Location : The Central Railway Station, Chennai
The next train from platform one would leave this station in two minutes. The boarding side of the first platform had a fierce wall one side and the stinking train on the other side. I was sitting on a platform bench, sipping a tasteless coffee, and waiting for the train to start. I swallowed the coffee, though I knew that it would taste like a coal beforehand.
An old man, wearing a loose shirt prowled towards me with a small bag on his shoulder and an open book in his hand. He looked fraught, and scanned around anxiously with darting eyes as if he was chased by the legal guardians for carrying something that he was not supposed to carry.
He had a well oiled hair, sticking to his mantle like a drenched fur. His pants started well above his hips, and he wore no belt. The pants stopped well before his ankle, may be he grew after he was forty or was it his teenage trousers?
He read that glossy book with utmost care, oblivious of the departure time or the crowd bustling around him. As envisaged, he banged on a porter .The old man stared at the porter, like a vulture looking for a corpse .His raised eyebrows expressed a thousand words, it is true that action speaks more than
words .There were a flurry of words that had deep meanings from the other side, the local language proving too tough for the old man. Those words can cause your ear drums to run away from you, this is what is called as the freedom of speech.
What was he reading? I wondered. What was that made an old man into a vulture?
The train was about to start, and the old man ran towards the unreserved compartment. The old man had made me anxious, so much so that I felt like a headless chicken loitering in a butcher shop. I made a desperate attempt to catch him; I had to run a meter or two with all my might to get into the unreserved compartment. I found that distraught man standing near the latrine, still holding the book tightly with both the hands, and reading it like a starved beggar.
The glossy cover smiled at me, like a little child yearning for a candy.
There was a yellow smiley, with its mouth curved up.
It read,
“HOW TO CURE MENTAL TENSION.”
