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Micro-fiction 084 – Twin Tracks (Echo series)

The view at the front of the train from Mombasa to Kimbusa offers the twin tracks of life and death…


Twin Tracks

It is often said that the good and the bad within us fight for supremacy, but over the years I’ve found they coexist quite happily. The murderer who is kind to their family, the thief who loves his cat, the bully who helps old ladies cross the road: Some would say it’s all part of the subterfuge, to hide in plain sight by acting out the small kindnesses of life, but I know it’s more complicated than that. 

I’ve ridden the trains all my life. My Punjabi grandparents came over from India to build what some called the great boon, others the great wound, the railway line from the port of Mombasa to Kimbusa at the tip of Lake Nyanza that killed so many of my countrymen in its battle with the forces of nature, the swamps, the heat, the snakes, the lions and the swarms of malaria-spreading insects. And the local people, they resented our kind ripping up their land, flattening out the valleys and the hills with our viaducts and steels, our smoke-choking engines. But my grandparents survived, their daughter, my Indian mother married my father whose parents also had come to build the railway, and so I, Ranbir was born, a proud inheritor of an empire of spice stalls in Mombasa. But my interests have always lain elsewhere, and whenever I could I would run away to the railway, sit on the top of the carriages, clinging to the side bars, scared and ecstatic and, best of all, the most thrilling, to perch on the fender at the front of the train. The competition was fierce for those few spaces, just three at most, and there would be fights to keep our place until the moment the train left and we gathered speed, half closing our eyes, glancing at our would-be usurpers falling away, and the track ahead of us, stretching out into the land beyond.

Those tracks, that’s really what I loved, the twin tracks running across the sleepers, their beautiful long curves arcing into the future, promising adventures and dreams, the rushing air in our faces and visions of better worlds. Every minute, every hour of that long journey inland those tracks would spin in front of me, framing my attention, mesmeric in their hold over my young mind. For me, the left and the right tracks were fanciful representations of the good and the evil parts of myself, always present, never to interfere with each other, but both running across the sleepers, the pulses of life, the slim moments like steps from birth to death, representing memory after memory, slices of dreams and imagination, some falling away with age, supported by each other, others replaced and robust, but always, always, running on ahead, then falling away, consumed by the passage of time. I would be impatient at every stop at every station, and will us to start again, to renew the rush of the tracks before me.

Sometimes I would concentrate on one of the tracks, the left one, then the right, and try to ignore the other, but soon it would become impossible, and I would feel giddy, as though the train would tip on the single track. I began to realise that my mind required the twin tracks, the two forces, the balance of perspectives on the memories and events of life, the good and evil paths that run through the experiences of us all.

Of course, when I was young, what had I done to understand any of this? But as I grew older, became more distant from my parents, ran away more often, I embraced a life that required the succour of the train journey, and still I battled for the treasured places at the front of the old steam engine to Kimbusa. As it aged, so did I, and I noticed it became easier to guarantee my place on the fender, as I was taller and stronger than the others, and the delirious sensation of wind against my face became more frequent, as I travelled both ways to and from Mombasa, more often, flying past the townships, the hills and dry lands, I became a fixture of the train. Soon I would be left alone at the front, with no-one daring to join me. Perhaps I had become too fierce, too protective. I did not care, for I still craved the thrill of the ride, the lure of the twin tracks speeding before me.

***

One day the train stopped for an unbearably long time. Generally I paid little attention to the stations, for they irritated me, holding me back from my greater purpose, interrupting the flow of my meditations on life, existing only as a means of survival. I stared at the still track ahead of me. Vaguely I remember the name Tsavo but I could be wrong. The smokebox behind my back was hot, but the stack, usually gushing with smoke, even in the hot sun, barely disturbed the air. Everything was quiet. Usually after the bustle of exits and exchange had completed, the train would pull away, but something had ceased. I pulled my eyes from the track and looked around. Although I could hear the ends of sounds, the echoes of people who had been there a few moments before, there seemed to be nobody left. I sat for a little longer, but impatient, and aware that none would take my place on the fender, I alighted onto the side of the railway, looked wistfully at the stretch of track ahead and padded over to the station platform, calling out.

“Hello?”

“Is there anybody here?”

“Driver?”

I entered the small lobby, a wooden hall with old-fashioned posters and a departure list scrawled on a large blackboard. The language must have been a local, for I couldn’t make sense of it. The ticket window was shuttered, and the door to the front of the station was closed. I tried the handle but it was locked. I looked back through the platform door, at the train, and saw the driver was missing.

I heard a mumbling from somewhere.

“Hello?” I was anxious, perhaps the train might leave suddenly, without me?

The mumbling came from behind the blackboard, like a muffled, old-time radio.

“I don’t think he can hear us.”

I banged on the blackboard. “Hello! Hello?”

“They won’t allow this to continue much longer.”

“It’s almost been a year, and still no sign.”

I froze. Those were the voices of my parents and my grandmother.

“Mata-ji? Bibi?”

***

“The court has instructed us to turn off the life support.” The doctor looked sympathetically at the little group gathered around the patient. 

An elderly woman spoke, “It’s so hard to understand. All those murders, at every station along the track, for so many years.”

“Our son, our beautiful boy.” Ranbir’s mother looked at her husband.

“We haven’t seen him for years.” Ranbir’s father looked apologetically at the doctor.

“I make no judgement. We’re just glad he was caught in the end.”

“He wasn’t caught, they found him at the front of an abandoned train, in the full sun, babbling like a maniac, staring into the distance, shouting about the death of those he stole from, or pushed from the train. Looks like he’d fallen on the track and crashed his head. I don’t know how he managed to get back up. He must have been there for days.” 

The doctor shook his head, and disconnected the tubes from Ranbir’s body, switching off the device that had kept him alive for the last 12 months.

***

Ranbir blinked. He sat on the fender staring at the familiar comfort of the twin tracks that sought into the land ahead, and thought about the murderer who was kind, the thief who loved his cat, the bully who helped the old lady, the good and the evil of a life that drifted from the heat of the day into the darkness of endless night.

[End]


Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Vurbl and Stitcher  and more. Also on this blog, These Fantastic Worlds.

Text, image, audio © 2021 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam and Elise Wells,  Logic ProX, Sound Studio, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, and Scrivener.


More Tales, More Audio

There are many other great stories in this series, including:

And a carousel of 10 audio stories from the podcast with information about submissions.

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts.