Tell Me, My Love

I have returned after a long train-journey. In the last two-hour stretch, there were just eight or ten people in the whole compartment. We were familiar with each other, exchanging polite smiles if not words while waiting near the toilet, stinking alike the smell of second-class sleeper compartments, running for water bottles at train stations, getting the same packets of food, and helping each other climb back on.

My companions scattered across the compartment included a sweaty middle-aged bookish man with hairy armpits who should have worn something more than his much-holed undergarment; two young ladies, nurses in some city hospital; a mid-forties British couple, cheaply but decently dressed, the only ones laughing and enjoying in that budget group; a military man of about thirty going home, sleeping most of the time; and, a young man with a novel and two textbooks for government interviews.

It was late evening, still one hour away from home, where the green backwater lakes are barely separated from the blue frothy sea by a thin shimmer of brown sand, when the British guy started to sing.

I could hear his voice across those separating walls. Bass voice, not really a good singer, using an old style, a mixture of Bob Dylan or Al Stewart or Cat Stevens. Along with the chug-chugging train, the rickety-rackety beat of wheels on tracks, the evening birdsong and the rush of cool air from outside, he sang in bursts, with pauses while cooking up those lines I suppose, but clear and slow.

Nothing great but I still tried to catch each word with the guilt and delight of a voyeur and an eavesdropper. Grasping, gasping, grappling…for life…with life…

Tell me, my love…

Why do these trees take a hundred years

Creeping growing for birds and pests?

Why do these fools shed a hundred tears

Chopping cutting for men and pets?

Tell me, my love…

Why do these young ones play together

Flirting laughing from God knows where?

Why do these forget to hate each other

Chanting praying for their God there?

Tell me, my love…

Why should I care when I have you?