It was the night of the 19th of October. Harish and I were on our way back to Ahmedabad from Bhopal. We were waiting at Ujjain central for a connecting train, which as is usual with trains in India, was late by an hour or so. So there we were, waiting, when the first of what was going to turn out to be two episodes of real life dramas unfolding on either side of us.
First, to our left, came a group of north Indian ladies, draped in saris looking extremely worried. One of them looked extremely ill and looked like she desperately needed medical attention. We feared that she would faint any second. They sat her down on a bench to our left, and soon there was a big crowd around them, trying to help out. Or it may have been a big family in itself. We were not sure. We saw someone running to get here a bottle of water. Around 10 minutes we feared for the woman’s life and were worried and confused about why a severely ill woman was not in a hospital but instead at the railway station going to travel someplace. But that was when the second story presented itself.
There was a lady from Andhra Pradesh (we figured that out since we heard her speak and both of us being from the south were able to eliminate Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil from the possibilities and narrowed it down to just Telegu). She was obviously very furious. But not the kind of furious that is just pure anger. It was a mixture of anger, frustration and a deep sorrow. She was from the lower strata of the Indian society. The one that has to work day in and day out and still can’t quite manage to make both ends meet. The everyday heroine. She was cursing and yelling as she was trying to vent her frustration with life we felt. But then entered the stage, a man dragging along another frail young man, clothes torn and tattered, body broken and battered.
The reaction of the previously mentioned lady was shocking to say the least. She just got angrier, and in a fit of rage, took a cover full of utensils and threw it onto the platform, pots and pans spilling everywhere. She then turned to the thin man and screamed at him, obviously angry with him for something he did. But again, it wasn’t just something he did. There was an obvious deep sadness in her. Soon this man fell to his knees and broke down in front of her. He was crying his heart out. He had had enough. He was tired of it all. That was when it hit us! He had tried to kill himself. His attempt at suicide was the reason for all we had seen just now.
Every few minutes, this person used to try to break free from the grasp of the man who brought him there and was preventing him running away and trying to kill himself again. But he was weak. In the distance we could hear the whistle of an approaching train. And that sound once again encouraged the frail desperate man to try once more to break free. He managed to take a couple of steps closer to the approaching train before the woman and the man stopped him. He cried out to them to let him die. But his family was not going to give up on him so easily. By then, our train had arrived and we too left.
But this got me thinking at how funny life was. To our left, there was this lady fighting for her life, and there was her entire family and strangers helping out in any way they could, giving her water, praying for her. And to our right, was a man trying to end his life, and his family would not let him. They offered him hope. On either side, life regained from the clutch of death.
It is moments like this that help you appreciate life. That help you realize how lucky you are. That while the biggest decision I would make the next day was what to have for lunch, or whether or not to read the case for the next day, there were people elsewhere, trying to decide whether they could afford another lunch or not, or whether they wanted to live the next day at all. Life is Strange.
