The wandering Nepali watchman

At night we women were all at home, Annapurna, Rani, all of us. Discussions on the bags and orders. For the next day.

When Buji babu came in with a stranger. "We can't understand what he is saying. Then we though he must be a visitor to Aparnaamma home.

We all were startled as he walked in with a Nepali looking man who came in uncertainly. At 8pm.

In a difficult to understand Hindi dialect," I am from Chennai, I was on my way to Nepal. They made me get off the train as I did not have some paper. I have been searching since then. It became night. I want a shop to buy a torch intend I will go.

Our village is very far from the main train tracks from Chennai, and deeply interior. It was a difficult story to believe, and yet one could not disbelieve the pathos. He pulled out some crumpled tickets when we asked, and he did have a Chennai Delhi ticket. So he had been disembarked two days ago and was wandering, lost, going deeper and deeper in a place he could not communicate in. He seemed illiterate and pulled out some scribbled numbers in a notebook. One connected. And someone else with a Nepali accent corroborated his story.

He had come from Nepal to Chennai to work as a watchman, and after four years was returning home. He had lost some identity papers. And only kept repeating that he wanted to go to Nepal.

The women fed him. Anita said that he should sleep at the temple where all village guests slept. Morning we put him on a bus to Tirupati, and told him to head back to Chennai, and recover his papers. He was adamant on somehow proceeding to Delhi. He wanted to walk along the railway track to Nepal, and we tried hard to convince him that this track does not go there. He said he had money saved, when we asked him.

He did not have a cell. We could only send him off with prayers. Away from his country, away from his home, just wanting to reach back to his children, baal bachche as he said. With some savings from his watchman job. We have no way of calling him again and seeing if he has reached home, as Lakshmikantha said.

We will always wonder after him, hoping he reaches. As Rani said, if he had not reached here, someone may have assumed he was a thief, not understanding his language. He will stay one of the uncompleted stories in all our lives.

My daughter asked later "Amma, in a city, we would not have responded so easily? Called and seated and fed a stranger with such a story... and kept him at night with us ."