On the night the clocks stopped ticking at the Delhi Railway Station, a woman descended the iron footbridge with a black satchel and a book bound in cracked leather, as though it had already been read by time itself.
She arrived when the fog was thick enough to touch and silence had already taken root beneath the rusting canopies of Platform Number Five. Even the rats—those unofficial custodians of the tracks—had taken shelter inside forgotten lunchboxes. The city, that relentless organism, had momentarily lost its appetite for movement.
The woman sat. She was not old, but time seemed to have touched her first. Her hair was tied in a careless bun that trembled each time a goods train rumbled past like a groaning memory. Her coat was too thin for the season and too large for her body. Her name, though spoken only once that night, seemed to echo for hours: Arundhati.
She opened the book, not toward the beginning, but somewhere in the soft, bruised middle. A stray dog limped up to the bench, curled beneath it, and slept as though the voice above would be his lullaby.
She began to read.
Her voice, though quiet, peeled the paint off the metal beams.
"They were going to put me in the movies. Pachmarhi. Winter of 1982. I went there without anything that makes you appear respectable—no parents, no job, no address. Just a bag, a scarf, and the boldness of someone who has nothing left to guard".
Above the tracks, the broken speakers crackled softly, whispering train numbers that never came. Somewhere, a tea vendor who had sold his last cup hours ago lit a bidi and exhaled into the dark, as if he, too, were trying to see what the woman would say next.
"They warned me. That I was not the kind of girl they took home to mothers. But no one warned me about the man who knew the names of birds and the names of parts of a woman no biology book would ever list".
She read without looking up. She was not performing. She was testifying.
"He had a wife. I had a lie. I said I had many lovers. In truth, I only had one—myself—and even I could not be trusted to stay".
A light bulb flickered above her, but would not commit to life or death.
At precisely 2:37 a.m., a blind beggar entered the platform, led by a monkey with golden fur. They stopped several feet from her and listened, though neither seemed surprised to find literature flowering in a place usually reserved for announcements and farewells.
"I had an abortion. Legally. Illegally. Silently. Without anesthesia. The doctor said I looked like a good girl. I said she was mistaken. I was only good at surviving. She gave me a lecture that I added to the others—schoolmistresses, psychiatrists, customs officers. All keepers of the moral line".
A long goods train passed, dragging thirty-two cars of coal and regret. When it was gone, the station felt lonelier for having remembered motion.
At this point in the night, something strange began to happen. The fog did not settle; it listened. The cold no longer bit; it observed. The clocks, long dead, began to tick—but only when she turned the pages.
A girl in a school uniform appeared beside her. She could not have been more than fifteen. She said nothing, simply stood close enough that their breaths mixed in the air like chalk and charcoal.
"At the bus station, they surrounded me. Men who had never read a book but knew what to do with a woman who had written one. I learned that actresses are not women but permission slips. That silence is the only contract the world accepts from us".
A pigeon landed on the rail. It had no feet. A man made of dust wandered into the station, dragging behind him a wooden suitcase filled with censored letters and broken combs. The ghost of a woman in a sari wet from 1947 passed by on the other platform, her shadow long enough to brush against Arundhati’s boots.
The girl beside her whispered, "Is that all true?"
Arundhati closed the book. Not because the story was over, but because the night could no longer bear its weight.
"No", she replied. "Some of it hasn’t happened yet".
The girl nodded as though that made perfect sense. She placed something small and invisible in Arundhati’s hand and then walked away—down the tracks, not toward any train, but into the mist where dreams are stitched together by the ones who’ve already stopped waking.
Arundhati did not rise. She stayed until the first train of morning coughed its way in, shuddering and shrieking, filled with passengers who looked older than they were, and younger than they felt. They did not notice the woman. They walked around her, through her, like a memory ignored for survival.
By the time the sun broke through, the bench was empty.
But on the platform, etched in fog and soot, were the fading remnants of a voice:
"I was here. I endured. I wrote".
Postscript
Later that day, the station master told a reporter there had been no such woman. No reading. No book.
But the old beggar swore that the monkey still weeps whenever it hears the words "They’re gonna put me in the movies".
And on certain nights, if the fog is just right and the clocks forget the time again,
someone—perhaps you—may sit on that same bench
and hear her voice
between the trains.
