It was a beautiful moonlit night and the clock was striking eleven. After waiting for a couple of hours, I was still sitting there on a rusty old baggage trolley made of wrought iron, gazing not at the moon, but at the big round station clock. Using my duffel bag as a cushion, I thought about the things I'll do during my summer vacation.
Other than my Pilani friends, most of you might be wondering what the heck is this "Chirawa". Here's some hints: Its not a food. Its not an animal. Its not a guy's name. Its not a girl's name either! Its actually the name of a place whose forsaken, almost abandoned railway station I decided to board a train from. Well it literally had just "a" train stopping by. There were a few rooms though, a waiting room, station master's office, and few other closed doors. The station had arguably only one platform with one tube-light and one fan.
I was sitting at Platform no 1 :) The fan was working fine but the tube-light was, however, set to flash mode. Much to my annoyance, I decided to take matter in my hands (as there was nobody around) and set the tube-light to off or defunct mode! Its not as easy as you think. Discovering an object as tiny as an electrical switch with blinks of light source was like looking at the world in discrete time only. Somehow I got the job done. Now it was just me, the moon and .......a very noisy fan!!!!!! Ya the fan was noisy and I didn't realize it until then. I figured I couldn't do anything about that so I leaned on to one of the handles of the iron trolley and relaxed.
After a while I had a little craving for road-side, or in this case, "rail"-side snacks. I got up and looked to see if there was any hawker around. There was nobody at the station. Ya, NOBODY! No hawkers, No travellers (except me), no beggars for obvious reasons and not even the station master! "No Station Master!! Am I really at a railway station? ", I asked myself. I checked to see if there were any rail tracks. Well there was one. Encouraged by that, I followed the track to some distance to see if there was any signal lights. I could see the older signal system (a pole with a red arm) which was almost obsolete in rest of the country. The arm was perpendicular to the pole which means "Red" or "Stop". I wondered if this signal would ever come down.
Based on a True Story | Two dogs and a cat were hurt in the true story | Part - II