Stranger than Fiction

Well this is an incident that happened to the grandfather of a friend. Now this man(the grandfather) was in service with the Indian Railways post independence. This incident occured when he was posted as a station master to a far off station in some village. I am not too sure of the geographical details but here is the story( I am going to tell the incident in first person)::

India was at war, yes it was the Indo-Pak war. The village was very deeply located, so deep that many people had forgotten about its existence. And those who did well the war had brought on too many things to help them forget of its existence. But well anyways I was posted here and doing my duty. Not many trains arrived or left the station, just a few goods train here and there and well a passenger train once in a while. The station was usually empty, and that was one of the reasons I was surprised to see this old man on the station this morning. He had a very expression-less, wrinkled face. You get to see more of wrinkles on the faces of villagers in India, partly due to the fact that they worked all day long in the fields and partly because thay had seen too many dreams getting squashed and too many promises made to them had been broken. But still hope lingered on.

Anyways this old villager in ragged and dirty clothes walked towards me. He had three pink coloured papers in his hand. Well these coloured papers were very commom these days and I recognised them very well, they were the telegrams. They were perhaps one of the ways that the headquarters could actually contact me since the nearest telephone was miles away. Anyway as he approached me, my eyes kept moving towards those telegrams, the source of all the good and sad news that need to be told immediately.

"Sahib", he called me, "could you please read these out to me." There were three telegrams in his wrinkled and sun-burnt hands. "Sure", I said. I took the telegrams from his hand and started reading them, inorder to understand and translate the contents to him in his native language. The first one read, "Regret to inform you the desmise of your son, Sp. Mahinder Singh STOP He died in action STOP." The second one read, "Regret to inform you the desmise of your son, Hav. Bhagat Singh STOP He died in action STOP." By the time I came to the third one my hands were already shivering. The third one read what I had feared "Regret to inform you the desmise of your son, Hav. Ram Singh STOP He died in action STOP." Now my whole body was shaking as the old man looked up expectantly towards me. How could I tell him such a heavy news. Nothing is more sad as news than to hear the news of the death of your son.

Keeping a control over my nerve I broke the news to him. I had expected him to break down or faint down. But nothing of that sort happened, he took the news unexpectadely well. I asked him if he was alright and and without any emotion in his voice, he replied while taking the telegrams from my hand, " I am alright Sahib, you need not worry. They have died for their country. I have lost three sons. But I have two more and am waiting expectedly so that they grow up soon so that they too can join the army." I was left speechless as the old man walked away.