A Journal of Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya

stood in a queue, like children praying.
Those same people. At the end of the
queue stood the girl who would sometimes
lift the veil of her burqa and look at
me…Very beautiful that girl was, full of
the very meaning of life, a sacred being.
Whenever I looked at her, I would wonder
…It was very strange. The people I was
most afraid of were people who looked
simple, innocent and were like my own
friends.’
‘But one day something went wrong.
At the Quetta station, when they were
linking the water tanker to the engine,
its cuff-link broke. The water tanker was
removed from there. The load was ready,
but there was no water tanker with it.
I looked at the Kanmitrazai station from
a distance. I had the run-through signal.
And there were those people standing with
empty buckets. There was no water tanker
attached to the engine. Had I wanted,
I would have taken my goods train past
the run-through signal. But I stopped the
train near that crowd.
There were people standing there. There
were empty buckets. There was I. And
there was the goods train too. But there
was no water tanker attached to it. People
stood there disappointed for some time
and then they began to leave. That beautiful
girl, whose name was Nazia, stood quietly
at a distance for a while and then walking
up to me, said in a voice full of great
sadness, ‘You did not bring water today,
Babu Saib?’
There was such sorrow in her voice
that I cannot describe it. I wish I had
thousands of clouds then. I would have
asked all those clouds to rain there. For
some time I only stood there, feeling
embarrassed. Then I tried to explain the
situation to her.
After she had listened me out she said,
‘For the last two days, no one has stopped
the train here. Today all of us had come
with great hope.’
I looked at her. She was wearing a
burqa. But I could see tears in her eyes.
The next day, the driver who was to
take the train fell ill. No one wanted to
do duty in the place of another driver.
But I was ready to go. When I reached
Kanmitrazai station with the water tanker,
people were very happy to see me.
‘Raka you did a good thing,’ his old
driver friend said.
‘Definitely, he did a good thing,’ the
other said.
With a sigh Raka Masih said, ‘I had
joined on the condition that I would work
in a remote area for two years. But even
before my two years were over, I was
transferred to Jalandhar. When I told the
people of Kanmitrazai about my transfer,
they became sad. Nazia lifted the veil of
her burqa and looked at me. I saw that
she was actually weeping. That day they
92 :: January-March 2012