Station Announcement
"Attention passengers: the 22:10 service to Return is delayed due to unexpected weather along the heart line."
The first drop struck the station roof with a sound like a coin tossed for luck. Another followed, then another, until the whole of Kochi Junction was drumming beneath the monsoon. Light bulbs glowed through gauze-thick rain; the air smelled of wet iron, milk tea, and fatigue. Loudspeakers sputtered, coughed, and surrendered.
Arjun Nair drew his collar tight and held a dog-eared copy of King Lear to his chest. The irony of standing in a tempest was not lost on him, though he disliked irony almost as much as pity. He had once lectured on this very play—until his insistence on ethics had cost him his post. Now he waited for a student who would not come, in a station that had lost all direction. The platform shivered underfoot as thunder rolled above it.
Two benches away, Sara Ibrahim balanced a small blue suitcase between her shoes. Inside lay starched uniforms, a rosary from her mother, and a passport still warm from the photocopy shop. Tomorrow she would fly to Muscat to work as a nurse; tonight she rehearsed goodbyes under her breath. Rain gathered at the edge of her scarf and dripped onto her folded hands. A child nearby coughed, and without thinking she opened her pouch, offered a strip of tablets, a smile, a brief reassurance in Malayalam. Compassion had become her reflex—both her strength and her weakness.
Further down the platform, a young man leaned against a pillar, sketching the reflections that trembled in puddles. Rohit Menon, fresh from London and full of new vocabulary—contextual, vernacular, sustainable—was determined to map the city's decay. His paper curled in the damp, lines bleeding into clouds. He could already feel the old humidity of this place tugging at his precision, softening him. A child's laugh rang out behind him, bright as a match. He sketched that, too—the echo of laughter trapped in water.
Near the end of the platform, a woman adjusted the focus of her camera. Ananya Das had been sent from Delhi to photograph "the crisis of Indian rail infrastructure." Her editor's words. She preferred faces. The camera caught them all in one accidental frame: a man with a book, a nurse sharing medicine, an artist lost in thought. The station clock above them had frozen at 9:47 p.m., time itself delayed. She pressed the shutter just as a gust blew her hair across the lens, turning the scene into a blur of motion and light. When she lowered the camera, the people had shifted slightly, as if embarrassed to be seen.
By the tea stall, Manoj Pillai counted his coins twice before ordering. Eighteen years in Doha had taught him the arithmetic of small humiliations: rent, remittance, return ticket. The vendor handed him a glass of sweet, steaming chai. "Rain's good for business, chetta," he said cheerfully. Manoj nodded. It felt good to be called elder brother again, even by a stranger. The tea burned his tongue and filled the silence where his family's voices used to be. Outside, the storm drummed against the shutters, reminding him that deserts could follow a man home.
Under a broken light at the far end sat Leena Thomas, refreshing the screen of her phone though the signal had died hours ago. Her train to Bengaluru was "delayed indefinitely," the notice board insisted, as if infinity were a timetable. Tomorrow she was supposed to begin her first software job, the promise of her own apartment, her own key. She imagined herself in cool offices full of glass and hum, far from neighbours who measured worth by marriage proposals. Now the world was reduced to rain, a plastic bag protecting her laptop, and the faint comfort of the porter who offered her his crate to sit on. She thanked him and watched her reflection flicker in the puddle, fingers twitching with phantom code.
A crack of thunder tore the lights from their sockets. For a moment the station dissolved into darkness. Then the emergency lamps blinked on, yellow and human. In that shared flash the six strangers looked up—the teacher, the nurse, the architect, the journalist, the mechanic, the coder—each startled into awareness of the others. Their eyes met only in reflection, brief as lightning, and yet something lodged there, an invisible thread stretched across rain.
The power stuttered again; the child began to sing to fill the waiting. The song was an old boat melody, half lullaby, half prayer. One voice became two, then many, until the sound of it rippled through the cavernous hall. The storm seemed to pause to listen.
Arjun closed his book. Sara smiled into the darkness. Rohit stopped sketching. Ananya forgot the camera in her hands. Manoj's shoulders eased. Leena found herself humming along without knowing the words. For a heartbeat, Kochi Junction was not a station but a single, breathing shelter—a brief country made of rain.
The child's song ended. The station exhaled. Somewhere a new announcement crackled alive, promising departure "as soon as conditions improve." The passengers murmured, rearranged their bags, resumed their waiting.
Behind the tea stall, the vendor wiped his counter, studying the six figures scattered across the platform. He did not know their names, only that each had arrived heavy with something the rain could not wash away. Later, in his notebook, he would call them "the six rains."
Outside, the downpour thickened again, folding the world into its endless drumming.