Station Announcement
"Attention passengers: The 17:45 truth-bound express is delayed. Kindly wait with patience; the facts will arrive soaked but intact."
The newsroom had smelled of instant coffee, fatigue, and ambition when Ananya Das received the assignment.Her editor, a man who measured compassion in column inches, had waved a folder at her desk."Kerala floods, human interest. Need local colour, not statistics. Don't get poetic, just find someone crying.""Someone crying," she repeated, unsure if he was joking.He wasn't.
Two days later she was in Kochi again — the same city where, years earlier, she'd photographed a group of strangers stranded in the rain. That picture had earned her a small award and a larger unease. It had followed her online, cropped and reposted as "The Night of Waiting."People loved to share tragedy as long as it wasn't theirs.
Now the monsoon had returned, heavier, angrier.Ananya stepped out of the taxi into knee-deep water, camera bag held above her shoulder like an offering. The streets smelled of mud and petrol. Boats moved where buses once had. The city looked both drowned and defiant.
She began walking toward a relief camp set up in a school. The rain came sideways, blurring faces, dissolving edges.Through her lens, she saw men forming human chains to rescue children, women cooking on makeshift stoves, volunteers handing out bottled hope.Everything was cinematic, heartbreaking, beautiful in the way suffering becomes when observed from the right distance.She hated that she knew how to frame it.
Inside the camp, ceiling fans turned lazily over rows of mats. A child slept clutching a plastic toy boat.Ananya crouched to photograph him. Then she stopped.The click felt intrusive, almost violent.She lowered the camera.
A man distributing tea noticed her hesitation. "Media?""Yes.""Then write that we are fine. People keep showing our misery; no one shows how we help each other."He smiled without accusation. His shirt bore the logo of a local tuition center — Rainlight Classes.
The name stirred a faint memory. She'd seen it painted on a wall once, near a railway line."Who runs it?" she asked."A teacher, Arjun mashu. Free evening lessons. The kids love him.""Can I meet him?""He's probably helping at the riverside camp. Try the bridge road."
By afternoon, the rain had thinned to a steady mist.Ananya found the bridge. Beneath it, a cluster of people passed sandbags hand to hand. Among them was a man in a faded shirt, sleeves rolled, directing calmly.He looked familiar — not from the newspaper, but from somewhere older in memory.
When he turned, she saw the same face from her photograph years ago: the man with King Lear in his hands at the station.Now he was teaching volunteers how to form chains, his voice firm but gentle.
She raised the camera, then lowered it again.Instead, she watched.
After a while, he noticed her and nodded, as if recognising something too."Press?" he asked."Sort of. I used to be.""Still are, if you're here in the rain."
They shared a smile that felt like an unfinished conversation finally resumed.
When the work paused, he came over, wiping his face with a wet cloth."You're the woman who took that photo, aren't you?"She blinked. "You saw it?""Everyone did. It made us look like survivors instead of victims. Thank you.""No one has ever thanked me for a picture before," she said.
He shrugged. "Maybe it wasn't the picture that mattered. Maybe it was the waiting."
She followed him back to the temporary classroom where children huddled around a single lantern, reading aloud from notebooks."They lost their school in the flood," he explained. "So we borrowed this one."He moved among them, correcting pronunciation, translating patience into warmth.Ananya took a few shots — soft ones, respectful. The light caught faces rather than tears.
Later, as the rain resumed, he said, "You journalists always look for endings. But some stories just stay open.""I'm beginning to learn that," she replied.
That night she filed her story from a relief van. The headline read:"After the Storm: Lessons Beneath the Bridge."
The copy was simple, unembellished. No metaphors, no pity.She described the way people rebuilt with bare hands, the way a teacher taught amid floodwater, how children still recited lessons while lightning scribbled on the sky.
When she sent it, her editor replied with a single word: Nice.She didn't care. For once, she liked what she had written.
The next morning, she returned to the bridge. The water had receded a little.Arjun was gone, but his chalkboard leaned against a wall, words smudged by rain:
Tomorrow's topic: Arrival. Definition – the act of reaching a place or understanding.
She touched the board gently, feeling the wet chalk dust on her fingertips.
In her notebook, she wrote:
Maybe we arrive through others.
Then she packed her camera, turned toward the horizon, and let the rain finish her sentence.