Chapter 15:: Of Journeys with Strangers

Mark Middleton had acquired an unwilling charge. It wasn't the best time for it, he was leaving the city for another, an unknown place, and he didn't know what his future had in store. But he had felt a pang of guilt about the boy, about leaving him lying there among the rubble of explosion. After all, if he hadn't rammed into his brain with all the force his mind could muster, the boy would not have fainted. And it wasn't necessary really, as he realized while peering through the boy's mind while he lay, unconscious and limp, on the station floor – he was just an ordinary boy. One of those he passed on the streets everyday. He hadn't deserved that kind of an attack. No wonder his brain couldn't take it.

Okay, enough of delusional self-justification. The boy wasn't just an ordinary boy, and Mark could sense it, though he couldn't comprehend it entirely. And it scared him, and to be honest, that was the reason he didn't want to part with the boy. A human brain is complex enough to read through and Mark doubted if anyone could lay one out completely, but he was aware of the general pattern and there was something inside this boy's head he hadn't encountered before. Oh yes, he was human well enough and had the usual human components, but then, there had been this zone. Mark couldn't see what was in there, it kept eluding his intrusion. And it was irrational and almost unreal, and generated strange incomprehensible vibes. Mark was quite sure it were those vibes that had caused that unexplainable explosion at the station. He couldn't imagine what else they could do. He couldn't understand if the boy knew him, or if he was a potential threat. What he knew was, he wasn't going to lose the boy before he found out.

His train was scheduled to leave in twenty minutes' time. The room he had vacated at the city hotel a few hours back must have been taken up already. He searched the boy's belongings and didn't find a ticket. His mind made up, Mark lifted the young boy's backpack to one shoulder and picked up his unconscious body in his arms and made his way through the mess and screaming voices and jostling people at the site of explosion, towards the train that was filling up a few platforms away.

The boy didn't have a ticket for the journey, but such trivialities, Mark knew, could be dealt with in time.

--

The cabin he occupied was, to Mark's great relief, entirely empty. Laying down the unconscious boy in one of the lower bunks, he settled by the window on the opposite bunk, and pulled out the harmonica from his own backpack as the train started leaving the platform. As music soothed out the rest of the senses again, he started taking account of his life so far.

He had spent a month in the city he was now leaving. It had given him nothing - no clue, no link that might lead to anything substantial. The only people who had individually spoken to him were the aggressive madman on the first day, and the young woman called Mala Das one afternoon at a metro station. Mala Das. It was strange to have run into her again, on this last day. He hadn't expected it, indeed, he had forgotten about her entirely all these days. But as he had sat at a bench at the railway station, watching curiously while hordes of friends and relatives crowded together to bid goodbye to would-be passengers, he had been suddenly struck with the awareness of the fact that there was not a person in this city, none in the world, to be expected to bid him goodbye before a journey. It filled him with a sense of melancholy – he wondered if it was a sign of ageing. That's when he remembered Mala Das again, because she was the only person in the city he could put a name to. Everyone else was a nameless face, merging into a faceless entity that became a crowd that became a city, an alien city. Could he have called her a friend? But their acquaintance had been too little, she was evidently not a part of his past, and he had more important callings. And then suddenly, he spotted her in the crowds, right there, at the railway station.

Mark did not know if it was a coincidence. On their first encounter, he had tried to notice if there was anything extraordinary about Mala. It had become one of his natural reflexes. He couldn't have intruded into her mind directly without her feeling it, but he had used his intuition, and it hadn't registered anything too unusual. He did find her slightly different from other women, but that, he had reasoned, might have been because he also found her vaguely attractive, and because she had spoken to him. It could've been the usual difference between one human being and another.

And so they had run into each other again. She had come to see off a few friends of her mother, she said. He told her, conversationally, that he was leaving the city, possibly for ever, and she wished him good luck. He noticed that alongside the polite – almost charming – affability, she was also trying to give off vibes of not being further interested in him or his life, and although it pricked at his ego, his mind was too full of anticipation for his unknown future to be more deeply affected by her indifference. At least she wasn't a threat, not like the young boy lying unconscious opposite him even now, whose strange brainwaves had resulted in the gas explosion minutes after Mala Das had drifted away into the crowds.

