Platform Four, 5:40 a.m.

Secunderabad.
The board flicks its yellow letters:
our train, late by forty minutes,
which here is a kind of punctuality.

A chaiwala walks the length of the platform
with his kettle and his one word —
chai, chai, chai-ee —
the last note rising like a question
nobody is awake enough to answer.

A family sleeps on a spread bedsheet,
four of them and a steel trunk
with a name painted on it in white,
K. SATYANARAYANA, VIJAYAWADA,
as if the trunk might otherwise forget
where it belongs.

A porter in red sits on his own cart,
eating idli out of newspaper.
A soldier going home
checks his phone, checks it again.
A crow lands on the rail and walks it
like a tightrope it has walked before.

And me, with a ticket and a bag
and a reason I won’t say out loud
for going back.

The lights are still on,
though the sky behind the foot-overbridge
has begun to pale — slate to pigeon to milk —
and somewhere far down the line
a horn,
long and low, a sound you feel in the bench,
and everyone, even the sleeping,
turns the same way
toward what is coming.