Station Announcement:
"The 06:45 local to Purpose will depart from Platform Three. Please mind the gaps between what is taught and what is learned."
The rain had thinned by dawn, but Kochi still glistened like something newly unearthed.Arjun Nair stood outside the station gates, his shoes soaked, his umbrella bent at the hinge. Around him, the city yawned awake: hawkers arranging wet bananas on pushcarts, buses coughing smoke, schoolchildren hopping over puddles the size of questions.
He felt lighter now that the night had ended, though he could not name why. Perhaps it was the song the child had sung before the lights came back, the one that had quieted the station. Or perhaps it was the way the storm had made everyone equal for a while — soaked, late, uncertain.
He touched the paperback in his pocket. King Lear had survived another deluge. So had he.
The street smelled of chai and diesel. A rickshaw splashed past, leaving his trousers freckled with mud. He began walking toward the bus stop that would take him back to his rented room in Kaloor. A billboard above him announced a new tuition center — Cambridge Plus Academy: Learn Smart, Earn More. He almost laughed. The world was always hiring teachers who promised shortcuts.
Arjun had once promised meaning instead. That had been his mistake.
He reached his street just as the first light cracked open between clouds. The building he lived in leaned slightly, like an old scholar listening to a difficult student. His landlady, Ammachi, sat on the veranda peeling mangoes into a steel bowl."You're drenched again, mashu," she said, not unkindly."Caught in the rain, Ammachi.""As if the rain hunts you personally."
Inside, the room smelled of wet pages and ambition gone stale. A metal cot, a desk scarred with ink, two cups — one cracked, one chipped. He lit the small stove and made black tea, thin as his patience.
The kettle hissed, and memory arrived with the steam: the day he'd been asked to resign. The principal had smiled as though granting him mercy. "You're too passionate, Arjun," he'd said. "Students don't need philosophy; they need marks."
Marks — measurable, printable, forgettable. That was education now.
He sipped the tea and stared at the wall, where his certificates curled at the edges. For a moment, he thought of tearing them down. Instead, he opened the window. The city's hum entered, mingled with the smell of river mud.
Below, in the alley, a group of boys huddled under a tree, their books held above their heads like flimsy roofs. Their uniforms were torn, their laughter careless. One of them — a thin boy with wide eyes — noticed Arjun watching.
"Mashu, is it true you used to be a college teacher?" the boy called up.Arjun hesitated. "Once upon a time.""Can you teach us English?""Do your schools not?""Not really," the boy said. "Teacher comes once a week. We mostly help our parents sell fish."
The simplicity of it — help our parents sell fish — struck Arjun harder than the rain had. He looked down at the boy's damp notebook, pages blooming like a wounded flower.
"What's your name?""Basil.""Bring your friends tomorrow evening," Arjun said before he could stop himself. "We'll see what we can learn."
The boy grinned, saluted with his soaked notebook, and ran off, trailing laughter like a small flag.
That night, Arjun rearranged his room. He cleared the desk, moved the cot against the wall, borrowed stools from Ammachi. He found chalk and a small blackboard discarded behind a shuttered shop. He wiped it clean with his towel, leaving faint ghosts of old sums and alphabets.
He wrote on it: Rainlight Classes – English for Everyone.
The words looked absurd, noble, necessary.
When the boys arrived the next evening — five of them, barefoot, smelling of fish and excitement — he began awkwardly."Lesson one," he said, holding up a word card. "Water.""Thanni," they chorused."Yes, but in English. Repeat after me. Water.""Wat-er.""Good."
He wrote it on the board, the chalk squealing like a stubborn thought.Then he pointed outside, where the alley gleamed under leftover drizzle."What do you see?""Rain," Basil said."Say it in a full sentence.""I see rain."Arjun smiled despite himself. "Very good. What does rain do?""It wets us.""Yes. It also cleans. It begins things. Remember that."
He realised he was teaching himself as much as them.
As days passed, more children joined — sisters, cousins, a grandmother who insisted on learning her signature so she could collect her pension without a thumbprint. The alley became a classroom, walls of brick and light.
One evening, a woman selling vegetables paused to listen. "Why free, mashu?" she asked."Because some lessons are owed, not sold," he said.She nodded as if that explained everything.
The rain kept visiting, gentler now, as though approving.
Weeks later, Arjun found himself at the station again. He had begun waiting there each Sunday evening — not for anyone in particular, just for the sound of arrivals. He liked how the trains exhaled stories into the platform, how strangers met and parted with the same polite astonishment.
That night, as another monsoon began, he saw the tea vendor from before."Ah, mashu! Still chasing the rain?" the man laughed."Teaching it, perhaps," Arjun said.
They talked for a while. The vendor told him about the nurse who had left for Muscat, the journalist who had taken a photograph of the station, the artist who'd drawn its roof. Arjun listened, not realising these were the very people he had stood beside weeks ago.
When he left, the vendor wrote something in his notebook: "The teacher who waited for a different kind of train."
Arjun didn't see it, but he might have smiled if he had.
At home, he opened a new page in his lesson register and wrote:Tomorrow's topic: Arrival. Definition – the act of reaching a place or understanding.
He underlined understanding twice.
Outside, the monsoon had found its rhythm again, steady, forgiving.He closed his eyes and listened — not as a man waiting for redemption, but as one already halfway there.