Sarabjeet Garcha
One Month
Stepping aboard a train makes me want to alight at an anonymous station on a very bright morning and stay there for one full month without knowing the name of the place
Let there be such a small city that no shop within it carries the city’s name
where the rickshaw-wallah, when I ask him to take me home, drops me anywhere, provided the place is close to a river
where no house has a TV, but only an old radio covered with a cloth and set in a niche which remains turned off most of the time and which guesses the time only by the sparrows’ chirping outside the window
a radio which not only brings here things from various stations but also carries a little bit of news from here to there
a radio which, as soon as it’s turned on, tells us only this much—that each inhabitant of every city boarded a train at night and, having alighted at an anonymous station on the very bright morning of the next day and without knowing the name of the place, is realising the dream of staying there for one full month
