Road to Nowhere

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ernest Hemingway

I love train journeys. It has always been associated in my mind with freedom and escape from the tedious obligations of the mundane life. As a child going back to my hometown for the summer holidays the adamant thronging at the railway station and the sudden whistling  of the train symbolised the exultation and mirth the summer had to offer. Even as time progressed I came to look upon train journeys with a tinge of nostalgia and longingness that could not find expression in any semantic articulation.

My romanticisation of the railroad is directly associated with a plebeian philosophy of sorts it endorses. One on the general nature of human existence on this planet. It is that the railroad represents human life leading to somewhere yet nowhere, that it is caught in the circular evolution from one place to the next without any particular significance of its own. Travelling, going along where it leads you is the only thing to be done. So the last time a friend and I ended up completely lost in a railway station outside of and much farther away from the city we could not but engage ourselves in nonchalant chit chats about the existential dilemmas of human life. We concluded that it was predicament that lead us, voyagers, who were on our way to the city to catch the wrong train on an impulse and end up where we were, in a deserted platform in a forsaken place. These are the people we noticed. A middle aged man reading newspaper, when asked for directions he simply told us he was new to the place and was himself quite unsure of where he was. Two teen aged boys sitting and chatting away. They are not planning to go anywhere, by the look of it. An old woman selling some kind of fruit we could not recognize. A woman waiting anxiously on the bench. And above everything else, there was no sign of the train! "We are waiting for Godot, it seems", my friend says. "Let us wait, let us wait." "Isn't life absurd? Aren't we all running to find us some kind of rattrap? What is the meaning of all this? For what, for what? ", and so forth. She takes out her cell phone equipped with internet. Now let us not blabber about technology and its existential conundrum. In the span of the two hours we sat there, we learned that the only part of your body that has no blood supply is the cornea in the eye, ostriches can run faster than horses and the male ostriches can roar like lions, Gorgias of Epirus was born in his dead mother’s coffin, Virgina Woolf wrote all her books standing, elephants cant jump, John Steinbeck’s original manuscript for Of Mice and Men was eaten by a dog, Socrates had all plans to be a stonemason like his father, 60% of your brain is fat, Charles Dickens was in a train wreck!

Our train arrives finally at the station. I look at my friend and ask her, "Are you sure you want to go there today?" She gives me a smile and replies back, rather confident of what she was about to say, "Yes. For tomorrow never comes."