Indian trains have their complement of traveling buskers, who make their money by singing songs wandering from compartment to compartment. One of my enduring memories of these bauls of the rails was from a train journey some fifteen years ago. This was on a school trip to a science camp at Tarapur, a town along the Maharashtra Gujarat border, on the Arabian sea. This was also to be my first encounter with Bombay.

It was in between Pune and Bombay, where the train barrels in and out of the darkness and rainy light of the Western Ghat tunnels, a young boy and a older girl, who still was not much older than I was then, i.e., 12 years old, suddenly appeared in the compartment, with two pieces of hard slate that they used like cymbals, like clappers, singing old Hindi movie songs. I now don't remember the songs they sang or their faces but I remember being struck with some kind of a dumb pain after they got off at the next station to get into the next compartment. One of our teachers told us, in English, not to acknowledge their presence in the compartment, for otherwise we would have to give them money.

So you pretend that they are not there in the aisle, you pretend that the hill scenery outside the window is more compelling than their bird like throats bobbing up and down, their eyes bright with half-hunger, and their singing - musically not smooth but a still grenade of pain tunneling down your ear, and primed to explode anytime you recall that journey. If in the West kids lose their innocence to the flame of desire then in the East, this flame that burns away the pretense of innocence is that of a naked and helpless witnessing.

I wouldn't have remembered all this tonight, except I got to YouTubing for songs of a Indian folk-rock band "Euphoria", and ran into this music video for "Maaeri", primarily made on a train in India. If you see this, imagine those small two birds (who still exist), as they clap pieces of rock to produce a beat, and sign old Hindi film songs up and down on that Western Railway line, a funeral pyre for innocence.