APPU’S TRAIN
(from Avadha 1986)
Unceasingly it moves, round and round,
Appu’s train, around
Hyderabad’s plains,
from Falaknuma to Bolarum,
unruffled by whys and whats,
calls out to people day and night,
Malakpet – Kachiguda – Sitaphal Mandi.
To all places, this is the only train –
morning noon evening night,
till one starts dozing off sitting
till one starts dreaming new dreams.
Nobody knows when people reached their homes,
each of them carrying a sack.
What’s in them? All a mystery!
Only sometimes, midway, would it stop,
Appu’s train.
From its chimney rises smoke,
reaches the skies, forms clouds,
pours down as rain and
calls out to frogs.
But it’s just that people won’t wait.
Wherever they can –
on bridges, on open grounds –
they alight and disperse
like hallucinating ants.
The buffaloes lolling in the ponds
by the wayside
climb out and wonder
what is happening.
After standing for long hours in the same place
Appu’s train,
just as we think it would sleep the night here,
suddenly with a ha ha roar, its wheels would come to life
and it would start –
and then … and there would come people,
who till then were nowhere to be seen.
Where had they gone, these people?
to the mosque, to the temple –
this is prayer-time!
Appu but is feeling sleepy.
What is visible between the closing eyelids?
Oho, a hundred steps leading to a room on the
terrace
and in that room,
a dancing bear.
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