Offerings...

My heart was like the emptiness of the 7:10 local to VT on a summer saturday eve. That day there was not much of a crowd and I managed to get a seat by the window on the far side of the platform. He sat facing me with his back leaning on the walls of the bogey. His head rested on the edge of the window. Wind brushed his unkempt hair as the train crossed the Vashi border and sped up towards the creek. It was a windy day, the waves crashed against the pillars, dying in white foam.

In my bag I had her pictures and the idols from the little temple she'd set up back in the small shelf of our living room. You don't keep the things of the dead they say, but offer them to water which somehow carries them to their yonderland of rest. I gave her pictures a last look and surrendered them to gravity. An unknown tear tore its way through my reserve and slid down the eyes. As I rushed to wipe away the trail of its existence, I found his jaded brown eyes looking at me, with a question marked in the matted dust of his gaze. ‘My wife, she's...’, I said. He said nothing, no words escaped his mouth, no contour of his face changed, but his eyes sank back in resigned recognition.

The idols were sticky out of years of basking in the vapors of her oil lamp, the same lamp that burnt beside her pyre. For the last time I raised the small plaster-of-paris figurines in my hands, touched them with my forehead before putting them to rest in the waiting waves. Outside the window, on the other side of the bridge, I could see the land rise up from the claiming waters.

That's when he got up to walk towards the exit. He must have been at the door when I felt his hand gently squeeze my shoulder; his grasp said ‘I know’ without uttering a word. Then he jumped. As the bogey pulled itself out of the bridge, I could see the soggy pictures bobbing on the surface of the water in the shroud of a white foam. The dust of his weary eyes would have been washed by the sea. Then everything was still.