The Last Station
Nobody was waiting
At the last station
Sign there was none
Of welcoming travellers or guests
A derailed wagon was lying
Away from the platform
It looked like the last remains
Of the skeleton
Of a pre-historic animal
The two rails are parallel
Fret, fury and sighs
Or joys that bubble over
Following the end of the infinite
The rails meet
And that’s an illusion
Unoccupied
I didnot have any engagement
One afternoon
And I didnot feel like staying at home
I got into a bus parked at the station
I didnot ask anybody about the destination
Sometime after he came and sat beside me
He smiled and said apologetically
I didnot ask you for sharing the seat
But I knew you came alone
I am without engagement like you
And I am bored
It’s splendid! He knows a lot about me
We began to talk about things
We didnot know earlier
We gossiped, we argued
And I started liking him
Exactly at that moment he stopped the bus
And alighted
I was startled
I didnot even ask his name
In the din inside the bus
Someone whispered to my ear
He comes this way
With everybody in the bus
But nobody knows him.
Translated by Ananda Bormudoi
Dr. Kalyan Bhuyan, Professor of Physics at Dibrugarh University, is an Assamese poet, writer and translator. He published one collection of his poems. He translated Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind into Assamese.