Bags heavy, legs strained, face sleepy, I landed on Ludhiana soil. It was around 10 at night, and shops were closed. Though it was spring time, I had some sweat on my face, perhaps a result of sitting in the bus for 8 hours (with only one stoppage in the way which lasted twenty minutes), a bus that was filled with passengers at all times.

The moon of Ludhiana resembled the moon of Delhi, three-hundred kilometres away, only a little clearer than that. A little, because both the cities share the common fault of being two of the most polluted cities across the globe.

Off from the bus, I ran a quick glimpse over my belongings – the bag that lay on the road, the bag that was hung on my shoulders – then patted my pockets for mobile phone and wallet – then my face for the mask. This took only a moment, and then the bus started to carry on its journey. On its own way. At the exact moment, as if having felt my momentary satisfaction.

Started at 2 in the afternoon, I had expected to reach earlier than this. But roads didn’t like the proposal. So I was late, was already sleepy. I crossed the road (traffic was thin), and found an auto-rickshaw waiting for passengers like me. Exchange of a word with the autowallah, and then I was on its seat.

The engine was on, but he wouldn’t drive for some time: he would wait for more passengers. In two minutes, one passenger came, and took the seat beside me.

But the autowallah would still not go. Another came in five minutes, and took a seat in front of mine. The autowallah sat on his driving seat, his hands on the handle. But foot not on the gas pedal. Still not ready. Still not wanting to move. His head turned as backward as possible, searching for more passengers, searching nearby, searching in the distance, on this side of the road and that side of the road.

My initial emotion was annoyance. What was he waiting for. Weren’t we three enough, so late in the day, with one of us already sleepy? Maybe a tad of this annoyance reflected on my face, but no one paid attention. Fellow passengers in their mobile phones, the autowallah in his quest.

Conflict of interest in an area of forty square feet.

Two minutes later, disappointed, he pressed the pedal and decided to start. Fifteen minutes later, I was at home, reunited with my family in person. After two weeks of my first of the many periodic separations from it.

But that image remains fresh in the mind: me annoyed, and the autowallah still looking around. Every time I go back to the image, I am more convinced than the last time that no person would have searched for more passengers with three already seated inside, at 10 pm in the night, unless it was such a need.

Unless it was such a need.

It is a normal return from college to my first floor room in Hudson Lane. I put down my bag on the bed, and just as I am about to sit, I find a little feather on the bed.

A feather on my bed? Really strange. I remember properly locking the door of the room before leaving in the morning, and there was nothing else suspicious to be found. Everything untouched, just as I had left, just as it had been there in the morning as I had shut the door – except for the little feather.

I try to survey around it a little, before I decide to pick it up. Yes, it’s a feather, nothing fake about it, but everything strange that can be. Yes, it’s the feather of a bird, but the window was closed, and there’s no other entrance to the room.

If I have to supply a reason to this, I can practically. Perhaps it stuck to my clothes when I was out before this morning, and remained there. Perhaps it left my clothes this morning to rest on the bed, and I had missed seeing it. Perhaps it was flying randomly in the air, carried by the wind like a pollen grain, and had entered clandestinely the moment I had opened the door at some time today or yesterday.

But I don’t feel the need to. The need to supply a logical reason to how the feather chose to enter. It’s a trivial question.

A more pressing question is what to do now, once it is here. Should I brush it away? Should I just ignore, and do what I was about to do? Why is it here even, in the first place?

I sit down, but before that I pick it up. I scan it, then rotate it in my hand, and scan it again from the other side. Who does it belong to? – A sparrow, a crow? Perhaps a pegion.

The feather carries a story, and I can feel it more and more as I see, caught in a trance. It was born and nourished in a family of feathers. Its world was a flying world, and it grew there like a tree. A world that sometimes was at rest, and sometimes in flight. Sometimes it was calm and peaceful and dark, and at other times, quite windy and swift and blue.

And then some day it got uprooted, separated from the other ones, and it found it was in a new world now. A world that was larger but highly mind-boggling.

And then it landed here, on the flat-purple world that my bedsheet is. And now, for the first time, it is seeing eyes – my eyes. It’s a meeting. The eyes are themselves a world, but shielded, distant, but attractive. There’s a fear of being dropped again into a high and mind-boggling world.

Everything depends on the hand that is holding the feather. Possibly everything. What remains mysterious is whether the hand is afraid too.