Suraj and she were walking down the Main Street, Poorni still in her uniform and Suraj in his pinstriped suit. Suraj worked as a financial analyst, and was on his way to become a team leader soon. Poorni admired Suraj's confidence in himself. When he walked into a room, people took notice. His walk had a certain majestic quality to it. He wielded his personal charm like a weapon and used it to break through to even the most reserved person in the room if he wanted to.
He loved to show off how lucky he was with everything in life. He always felt invincible. And that was the night he had disappeared from her life.
Gomer had watched the train pull into the station when Poornima was driving it. He could see her face in the glow of the cabin light and he could see her face slowly turning sad as the train came to a halt. It was evident to him how much Poornima loved to drive. He thought that the driver's cabin was her dominion, and when she was on her shift she must feel that everything was manageable. It was like she was a different person in the cabin and a mere shadow of that person outside of it. He sensed how this fog of sadness took over her on her way away from the train station. He so much wanted to yank that soul crushing gloom from her person and burn it with a blow torch so all that would remain would be this happy beacon of a person that she was when inside the driver’s cabin.
Gomer had trained with her at the training academy for the metro train drivers. Poorni was was ranked very high in the in the selection exam and he had barely made it in. In fact, the only reason he got the job was because one of the trainees got charged with a DUI and thus deemed unqualified for this job.
Gomer's observation was that, even though Poornima was not much of a talker, she was was very helpful to people who had questions about the work. She would go out of her way to guide someone or help them through a problem. He had got a lot of help from Poorni when they were classmates and it had helped him improve his scores a lot. She had made him feel special and his interest in the training program had spiked whenever he got help from Poorni.
Everyone including himself had witnessed the joy that Poorni had felt when she was the first from their training class to be selected first for the job. It seemed as if that the biggest and the happiest thing that happened to her. And then Suraj came into her life.
Poorni was happy as can be both professionally and personally. Suraj took her into his world. A world away from the demons that bothered Poornima. She moved in with him and and she could stay away from all the situations that brought her sadness. She was transported into completely different world when with him. One where she could forget her past and look happily into a bright future.
Three months ago their relationship things took an undesirable turn when Suraj went away from Poornima's life. She took unapproved leave from work and did not emerge from the house for many days. She felt broken, fragile, lost. She felt like there was no tomorrow. Food tasted like saw dust. Social company felt like poison. Sunshine seemed like acid rain. She shut herself down in the house and refused to take any calls, answer emails or even knocks on the door.
It took a lot of banging on the door and threatening to call the police, to get her to open the door. Gomer had finally got her to see another human being after 60 days. She looked like an apparition when she opened the door. It looked she had hardly eaten in those 60 days. The house smelled. She herself stank. Gomer had brought Monika with him along with another friend of hers. All three literally dragged her into the bath and the two girls bathed her while Gomer started cleaning the house. It took five days of repetition of this same routine for Poorni to grudgingly give in and agree to come back to work. Poorni’ s boss was short staffed and had agreed to letter her back in only because Gomer and few other has threatened to quit if he did not give Poorni her job back.
The driver's cabin beckoned her as a place of solace and contentment. She barely managed to follow the protocol the first day she was back. She kept breaking down into tears. But over the next few days, she remembered how great she felt being a competent train driver. It stopped her crying and even made her smile. When she was driving, she felt like it was the only time when Suraj's absence did not bother her so much. Because in there she was not a broken half but a confident whole self. She was not an incompetent failure but a competent achiever.
Gomer used to keep track of her arrival times at the station near his house and sometimes used to come to the platform to just to wave her by. She was very thankful for what he had done, but was not completely ok with what he had done. The first thing that would hit her every time she saw Gomer was a wave of embarrassment. She felt like he had seen her insides. He had seen her ugly, shabby, crying self at a time when she was wallowing in self-pity. He had seen her when she was boney and dirty not having eaten properly or kept up her hygiene. He had no right to interfere with her life like. If she wanted to starve and vanish from this world, it was her choice and Gomer had no right to force her to change her plans.
The past few weeks, Gomer use to text her to check on her, if she was doing ok and if she needed anything. She ignored the texts for most of the part and would reply on rare occasions. She felt it was right to ignore him. He had meddled with her life and she did not like it.
The next day, as Poorni was getting ready for her shift, she heard a chime on her phone. She picked it up and found an email from her boss. The manufacturer of the city’s metro trains was commissioned to redesign the coaches. The design department’s staff wanted to collaborate with the train operating staff to get inputs for the new designs. The boss wanted her to spend three days every week with the manufacturer’s design team starting today. She was furious that she had no say in this matter. Nobody asked her if she wanted to be part of the project. And the worst part was that this meant that she needed to be away from her driver's cabin three of days every week.
She called her boss to explain to him that she was better suited in the driver's cabin. Her boss explained to her that the assignment was first offered to Gomer and he had recommended her name instead. And that her name was already passed to the higher ups. There was nothing he could do now and that she had to work on this project.
"This is it", she screamed in her mind. She quickly put on her uniform and stormed out of the house. She hailed a cab and ask him to hurry to 21, Boston Ave. She arrived at the address 20 minutes later. She looked up at the top floor of the building. Gomer lived in the apartment on the top floor. Her fist was closed tight into a ball as she struggled hard to hold all her anger within herself. She ran up the flights of stairs and was banging on Gomer’s door with her clenched fist. Her anger was taking toll on the door. The door number that was stuck on the door fell off.