The trundle of trains across Old river barrages is the sound You wake to as rain lashes Windowpanes, and thunder Briefly transmutes crape myrtles Into the sentinel gulmohars, Which stood outside your Window in that far country Of trains and river trestles.

Note: It is somewhat ironic that roughly around the time I was writing these lines this morning, to capture that distant sound of trains, halfway across the world, in a different time zone, people were crawling out of a massacare in Bombay's train system. I can only send peace out to the dead, the maimed, and the living.