Déjà vu

This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 38; the thirty-eighth edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton. The theme for the month is "The Woman on Platform Number 10"

The woman on the platform 10

             Ananth was almost sleep, his eyes too exhausted closed in by themselves. He was feeling the soothing cool breeze & his head was resting against the train window, while the train silently made a pass through the villages. He was returning from exam duty from another city where he was assigned for a few days as examiner. He saw a station approaching. It was a small village with lush green fields everywhere. He saw a women turned backwards. She was looking at some advertisement so keenly that she never turned her back. Somehow this scene of woman at platform 2 stuck in his mind. He grasped onto this mental picture trying to decode it desperately, trying to comprehend the strange feelings associated with this picture. He was just wondering whether he knew the girl he saw there or more importantly was wondering whether he was actually sleeping or dreaming. The train moved on & Ananth felt asleep. He felt kind of deja-vu feeling when he woke up after sometime & somehow he couldn’t get over the familiarity feeling with the platform 2 & the woman he saw.
He was still confused whether it was  a dream or real scene. He had a strange feeling that he had been before to that place, the station or known that women. He told his wife Akansha over dinner that night that he had this strange encounter of being familiar with the platform 2 of a particular village station or known that girl standing there with back turned towards him. Akansha asked whether he had been to that village before which he recollects. Akansha told on the lighter side that this may have been your previous lifetime. Years passed after this incident where Ananth had forgotten about this when one fine day while cleaning the store room, Akansha jumped with joy as she had found the childhood paintings. She was so excited to see them after many years. She called Ananth & started showing them one by one. They started looking at the pics. Suddenly they came across a painting of a woman standing on the platform with the number 2. A shock ran though Ananth’s body due the striking similarity between the painting & the scene he recollected while travelling some years back. The scene I was telling you some years back...you remember I was returning in train & an mental image had stuck my mind of this woman on platform 2. I tried hard to recollect who that might be or what it meant. Akansha also had forgotten the context when she had made this painting. Was it for a competition, or exam or just she had made it. It was from her childhood. Akansha said probably I may have thought of a theme of train & platform & women waiting for the train or waiting for someone arriving at the station. They thought about it for a long time trying hard to recollect what that scenes & the painting meant to them. How can two persons have a strange feeling, a sort of connected familiarity about a similar thing? Later years passed they had discussed this with their friends & they got the opinion that this may be merely a coincidence where two people experienced & somehow trying to connect the dots, which when connected may mean just nothing.

      Ananth was a professor of physics, he believed in reason & logic & such things as last lifetime etc just were outside his scope of belief.  Akansha had studied history, but chose to do social work after their marriage & drawing, painting were her hobbies. One day at breakfast Ananth was checking their daughter’s essay about an abstract concept. She had chosen soul & she weaved a story with concept that souls are connected beyond time & space & they will be united in the lifetime as they were in the last or the next. Ananth asked Akansha to check the same about this striking similarity with their déjà vu experience. Akansha said this can’t be our story as we met in third year of our college remember & not in any train station or so?  They got to know each other in third year of college & soon it turned into love & marriage. But wait a second did you arrive to join the hostel a day before the college joining date. Ananth exclaimed yes I came the day before to joining the hostel. So it’s quite possible that we may have seen each other at platform 10 that day. They felt like they were connecting the dots their déjà vu experience & started making sense after many years. Ananth said the platform he saw while travelling was two & not any other number as it was a village & hardly two platforms. They checked & found that the train coming from Akansha’s home town to the city where they finished their graduation was 10. They impatiently tried to figure out the relation between the platform 10 & Platform 2. Their daughter who was good at math said 10 is binary 2.

       Ananth concluded the essay telling if we keenly observe the events happenings in the world, there may be a connection between all things, natural & unnatural happening around us. Some things live beyond time & space. They told about this interesting observation to their friends at dinner that night. But they all discussed about it, they couldn't prove or disprove anything as this really did not matter to them in anyway.  Ananth desperately wondered whether the woman in platform 2 was Akansha in last lifetime. Whether the woman in platform 2 & platform 10 were the same but probably different lifetimes?

Disclaimer: All the characters in the story are fictional & any resemblance with reality is just a coincidence.

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