Getting back

[Cellphone entry. Dated: 22 Sept]
Outside my window:
Kanpur jooton ka mahamela.
Agnostic Public School (Bertrand Russell would be proud!).
Bokaro. The familiar sight of slightly smaller town roads, shops, students. The not so familiar sight of people randomly dancing on the street.
The nape of a sleeping jawan's neck, the hair is cropped close. I touch my own, the tiny fuzzy line of hair, disappearing on the way to my spine is the same as his. I can't see his face, I can't see any of their faces. A hand with Om tattooed on to it. In the old days, men joining the army would have their names tattooed on to their bodies, to help identify them in case they got killed. My nana had Tara, written on his arm.

Now we're listening to Gutur Gutur (Chadh gaya upar re/Atariya pe lotan kabootar re), I'm grinning manically and singing along. Two really beautiful women are chatting outside their house, one of them is a "kanji aankhon wali" (light eyed people are supposed to be "untrustworthy") but she doesn't seem malicious to me at all.

Dhanbad has a bit of a Lucknow feel to it. Not the Mayawati-chic or Sahara Parivar parts of it, but the older parts. As a child, I thought Nazarbagh was Lucknow, that was the periphery of my thought.
At the station, the old tattooed lady in charge of the "ladies" waiting room is a bit obsessive. She wants us to lock the door because "school ka ladka ladki ghus jata hai nahi toh"... obviously she imagines more nefarious activities going on here at night. I doubt that's possible with the mechanical voice of the announcer woman telling us about the train from Varanasi that's just arrived in Platform number 2 and all the stations its been to, every 5 seconds. I can't hear myself think and I watch a mother coo over her child and wonder what she does when she needs to go pee. I think of bizarre possibilities - Put him on the floor? Give him to a stranger to hold? Put him in her bag and hang him on the door? Borrow a diaper?

I'm overtaken momentarily by a heavy feeling of disorientation as I watch our train pull in. It's motion is making me uneasy, it feels like I'm looking at it through a fish eye lens.
On the train I'm lulled by the rhythm of it's movement. The sense of inexplicable anxiety will grow with our proximity to Delhi, but we're still too far. I've turned off the light now, looking out at the moonlit countryside rushing past. A beam of light from our compartment dances along us, thrashing wildly like monochrome aurora borealis. I'm listening to Smashing Pumpkins (the early stuff - Gish, Siamese Dream, Mellon Collie). I love that they're able to balance these tranquil, pensive, melancholy sounds and also have the angsty, cynical, sneering spirals of crashing drums and effortlessly expressive guitars, sometimes even in the same song. I feel like they "get it". I've been reading about long journeys, exiles, circumstantial interventions . And I've lost all sense of time on this train. I feel like I'm returning from 2046, except I'm a delayed reaction android, feeling everything in second hand. The thought of whatever it is back home (and by home, I mean college, mostly) which troubles me is hazy in the back of my mind, as for now all I can think of doing is looking out the window.
I wake up, at Kanpur, feeling extremely paranoid and needlessly aggressive. I think I was dreaming of being attacked.