Train to Pakistan

 

Hukum Chand, the magistrate of Monjo Majra, stepped out of his car, took a shower, changed clothes, and lay down on a soft mattress. He closed his eyes, covered them with his hands, and tried to rest his mind after a long tiring day. He could not sleep, his mind didn't rest, not for even a moment. He got up and poured himself a big shot of Whiskey. It didn't help either. As he closed his eyes, the horrifying sights of the day keep coming back. He pressed his fingers into his eyes to stop them but the images became redder, darker, and more horrifying. 

He stared into the ceiling above. He saw a pair of lizards, their eyes pinned on something. He then saw the moth swirling around the lamp. It went round the lamp a couple of times, then went into the flame and turned into ash. The mother moth rose above the lamp and went spiraling to the ceiling. Hukum Chand followed the trajectory. One of the lizards jumped onto it and soon it was trapped in the jaws of the reptile. Maybe it was its density, maybe it's everyone's destiny. People live live for the short time, then either they kill themselves over something or get killed by someone else. Death was inevitable. 

Hukum Chand was very aware of this fact. He was not afraid of death. He has lost a lot in his life, his friends, and his family. Tragedies had made him alone and numb. It was the magnitude and brutality of the violence that unsetelled him. He had seen fifteen hundred corpses taken out of the train like they are no different than any trunk or bundles of clothes. Men, women, and children were brutally cut into dead bodies. 

Muslims killed every single refugee Sikh and Hindu escaping to safety from Pakistan with no humanity. Men, women or children, infants or toddlers, pregnant ladies or old women none was spared. Spears and shots cut through the bodies, an immense amount of blood and flesh coming out of wounds. One man was holding his intestines in his hands, and a mother lay dead with her child in her arms, their eyes wide open in terror. Seeing that many dead bodies at once made him go numb at first. Even the thought of the scene was terrifying. The magistrate couldn't rest on the best facilities ever provided to someone in the area.

Suddenly he became conscious of the coming night. Soon, everyone will leave and he will be left alone in the bungalow with its empty rooms crowded with the ghosts he has created himself. How many years had he spent sleeping alone? It's been many years since he lost his family. But today was different, he felt afraid, terribly alone. The breeze blew hard through the window and the lamp got off.  He was alone in the dark. His heartbeat raised. He could sense cold blood running through his veins. He needed someone with him at that moment. Who can it be? The servants? Suddenly he got reminded of a prostitute girl, he brought  yesterday. He called for her. 

She came in hesitantly. She was barely eighteen. What the circumstances do to people is very merciful. But he didn't have these thoughts when he met her last time. It was pure lust then. He just wanted to exploit her and would have done that if not interrupted by the gunshots outside. She was still afraid of him. She sat on the corner of his bed. He put his arms around her waist, made her lay down beside himself. He held her hand in his. He put his head near hers. He could feel her breath. Warm cabon-di-oxide was striking his face. He tighten his grip on her hand. Hukum Chand snuggled against her like a child and fell fast asleep. 

Rewritten an expert from Khuswant Singh's book Train to Pakistan. It has impacted me very much. Classic litrature is very different from all other fantacies and fictions. It has very beautiful compostion of words. It is really an art to express the feelings through words and Khuswant Singh has done it very beautifully. It leaves me awkstruck with the way he has discribed the tragedy of parition.

Any life in IIT is going well, is it? I need to study but don't know what to study, from where to study? I don't know what to. and mostly I end up doing nothing. I am reading books, I am listening a lot of music, and westing a lot of time on YouTube. Yeah, westing some time thinking about the memories from the past. The one thing I am not doing is to study. I need a rhytm to get going. 

I really like the labs here. They have sophisticated equipimants, expensive LASERS. But the problem is that the experiments are not related to thoery classes, so we need to research a lot. But I am really enjoying taking observation, analysing data and scraching my head to make sense out of the graphs I am getting.