The Last Journey Of The Guide
Some stories start with a railway station.
Not the big, noisy ones in cities, but the smaller ones where trains come in unhurried, and the chai seller still calls out each order by name.
This one begins in such a place.
I first met Hari when I got down from the Mysore passenger at a little town that looked as if it was still untouched by the rush of the world. Hills in the distance, a lazy river running along the tracks, and a row of yellow buildings that seemed to have dozed off in the sun.
I had come looking for silence that weekend. What I found was a story.
He appeared beside me so quietly that I almost stepped on him.
"Sir, you need auto, lodge, or temple darshan" he asked, tilting his head slightly, eyes searching my face for clues.
I waved the others away. There was something strangely calm about him. He looked like the usual local guide in these small towns, with a faded shirt, cotton bag and sun browned skin. Yet there was a softness in his eyes that did not belong to someone who spent his life bargaining over tour rates.
"Temple, lodge, and good tea" I said. "In that order."
He smiled, a slow, careful smile that looked as if it had been repaired after breaking many times.
"Then you have come to the right prisoner, sir" he replied.
I raised an eyebrow. He laughed at my expression.
"Sorry. Right person. Slip of the tongue."
I did not know then that it was not a slip at all.
On the way to the lodge in his auto, he pointed out the town like a man introducing his own family.
"On the right, the old post office. No one posts letters now, but the postmaster still waters the rose plant out of habit."
"Here, the Annapurna mess. The owner shouts a lot, but his rasam can heal heartbreak."
"That shop with the green door. Do not buy anything from there. The sweets look bright, but they taste like revenge."
His commentary had the easy rhythm of someone who had told these lines many times, but there was no boredom in his voice. He loved this town. You could hear it.
At the lodge, while I filled out the form, he stood aside, suddenly unsure, as though his part in my day had ended.
"Are you free this evening" I asked.
He nodded quickly, and a little too eagerly.
"Then show me your town as if I am the first tourist you have ever had."
For a moment, the calm in his eyes shifted. Surprise, then something like gratitude, flickered across his face.
"All right, sir" he said quietly. "Today I will guide you properly."
We began with the river.
It was wider than it had looked from the station, slow and brown, with children making paper boats near the shore. A line of stone steps led down, and on one side, a small shrine sat under a peepal tree.
"This is where the town comes to wash its sins and its vegetables" he said.
"Which is more successful" I asked.
"Vegetables" he replied without hesitation. "They at least become clean."
We sat on the steps for a while, watching two boys argue over whose boat had gone farther. An old woman in a faded purple sari was rinsing steel plates, her bangles clinking softly as she worked.
"Do you ever get tired of explaining all this to strangers" I asked.
He looked at the river instead of at me.
"Once, I thought I would get tired" he said at last. "Now I am afraid of the day when there is no one left to explain it to."
There are moments in a conversation when you know the door has opened a small gap. You do not push it too fast. You walk beside it.
"So how did you become a guide" I asked.
"By failing at everything else" he said with a smile.
We walked through the vegetable market, where coriander and curry leaves hung in thick bunches, and the air smelled of green things and gossip. Every second stall owner seemed to know him.
"Guide saar, temple crowd today or what"
"Arre Hari, you have not brought anyone from the big city for my jasmine since Ayodhya judgement."
"Tell your tourists to buy bananas only from me, I do not cheat on the weighing machine."
He greeted each of them with that same repaired smile, never lingering too long, never promising too much.
I noticed how he walked a little ahead of me, as if still not fully used to company. Sometimes he would begin a sentence and then stop midway, like someone driving over a road with missing bridges.
At the tea stall, where they still used glass tumblers and thick steel saucers, I finally asked him.
"Why did you call yourself a prisoner in the morning"
He stirred his tea with unnecessary attention.
"It slipped out, sir."
"I heard that. I am asking why it is inside you at all."
