La Dernier Metro

The millipede is black with regularly spaced yellow markings. Its resemblance to a train at night is enhanced by the smooth way it glides along the ground on its many wonderfully coordinated legs. Suddenly I am transported back to a night many years ago.

A couple of minutes out of Neral station very little was visible other than the fading station lights. Though my father was sure of the general direction, the narrow paths across the slushy ground were difficult to pick out in the feeble light of our torch. “It’s just ten minutes from the station”, my father kept insisting, but we blundered through the darkness for what seemed like hours before my father exclaimed AH! All our torch showed us was a bunch of trees, but they were mango trees. Two minutes later we were knocking on the door of the owner’s mud-and-wood house. The kerosene lantern-lit face that appeared at the door abruptly went from suspicion to delight, and half an hour later we were polishing off the last of the bhakri and smoke-tinged vaal.

Later at night my father and I sat out on a charpoy under the mango trees. “That must be the last Karjat local”, my father remarked as we watched the near-empty train glide through the darkness. “La Dernier Metro” I think now, decades later.

The hug he gave me before I fell asleep that night was perhaps the closest this matter-of-fact rationalist man who was my father ever came to expressing what he never put into words.

flashing fireflies
the silence broken only
by crickets