Souls and Raindrops*

7:44 A.M.

The green electronic display flickered, blinked and changed as she watched.

7:45 A.M.

The wind kicked up a chocolate wrapper and a dirty scrap of newspaper into a slow pirouette around her feet. She caught the flyaway end of her dupatta and wrapped it around her handbag, clutching both closer to her body. A gingerly placed step to the left, a little hop to the front, and she was past the puddle of water. Her pace quickened against the wet stone platform worn smooth by decades of rushing feet. Soon, she was just another blur of movement in a teeming, seething mass of commuters, under a sloping, leaky station roof, under a fast-greying sky.

He crouched in a filth-ridden corner of the stairs leading to the second platform. The corrugated sheet of the roof didn’t reach far enough to shelter him completely. A slow trickle of water crept down the side of the stairway into a splash of Coke from somebody’s carelessly thrown plastic cup. The trickle swirled, widened and welled up, till it finally broke free into the grooves between the smooth stone slabs and meandered into a puddle at his feet. It didn’t seem to bother him.

A rusty can with traces of its once blue wrapper sat at his feet. A faint gleam inside it told of some earlier passer-by’s generosity. His gnarled, dirty hands stretched out and away from him in that timeless petition for help, sympathy and most of all, money. Tangled, matted locks of greasy grey hair hung down the sides of his face that bent abjectly over his hands. A dull pair of eyes with yellowed whites and age-clouded irises stared vacantly, resignedly, at the ground in front of him. A blur of feet of all sizes and shapes, covered and bare, clattered around him as the damp wind whipped at his ragged shirt, bringing his shrivelled frame into sharper relief.

She stole a quick glance at her watch. Two minutes left for the next train. She could catch it if she hurried down the stairs to Platform 2 fast enough. She nearly ran past the brown, ragged, smelly isle of stillness on the stairway. Oh, she’d seen him before. No words of supplication from this one. No invoking curses or abusing ancestors if you passed him by. Even if he did, who had the time to listen? A slight raise of his hands, a barely perceptible movement as he leaned forward…this was all the indication one had to realise that a fellow being was seeking charity.

Something made her stop and unzip her bag. Sympathy? Sorrow? Guilt? All three perhaps? She dug deep into the recesses of her purse while being rudely jostled aside and sworn at by other frazzled commuters. Never mind. She dropped a couple of coins into his outstretched palms and raced down the stairs, just as the train pulled onto the platform. A few seconds later she’d pushed, shoved and clawed her way into the heart of a bogey filled with sweaty, ill-tempered women.

A little raindrop left its home and made its way down to earth. Falling down, falling fast. Past other drop-laden clouds, and layers of dust and fumes. Down, further down, past thirty-storeyed buildings, past shabby tenements stacked on a wasteland slope, dodging the outstretched limbs of a thirsty tree. Whipped and tossed around by a steady wind, it finally lay down to rest in a star-shaped spatter atop a train that was slowly pulling out of a suburban station. Soon the raindrop was joined by millions of its brothers who’d decided to follow suit. Together they drummed in time to the rhythm of the train, of the people moving, of the vast metropolis, of life itself.

If she could’ve looked back at the stairs, she would’ve seen him sitting in his corner, a huddled mass of assorted rags. She hadn’t realized that alms, one meal a day and an occasional scrap of sympathy thrown his way were no longer the focus of this man’s existence.

She couldn’t have possibly known that for the past few hours, the man himself had ceased to exist.

*Note: The title has been borrowed from that of a poem by Sidney Lanier.