RAILWAY TRACKS

                                            By khwaja massoud

            The first sugars of excitement at prospects awaiting me where I was headed began to melt and sourness took over my senses.

The coach was now full. Tears swelled, awaiting the final push of emotion to take them flowing down a hundred cheeks. Farewell bidders getting last promises out to live with during the impending days of their loved ones’ absence. The final whistle accompanied by urchins’ desperate cry for attention before they get down into the empty abyss the station must soon become after everybody has left. Passengers waving, their binoculars missed, as they strain their eyes to take in the remains of fast receding figures of old fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, wives and babies.

I shut my eyes unable to watch what I was missing. Memories, always in wait for you to open the doors of reference, will come rushing in if I allow them. My mind wrestled with the senses to tell me not to let in what I was deliberately leaving. You have just come out of a phase you will do well to forget and therefore let it be that way, it was telling me.

My father was a man who lived to suffer. God knows what businesses he had done, what vocations he had taken up, and what failures he had endured and what successes he had missed just to be able to put me into some temple called University. And yet I have never known him to speak lies or ill of others. He envied none, coveted nothing, but always smiled and said, ‘keep to your tracks, son’.

Tracks? What is that? I remember asking myself. ‘The day you step off the tracks I have laid out for you that day will be a day of my failure’, he would say. But you are no great example of success even today, dad. I might have asked.

‘I know what you are thinking, son. I have nothing to show to you as my success. True. That is my success, son. You are too young to know it now. But you will, one day’.

His last words? As good as, you can say. After all, he wasn’t the talkative kind. He would tell me he was in constant communication with Him. His days would pass from home to mosque and from mosque to home. Sometimes it surprised me that we did not live in despair despite all that was not well around. Values? Faith?

The train hurtling toward its destination sounded very special to me. Here I was, a successful CA with an MBA to boot from a prestigious business school on his way to take up a big job in a multinational company. In a train on tracks!

Tracks? Can a train without tracks to take it safely to its destination ever be a train? I wondered. Something inside kept nagging me, telling me to discover my relationship with the train and its tracks.

I think I failed. I soon fell asleep.

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I saw myself pressing my father’s tired legs. The hopeless breakfast I prepared for him which he ate with fervor. The long walks to the weekly market I undertook which reminded me of the walks father himself undertook everyday in search of any simple job to suit an honest man.

The hours of study in front of books borrowed from boys of rich families. The rush, to know everything in them before they had to be returned, was always taxing, brought fevers the following days. The days of pretensions when I feigned a full stomach to leave the meager plate for father. They did not go undiscovered by him, smart as he was in noticing my excesses in his favor, for he would the next day return with a big bag of dried fruits picked by him in the far reaches of the town’s outskirts.

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The train’s shrill whistle must have woken me up. I got up with a start. Its steel wheels hitting the tracks at its joints sounded suddenly palpable. The tracks! The train on tracks! Safe. Destination bound. I got it!

All these years I had been on sound tracks my self. They have brought me to a safe destination. Good character and a promising career.

My will to follow those tracks and my hard work in my studies were my train. The passenger in them was me.

How lucky I have been to have run on a sound track. My father, his values and faith, my track. 

Khwaja massoud