Right after the explosion, Mark had noticed from the corner of his eye Mala Das, who seemed to have twisted an ankle, drag herself away, with some effort, from the site. Nothing too bad, she'll be fine, he had thought for a second, and put her off his mind. His attention, and indeed alarm, was captured by the young backpacker who had fallen to the ground in front of him by the impact of the explosion and was now trying to get back on his feet. Mark couldn't recall having seen the young man before, but there he was, staring at him with a mixed expression of helplessness and what could only be called suspicion. Was he an adversary, was he trying to hurt him, did he know Mark's true identity? All he could be sure of was that the explosion had hit the boy physically, and he was weak. So Mark did what he thought was best – spread a smile over his face, prepared his mind for a battering-ram intrusion, and reached out his hand.

--

It took another half an hour for the boy to come to his senses. He groaned and half-opened his eyelids, and the next moment he was bolt upright on his bunk, staring wildly around himself and then at Mark, who removed the harmonica from his mouth and turned towards his hostage. There was fear and confusion the boy's eyes.

'I'm on a train!' he almost shouted at Mark, accusatively. 'Where are you taking me?'

There was a decided calmness in Mark's voice when he spoke. 'This is the Gitanjali Express. I'm going to Bombay.'

'Why the fuck are you taking me to Bombay?'

'I'm not,' Mark shrugged. 'You're not confined, you are welcome to leave whenever you like. I just want you to answer a few questions.'

'Huh?!'

There was no point making excuses. He said, flatly, 'You caused that LPG gas explosion at the station.'

'What bullshit!' yelled the boy, incredulously. Then his expression froze for a split second and subsequently distorted into one of pained confusion, as if he was trying to remember something not part of his own memory. 'My head feels…' he touched his temple with his right hand, thoughtfully, '…raw.'

There was no pretension in his surprise, Mark noticed, and it made him feel guilty once more. 'You've been shaken up pretty bad,' he said to the boy soothingly. 'Make sure you get plenty of rest.'

The boy turned to face him directly and narrowed his eyes to slits. 'Who are you?'

'My name is Mark Middleton.'

'Yeah right! And my name is Kurt Cobain,' smirked the boy and rolled his eyes.

It was Mark's turn to be confused. He could feel the disbelief and sarcasm in the young boy's voice, but he couldn't place its source. After a few seconds, he carefully chose his words. 'Is it?'

There was a moment of uneasy silence as the two men, younger and older, locked each other in a stern glare of deep wariness and suspicion, each of them trying to mentally get one step ahead of the incomprehensible other. An unassuming fruit vendor who had just stepped into the corridor of the compartment at the moment suddenly slipped on nothing in particular and set half of his wares flying out of the open door of the speeding train. Mark was fighting hard to check the impulse to break into the boy's mind already, it would be so much easier – but no, the boy would notice. After a while, the boy broke the gaze and threw up his hands in the air.

'Okay. Cool. The joke's on me, right? Out with it.'

Taking care to maintain the same flat tone of voice, Mark replied, 'I'm not joking.'

'You must be crazy then!' exclaimed the boy. 'You don't know who Mark Middleton is, do you?'

'No. Tell me.'

The boy opened his mouth, closed it, took some time to frame his response, and began to speak. 'Well, Mark Middleton was the lead singer of the Irish alt-rock band the Statues. They were crazily famous in the 90s… even now… you won't find one boy of my generation who hasn't heard them! They got even more famous when Mark Middleton died, like, two years ago. It was a crazy death, y'know? They were at the peak of their career… and this one night, Mark just loaded up on drugs and drove his car off a cliff in Nevada. More than a hundred feet of fall! They could only recover his mangled corpse! It's probably the biggest tragedy in modern rock history! His label released a CD of songs he'd recorded for the next album on the anniversary of his death… he was planning to go solo… and you just have to hear the shit, y'know? It'll drive you to tears, completely! Fantastic stuff!'

'I hadn't known of any of this before,' said Mark, slowly, a few seconds after the boy had finished.
'No shit, dude! You're fuckin' nuts. I don't even know why you've kidnapped me…'

But Mark Middleton wasn't listening to him any more. 'I am sorry to hear about this man's death. Are you close to his family? Could you help me get in touch them?'

