Читать книгу Another Heaven - Annu Subramanian - Страница 6

Prologue

Circle of a Mission

Kuyil Extension, Seloor District, South India

October 15, 2009 • 2:45 p.m...

A young woman walked gently down the dirt road along the railway tracks facing the perimeter of the railway colony. Gathering a dirty cloth bag to her breast and covering her head with a scarf from the light drizzle, she quickly went past a couple of scrawny dogs and sat under the overpass. Her nervous glance reached up to the palm trees, to the branches swaying gracefully in the October breeze. Then her furtive glance ran to the railway schedule in the bag and jumped to the coded instructions scribbled on a crinkled note. In spite of the gentle breeze, she began to sweat profusely and wiped her clammy face with the fringe of her frayed, bright-green, cotton sari. Looking to her right and left, she picked up a cell phone from the cloth bag. When her other hand touched her padded blouse, she gasped in pain as the craftily assembled wires crushed her young breasts, and she let her hand slide to the dirt with a new abandonment.

2:53

The slouched figure of the young woman straightened with a strange determination as her ears picked up the sound of an approaching train. Her eyes absentmindedly scanned the surroundings—an emaciated cow was listlessly chewing a tuft of dry grass, a young man whizzed by pedaling his bicycle, a couple of children walked on the other side of the dirt road towards the railway colony, their little heads tucked under an umbrella. The cyclist paused, turned and looked at the woman with significant interest, and left the dirt road when he lost hope of snaring her attention. When the train rushed towards the overpass, unbridled and furious, the young woman tried to hold the cell phone steadily with her unsteady hand.

2:55

She began to chant... In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful... As the wheels touched the tracks above the overpass, the train exploded into fragments and left a canopy of hazy smoke over the expanse of crowded little houses making up the railway colony. And the young woman’s nineteen-year-old, mutilated body scattered along the dirt road while the flying flames hungrily licked the glass windows of various compartments.