... through the toughened float glass

A few days ago. I was inside the compartment of Howrah-Puducherry AC Superfast Express. And the world I naturally live in was outside. I overnighted at a dull upper berth, from where nothing could be seen outside. It was past 10 a.m., a golden opportunity bloomed. Down there in the lower berth, I saw the passenger folding his laptop into his satchel. He got up to permanently rest his feet on an approaching railway platform. Just two-three minutes over, I came down and sat beside the glass window to enjoy the parakeet blushes of Nature. My eyes were mute while the train was whistling through its linear perspective.

It was, as if, the first morning blushes in a married couple's life after they remembered those sensitive touches, those hide-and-seek of involuntary body warps, those stealing of incognito-smiles. All these were in alliance with the morning. It seemed to be a winter sun hugging Nature tightly. The green blushes that are missing in my bleak-and-black Kolkata appeared inexplicably gorgeous in Andhra Pradesh. It was as if a mischievous act of the pet dog of an obsolete artist, who had mistakenly left his bucket of green colour in the custody of his pampered dog, and who, being naughtily overcautious, upturned the bucket. The pet might have received blows but the floor became a garden to him. Now, it was his turn to sprinkle stones of palms in a wanton way to make an orchard. Sunny days and rainy evenings would carry the precious time of birth. Sticking their soft heads out would be carried out in no time. And then, status would be updated... "We are grownups!" in the face of the season, in the book of the soil and in the facebook of the natural world.

These palm trees are beyond the human-brain-skimmed relationship of brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces. In the green world, trees live with trees only, with their different art forms.

My world, the compartmentalized cosmos, was not so cosy as it apparently appears to be from outside. It was cold, glazed and glossed. However, the glossary of artificial glosses lacks the spontaneous changes of colours and smells. The green has layered the floor of the earth with all its mind-blowing shades. I looked speechless at the geo-graphic on the geo-graph. The green over, the green begins.

Pretty ideas apart, I went on a blind date with the palm trees. I wished I had the fist power to break the toughened float glass and jump into the green waves. Unfortunately, I'm too powerless.

On its running wheels, the Express slowed, panted and stopped to rest for a while. The green, flowing by, stopped too.

I was busy in drinking the beauty as long as possible, as far as possible. Suddenly, a drift, part and parcel of human life, played a trick on me. A slender picture frame amid this art gallery stole away my attention. An old lady, octogenarian I guessed, was making her hair soar high into the air. The gray hair, the result of smouldering coals of a chula, was billowing upward, but I saw a loco lady instead, with paper-thin skin texture, and gray hair posing against the green revolution and disposing sarcasm of life.

Education, even if taken to as part of opsimathy, should be gladly acquired. I learned, that day, youth is but a visual error of a photographic hour.

I smiled at myself and butterflied my hands around my neck as the train pulled into Vizianagaram Junction with above fifty shades of gray afternoon.

Co-passengers in my compartmentalized cosmos pulled my attention with their various tongues. I have always desired to enjoy long journey by train even to the penultimate day of my life. Those passing passengers and fleeting moments, filled with the flavours of cultural variety, kept my desire of a world tour aflame.

And my eyes will always be mute while the train will always be whistling through its linear perspective. And there will always be rain to put bevel effects on the float glass of human eye.