'What the fuck, why'd I be close to his family?'

'I'm sorry,' he didn't understand this. 'You seem to know quite a lot about him.'

'This is common knowledge, man! Everyone knows about Mark Middleton! He was a fuckin' celebrity! Have you been living under a rock for the last century?'

'Worse,' Mark couldn't help but grimace. 'I'd been hit by an aeroplane. Apparently. Complete loss of memory.'

'You're giving me shit again, aren't you?' the boy raised an eyebrow.

'No. It was in the newspapers a few months back. I'm not carrying a copy, but then, I didn't expect to be required to present evidence,' he said plainly.

The boy reflected for some time. 'Now that I think about it,' he finally spoke, 'there was something like that in the papers.' He added with an apologetic smile, 'I didn't read it too carefully, of course.' Mark said nothing.
'So you are that guy? Damn cool, eh? Why are you going to Bombay, then?'

'It seems to be the biggest city in the vicinity,' Mark shrugged. 'Calcutta didn't seem to trigger anything in me, perhaps a bigger place would. If it doesn't, I'll go somewhere else. I have a bit of money, as long as it lasts. After that I'll think up some other plan. To a man with no strings, none of it makes much of a difference.'

'Damn cool, man,' nodded the boy admiringly. 'And why did you have to kidnap me then? Don't give me shit this time.'

'Because you caused…' Mark started stating the obvious again, but stopped himself midway. The boy was evidently not aware of his powers, and persistence may reveal his own powers, which he wasn't ready to give away to a stranger. 'Also because… I thought you needed help. I felt guilty to leave you lying there, since you evidently had nobody else with you. Complete strangers had rescued me too, after my accident, or I wouldn't live to see this day. It wasn't the wisest move on my part, I admit.'

The boy looked at him in wonder. 'And so I'm being taken to Bombay with you now.'

'You're being taken nowhere. You refuse to have anything to do with the explosion, you're fit enough to walk – you can leave any time,' said Mark. 'But since I had attempted to "kidnap" you, I suppose you won't bother to tell me your name or where you were going, before you leave?'

'My name? Oh, Moses. Moses Putatunda. And I wasn't really going anywhere… oh, I don't know. Could've gone to Bombay.' Here the boy looked out of the cabin window, a little uncertainly, at dusk descending over the expanse of lush countryside through which the train was now passing. Then he eased into his seat. He seemed to have decided to stay, or at least, not leave immediately.
'Y'see, I've got a bit of money too, and I just wanted to go out and see the world. Backpack a bit, hitch rides, sleep in motels, spend my nights under the stars, listen to all my favourite bands live… the ones that are still around that is, fuck a couple of hot chicks, things like that.' The boy smiled sheepishly at him.

Despite his indifference, the older man's face broke into a smile. Typical young boy dreams, he thought, and this boy was just embarking on an opportunity to live them all out. Even during the intense exchange they were engaged in minutes ago, the momentary gaze of longing that he had cast at the ample posterior of one of the passing female passengers hadn't escaped Mark's notice. He was just a young boy, easily distracted by life's excesses, unaware of the powers he possessed and not in control of them… almost vulnerable in his naivete. Oh, he was street-smart and exuded a roguish charm and had surely seen his share of life, but there were so many things he did not know of, so many things he would refuse to believe. Mark was surprised by a surge of filial concern that seemed to rise in his mind for this charming young stranger, where about an hour ago there had been dislike and suspicion.

'My headache's getting worse, I think I'll go back to sleep. Wake me up when the TT comes, I already have a perfect story cooked up for him. You could be my elder brother,' grinned Moses, and Mark noticed his voice sounded tired. 'In the meantime, why don't you check out some music by the Statues? I have some in my iPod, I'm sure you'd love them!'

'I'm sure I would,' said Mark, returning the smile.

--

An hour later, the boy was still asleep. Mark Middleton put the harmonica to his lips, stared out at the darkness that had now fallen over the scenery outside the window, and began to play the notes of Journeys with Strangers, the haunting, ethereal number that had catapulted an obscure Irish rock band called the Statues to instant fame a decade before he came to consciousness.

--