parting endlessly, going on and on to what appeared to be the ends of the earth. It seemed as if they were like life itself, pulsating, beating and sometimes a little rusted. Thomas Hardy had once famously introduced the railway as an alien disturbance destroying the pastoral landscape. But here far away from the epicenter of the modern world, far away from Hardy’s native lands, on the third worldly fringes, in this humid country were soft people ate rice and talked in lyrical tongues, the railway too like so many other alien things had been internalized. The stretches of green interspersing individual tracks looked like they had always been there and the little marshes and ponds lying just beside the railtracks seemed as much a part of the Indian railway services as the electric posts and signals.
The bogie swayed to and fro to the lull of the lazy afternoon. Most of the men in the compartment were sleeping, arms folded across their chests and heads hanging precariously in mid-air. Few others were playing cards. A young couple, probably students, were chatting away at the other window. Suddenly a hawker who had been standing near the gate furiously started scolding the old woman standing next to him. I always thought of hawkers as a nuisance. No civilized country would allow vendors, that too in such alarming numbers on trains. This man, I saw, was scolding the woman for not carrying water.
“I don’t understand you people. How stupid can you be? How can you come on such a long journey with a child and not carry water?”
It was at this point that I noticed the small boy beside the woman. He had just finished vomiting and was now standing shakily clutching on to the woman looking bewildered. They both looked like they hadn’t had a bath in three days. The old woman, presumably his grandmother was fussing as she had no water about her. I watched her as she wiped his mouth with the end of her saree and started stroking his head, softly throwing various terms of endearment at him. The concern with which she tended to him touched me. It seemed almost as if she believed that her affectionate fondles would make the boy feel better. Call me old fashioned but I believe that women should possess a certain degree of feminine virtues like softness, love and care, values that have been cherished by generations before us and which I am sad to say the modern generation of jeans clad uber confident aggressive career women completely lack. But this woman, this pauper, with probably not an ounce of culture in her possession was so akin to the Mohini Raja Ravi Verma had pictured. To love should be inherent in a woman’s nature but this dirty woman in the shabby train compartment was so different from Mohini with her cascading mass of black hair smiling as she swung to and fro for eternity. But a woman is an embodiment of nature and nature is never touched by money, class or creed. Why was it then so surprising that this poor old woman could be a representative of the lost values of a passing generation? It seemed unfair that my fellow passengers would probably laugh if I told them that I found this woman more charming than the majority of their wives and daughters.
“Excuse me sir”, a female voice broke my reverie, “Do you have any water?”
It was that same old woman. I hesitated, passing a swift from her dirt clogged nails to the water carrier attached to the side of my backpack. She had probably seen it. To refuse now would be embarrassing and so although I was shrinking from her dirty hands I quietly handed her the bottle. The little boy drank from it and his grandmother then proceeded to return it with a word of gratitude.
I protested, “There is really no need, you can keep …”
But she looked at me sourly and this kept me from finishing the sentence.

…………………

On a quiet deserted platform I got off the train and proceeded to go home. I found a dark corner and swiftly threw the bottle. It fell with a thud against a stony dung plastered wall. I turned and walked away in silence.