I LEAVE IT TO YOU - CHAPTER III

Hoggar woke up suddenly like how a doll attached to a spring would open to our surprise from a gift box. It was a cold day but that did not let him go without sweating. Everything was still vivid to him. The whole thing. He was actually touching his ankles, squeezing them to wrench it out of pain. The funny part was that his ankles were not aching at all. Such was the effect of the dream. Now that was very comforting, that it was just a dream. He let go of his ankles and tried to sleep again. But sleep wouldn’t come, not without another sedative. He was definitely not going to take another sedative. He had already taken one. He didn’t want it to be ‘one is company, two is the crowd’. The sedative he had taken the previous night had suppressed all his feelings for his lost friend and had activated the sleeping nerves. But now? He just passed the early morning sitting down on the floor with his eyes wide open, lost in thought, but definitely not sleeping.
The morning came as he was sitting, just sitting. In another ten minutes the alarm would start its chore. He switched it off before it could even go on. The dream had been very strange. He hadn’t got dreams like this before. He did get one the previous day and that was equally bad. He forced himself not to believe that whatever he dreamt of was going to get ‘realitised’. He somehow coaxed his mind to understand that Timothy’s death was already preordained and that he didn’t have anything to do with it. Possibly yes. But what if it was another way. Maybe his dreams were giving him glimpses of the future. Maybe the dreams were the blueprint of whatever that was waiting in store for him.
He had to leave early for he had lots of works to do. He wouldn’t waste time, he would never do it. That too in cases of emergencies he would function like a meteor. He hastened his breakfast. He was going to take the ‘previous train’. The appointment with the funeral people had been fixed and he was going to meet them before going to work. While walking along the road he reprimanded himself for behaving so badly in the morning. He had lost an hour of his sleep thinking about some stupid dream. However hard he tried to be skeptical about the ‘dreams coming true’ thing, his fears did surface up like bubbles. He reached the station and there was a huge crowd waiting for the train, double the amount that would wait for his usual train. He still had his qualms of taking the train but somehow inexplicably he moved towards the train. He thought it was like winning over nature, fate, destiny and all that one can’t actually win over. He wanted to show fate that he was not afraid of his dreams and was not going to run away from it. The train was approaching the platform and the crowd raced to get into the train.
A sudden flash in his mind and the next thing, he didn’t want to get into the train. Something pricked him and pinned him mentally and out of all the things he was sure that he didn’t want to board the train. He didn’t mind losing to fate, he didn’t mind accepting the fact that he was afraid of fate, afraid of what it might to do to him. But unfortunately he was late, too late to back out. He was in the middle of the crowd and the racing crowd was just pushing him into the train. He tried his best to escape, but as everyone say, there is no escape.
The horn blew, hands waved goodbyes, reds became greens and the wheels started turning. Turning…..turning…..turning………..
Hoggar was standing perplexed and intrigued. The train was moving at a slow speed and had a big crowd in it. He was standing near the door wondering why he ever got into the train. He wanted to break the glass and just jump out of the train but he could never do such a thing. He was standing there, all shivering and frightened. Why? He didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Next, there was a continuous honking noise that penetrated even closed doors and windows. Immediately next, a big bang and a huge crash. He didn’t know what was happening to him. He was thrown over some smooth green fields with terrible injuries and little conscience. A sever pain on his ankles was trying to kill him. For that matter, he didn’t even know if he was dead or not.
Hoggar woke up not from sleep but from anesthesia in a small community hospital room. The cot was made of metal and was hard and really uncomfortable for him but the anesthesia had taken away all those discomforts away from him. A nurse in white was standing next to him, doing something with his leg. The pain in the ankles was really terrible and the nurse was giving him physiotherapy. She looked like an angel in white. It was like as if some angel had given him a new life (with aching ankles). The physiotherapy was appeasing but it didn’t help much. The nurse later explained that their train had collided with another train. Strange. The other train had also come in the same track but in the opposite direction. It was not very strange for him. He knew it was fate’s game. It wouldn’t have been strange even if an airplane had come and collided with the train. Nothing was very strange once he started understanding the way fate worked. Even if he had stayed at home without taking the train some devil would have carried him to the train.
The nurse told him that a lot of lives had been lost. Those who escaped death had been brought to the community hospital. He had come with a severe fracture in the ankle and scratches and wounds allover the body and one severe wound in the head. An operation had been performed and he was out of critical conditions. He was given painkillers which extricated the pains in the ankles and the head to a considerable extent. The sun had set and was giving way to the nighty night. A ‘fluidy’ dinner was given to him. The angelic nurse gave him some tablets to take, a sedative was one of the tablets that were given to him. After a few minutes it was good night for him.
All the kids were replete with ecstasy and rapture. There was so much of uproar in the mother’s orphanage that no one even heard the telephone bell ringing in the other room. The clock in the main hall ticked 3 in the afternoon. The two teachers, three maids and three matrons were all boarding a bus with the thirty-five children. It was a paid trip for them. Some charitable organization had arranged for a trip for the orphans. This does not happen a lot of times, not more than twice a year or so. They planned to go to the museum and beach. The bus was standing just out of their modest one storied building. From somewhere a lighted cigarette flew towards the bus. Just like bulls eye it reached for the gas tank and just like magic the gas tank flew open and just like a cataclysm the bus burst into flames and then there was nothing just like it. A minute later about 50 charred corpses and a completely dismantled burned bus were the only occupants of that place.