Chapter 2: Plant response to elevated CO2 - DRUM - University of ...

At Agaas, the train chugged in only thrice a day. At 6.15, 4:36 and 9:32. It
was interesting to see the kind of people who alighted at the station. Even so, we
always felt a little scared playing on the tracks, searching for the perfect marble
stone, for too long. “What if they scheduled an emergency train?” Pia asked me
once. After that we would just dip down, fill our pockets with some marble
stones and climb up on the platform again. Our pockets and hands full with
marble stones, our magic tools, we chipped them against the other, competed to
create magic sparks. Pia had two marble stones in her room behind her Dadi’s
books. In the dark, she claimed, she could start a fire with those stones. Her
brother scoffed but I know it was true.
There was only one small problem with Agaas, a thing which bothered me
and gave me endless worry – the time after dusk, when the sun sank in. There
were very few lights, because I think the government at that time had electricity
quotas in villages. After the sun set, the whole place looked as if someone had
covered it with a giant black bedsheet. Outside, there were very few lights at
huge distances from one another. There were pockets where you could only
make out blurry shapes of buildings and worst of all, beyond our home – the
crematorium! I wouldn’t ever go out, nothing in the world would ever persuade
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