It is somewhere in North India, the kind of place with endless dusty roads that lead to villages with no name. Sleepy pockets that are hours from anywhere. Now it’s full of uniformed men, and machines digging, lifting, dragging. No one speaks much anymore. Faces are set. Hands move mechanically. The blood and the mud have merged.
Bodies—bloodied, mangled are stacked like old clothes in a donation bin. Nobody flinches anymore. Not the police, not the medics, not even the army jawans lifting limp torsos with practiced detachment. Everyone works with the dull precision of machines. The sun beats down.
The dead and alive are being piled into pickup vans now. There are no ambulances left. The cold steel beds in the government hospitals in the villages nearby are overflowing. People, barely alive, lie on the floor in the dull green corridors, crying out for someone, anyone. The duty doctors have been summoned from their afternoon naps and private clinics. They are dazed. They don’t know where to start. Postings in these sleepy villages did not prepare them for this.
News anchors shout off TV screens. Talking heads. The same footage, the same outrage, the same scripted sorrow, looped for maximum effect. One channel doesn’t even bother blurring the visuals anymore. It’s about TRPs now.
Online, the armchair experts are at work. Blaming infrastructure, policy, past governments, present ones. Writing threads about Japan and China. Sharing diagrams and offering suggestions. Trending Hashtags.
The Prime Minister Tweets a condolence message. Om Shanti. Thoughts and Prayers.
The opposition leaders take to the streets with placards, demanding his resignation.
The Railway Minister walks around in his Nike sneakers and surveys the accident site. The rescue operations are put on hold for security reasons for a few hours. He has announced compensation: ?25 lakhs for the families of the dead. ?5 lakhs for the injured.
In a government school turned temporary morgue, an old man walks carefully between rows of bodies. The dead are laid out side by side, like exam candidates waiting for the question papers to be distributed. His slippers stick to the floor, a mix of blood and mud thickening into paste. His eyes scan the faces—the mouths agape, eyes staring or missing entirely.
His steps are cautious. He does not want to step on a hand or worse, a face. He is looking for his son.
Eighteen. His only boy. Left home a day ago with a bag full of old clothes, a steel tiffin box of rotis and pickle, and his tenth standard certificate carefully enclosed in two layers of plastic. The agent said there were jobs in Madras in restaurants, construction sites and office buildings.
Now the father walks among corpses, heart thudding. His son’s name isn’t on any list.
The boy didn’t have a reserved train ticket. No one does. It is just a three-day journey. There’s always room for one more on Indian trains. You sit where you can. You adjust. Everyone does.
***
And then he hears it. He stops in his tracks.
A low, wet groan. He turns. One of the bodies moved. No, not a body. A boy. Blood-caked face, one eye swollen shut, the other, open a sliver. There’s recognition in that eye. A silent plea.
The old man stares, frozen. His breath catches in his throat. The boy’s mouth opens, releasing a moan that sounds like Baba. Or maybe it’s just wind escaping.
It is his son.
Still alive. Barely. His leg severed.
The boy tries to speak. A whisper of breath escapes his lips. The old man drops to his knees, fingers trembling. His son is looking at him through a film of blood, pain, and dust.
And then the father remembers everything waiting at home.
His wife, whose heart has been failing for two years. They couldn’t afford the surgery. She is waiting now, for a money order from this son soon.
Three daughters, still unmarried. Too old, people say. But maybe, if they had a dowry now, someone would marry them, at least a widower. Maybe even one without children.
***
The land and monsoons have failed him again this year. The banks send their collection executives, his landlord sends goondas. The interest compounds with every heartbeat.
And this boy—this broken body in front of him—was the family’s last hope. The son who was supposed to earn, send money back, change their fate.
Now?
Now he’s a cripple. A burden. Even if he survives, the ?5 lakhs from the government won’t last a month. He would never work in a construction site. Never stand guard outside a bank. Never lift sacks of rice to a godown.
His heart lurches with guilt, with grief—but more than anything else, with fear. Not for the boy, but for what his survival would mean to the family.
The old man’s breathing slows. He looks around. No one has noticed.
He stands.
Dusts his knees. Backs away.
If he comes back later, he tells himself…
He takes a final look. The boy’s eye flutters shut again. A low sound escapes him. Or maybe it’s just air escaping a cracked rib.
The old man squeezes his eyes shut to stop his tears and walks out of the classroom.
No one stops him.
He keeps walking.
Anamika M. lives in the hills of South India, where she spends her days with spreadsheets and presentation decks, and her evenings with stories shaped by the people she meets and the thoughts that surface during long walks. Her work has been published in various literary magazines, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Account: Journal of Poetry and Prose. Her writing rests between fiction and reflection, lingering in the grey area where facts seem imagined and fiction feels true.
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