Those railside dwellings, simple concrete-plastered brick walls, single or more floored, how many of them I don’t have any idea, or a solitary clay tiles roofed shack at one end of a levee of a crop strip, had been swept by my glances trying to have a peek inside one of them, especially at night when silhouetted against the thicker texture of darkness by faint, yellowish street lamps, when the secrets of interiors could be made out at a glance, not a prurient one, not a prying one but just out of an inexplicable curiosity, how a human kind lives within walls. Steam locomotives to diesel, sometimes intersected by electric ones, shuttle pilgrimage journeys to Bodhgaya from South India and vice-versa; the bobbing movements of a topless man feeding coals into an engine furnace still stands afresh on my mind. Without any idea about a viaduct, aqueduct, Roman engineering back then, I hadn’t searched for such grandiosity and wonders but how minnows appear in a rainwater stream, how carps in a pond fed by a gushing one. And something like what lies beyond the horizon within the range of my ken.
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