A Piece Of Me
The train was moving as if inebriated. After hundreds of jigsaw-puzzle shaped irrigated fields, thousands of trees and lampposts, millions of rhythmic taps of the train-wheels' on the conjoint tracks and a billion stars in a moonless night, it stopped at a semblance of a station. A ramshackle structure was there, in which an excuse of a government servant, whose designation is a euphemism: "Station Master", was seen serving in odd hours, lest one should say the administration of the country does not work. In Baba's rectangular arms' lock, about five feet above ground level, I descended on what was supposed to be the railway stoppage of a paean-like name of a town—Bokaro Steel City. It seemed Baba knew the Bada Babu. A child all of three, I used to wonder those days how almost every person the elders came across appeared an acquaintance. After the mandatory niceties, we left along a serpentine way that looked like the parting of hair of an old lady with thinning ha