Bug Bitten Toes, Bitten Nails, Bruised Hearts

A train journey if travelled in the mind sometimes builds a memory that dangles between fact and fantasy...smell of steel, sweat, tired eyes....a medley of images.

The train looked like a lazy snail and the torn green Indian railways rexin cover felt like putty. Like putty people sat on the steel of  colonial India Ltd.,hot skinned. The rumble matched the putty feeling, crumbling, soft and falling. Like the putty on the walls of  poverty laden houses. Without reservation, without tickets, with just a bag of sentiments, the family sat huddled together like the mice underneath the metal seats. Mice that would nibble at their toes the nights, when the steel of colonial India would cool down, so that the bugs would inf"east".

The youngest was a funny little girl with bitten nails. Round faced, moon goddess, they called her. Now she had a little doll in her left hand, while she scratched her little foot with the right. Bug Bitten, she shifted her focus on watching a family on the platform. They too perhaps smelt of colonial leftovers of indianized steel, Unlike hers, the other family was fatherless, brother less and buglessThere were two girls, one square chinned, the second round faced like her. As the train pulled away, she felt tears well up her eyes but she blinked them away before her bug bitten brother could smile at her cry baby identity.

The moon faced goddess had no power over the origin of grief, but she had control of its expression. She could bury grief of her bug bitten foot by counting her toes. She could forget the family out on the platform was fatherless, brother less by remembering they were bug less. They would not scratch, maybe the two girls would only scratch heads. Maybe they had fat lice, like her classmates had. Fat,juicy lice that she would watch whenever she found the space and the time.

Her brother was beautiful, chiseled nose, lovely eyes but he had only a single foot.The other foot was not fixed by God,perhaps forgotten to be sent down, perhaps the missing one still hanging from a branch of the forbidden tree. She watched her one footless brother with a twinge of jealousy. He was required to scratch only one lone foot. The other was a stump and when money could buy, would be a metal pipe, like the leftovers colonial Indian steel, a smell of a memory.

Anusha

2001