EYES

I tell nearly everyone I know about the people that I meet, see and talk to while in the train. I can remember them, their gestures, and the colour of their skin, the way their hands and head moved as they talked even while I’m talking about them, mimicking them in front of my friends. They all have pictures of themselves in my head. May be this is why hordes of people seem familiar, I might’ve seen them on one of such trips and then I coax my head to try and place the place to the instance.

But now, many of these characters that I meet inside trains will have a face.

I met a character today. He did not see. He feels around his way all day with a folding stick to guide him.

As the train edged close to the final destination station, our visually-impaired champion started digging deep into his trouser pockets and fished out wads of tenners. He then felt the corners of each note, straightened the dog-eared ends and counted them, placing one on the top of another.

The other pocket now. Out came currency notes of varied denominations. I assume the longest one that he felt for; he would consider the hundred-rupee note. The medium sized one would read FIFTY RUPEES in ten Indian languages and English. The smaller one would obviously be tenners. After the manual note-counting machine was done with processing, each denomination rested cozily in each one’s family bundle, inside the cozier confines of our champion’s trouser pockets.

A fellow traveller and myself couldn’t help grinning widely at each other for quite some time while we witnessed this.