... he was saved, and that's all

I could not write a single line - like a troglodyte - on the cave wall of my thinking, as today's yesterday was a horrible one, a haunting one...

Yesterday, I chanced to steer away from witnessing a fatal accident at Dum Dum Cantonment Railway Station.

It was almost 10:30 AM when the front head of Duttapukur Local came into view. Naturally, with all their mortal anger, some of the everyday passengers burst out, “Hey, Look! Almost on time!”.

The weather was grisly. The cloud was about to fracture. The entire platform (No. 2) was wet by the morning shower. And, as there is a sharp turn at the No. 3 railway gate, the train was pulling in slowly, blowing its horn out.

Usually I get on the last compartment or on the penultimate one. So I stood where the compartment would stop to sell its breath.

When the train, like a heavy caterpillar, was drawing its body almost entirely into the station, a student from the third to the last compartment jumped off onto the station.

Human cry shrilled into the air, as the left leg of the boy got a wring, all on a sudden, between the kerb of the platform and the train. The train dragged and rolled the boy about ten feet. No sooner did the passengers realize that they had to do something than the train made folds of the boy along the platform.

Ten feet, to a running train, is a mere distance. To a human being, ten feet drawn (not even mauled!) by a train, is half way to death. And half way to death - the fear of death - is more horrible than death itself.

Who can calculate her/his luck? But, it was luck probably and luck only for what he was saved from having gone under the wheels.

The train clocked over the usual timespan. One of the Railway staffs got down from their chamber and made a sprint towards him. “Is he all right?” An old man sprinkled a smile and said, “He will be...” The staff ran back, and now, knowing that he had been saved also, began trumpeting his foul mouth.

I went towards him, fanned by a gentle few. He had received a severe injury in the knee, shaft and the ankle of the left leg. The right knee also protruded a painful bruise. Yet, he couldn't understand how much pain he had been paid. He was trembling with fear... as if, death was still pirouetting in front of his eyes.

I embarked myself in the same train as the old man did. When I tilted my exhausted being against an iron partition, quite carried off by the thinking of the boy, the old man said, “Please, don't think too much. He wanted to save what saves only a chosen few. He is a lucky guy, isn't he?”

I sighed. No more word I required. I demanded a recluse. I demanded a solitary thinking...

He was saved... and that's all. If a student dies in front of a teacher, the latter feels so helpless that death itself matters nothing to him.