He sighed, as if this was a question he had kept reserved for the night, not for a bright afternoon with temple bells in the distance.
"Do you want the tourist version" he asked, "or the real one"
"The real one. I can google the other."
He smiled at the unfamiliar word, then nodded.
"I was in jail for three years" he said simply.
The tea between us went cold very quickly.
He told me the rest in pieces through the day, not as a straight confession, but like those films where the past keeps entering the present in short flashes.
He had grown up in this town, son of a man who drove a bullock cart and a mother who liked to listen to film songs on the radio. As a young man, he had started hanging around the station, running errands for travelers, fetching water, helping old women with luggage. From there, he had slipped naturally into the work of a guide.
"Guiding is like lying with good intentions" he said, with a half smile. "You say the town is more beautiful than it is, the temple more ancient than it is, the food more pure than it is. All to make the guest feel he has chosen the right destination."
One day, a dancer had come to town.
He did not describe her the way men usually describe women. There was no talk about her face or figure. He spoke instead of her ankles, and the sound her bells made when she walked in the corridor of the lodge.
"They sounded like a new language" he said.
She had arrived with a husband who treated her like something between an unpaid servant and a decorative statue. The man was a writer of history books, more in love with dead temples than the living person beside him. While he spent his days scratching notes in a diary, the dancer spent hers staring at the river from the lodge window.
It did not take long for the guide and the dancer to become friends. There are some distances that collapse with just one kind word.
"They both were lonely in different ways" I said.
He smiled sadly.
"Yes, sir. And sometimes when two lonelinesses meet, they mistake themselves for love."
He helped her find practice halls, arranged small performances, spoke encouraging words she had never heard before. In return, she fed him stories of cities he had never seen, of stages bigger than their entire town. For a young man who had lived his whole life between the railway station and the temple, it was like being given a second sky.
"And where does the jail come in" I asked gently.
There was a long pause.
"I wanted her to be happy" he said. "At least that is what I told myself. I told her she deserved more. Bigger stages, better life. I told her she should not waste herself on a man who only saw her as background music."
His voice hardened slightly.
"I did not realise I was also telling myself that I deserved her."
He began managing her shows, taking her to nearby towns, arranging programs. Money started coming in. People looked at him differently. Once, a hotel manager who never offered him even a stool in the lobby called him "sir" by mistake. He carried that "sir" around in his heart like a flower in a shirt pocket.
"Success tastes like jaggery first" he said quietly. "Sweet and sticky. Then you discover there are ants everywhere."
He started keeping accounts in his head instead of on paper. When small amounts went missing, he assured himself he would put them back. When bigger ones went missing, he convinced himself he deserved more as the manager. After all, he was the one handling everything, making all the decisions.
"It started as rounding off numbers" he said. "Later, the numbers rounded off me."
And then one day, an accusation of theft, an angry husband with lawyers, and a case that dragged through the town like a wounded animal. He was convicted for cheating, not for love. Courtrooms have their own limited vocabulary.
"My mother stopped listening to the radio after that" he said. "She could not bear to hear any song that reminded her of the woman who had broken our house."
I noticed the way he used the words. Not "the woman I loved" but "the woman who had broken our house." Time rearranges sentences like that.
He finished the story in a single short line.
"Jail was quieter than I expected."
In the evening, as the sky turned the river into liquid copper, we climbed the long steps to the hill temple. The town unfolded below us in layers of red tiles and black water tanks. From up there, the world looked strangely manageable.
"Why did you come back here after jail" I asked.
"Where else can a guide go" he replied. "My feet only know these streets."
"Do people know about your past"
"Everyone knows. That is the advantage of a small town. You can never lie about your history. The disadvantage is also the same."
He had tried to leave once, he admitted. There had been a job offer from a distant city, a friend of a friend willing to take a risk. But at the last minute, when he stood on the platform with his small bag and his bigger guilt, he could not step onto the train.
"I kept thinking" he said, "if I go somewhere new, people will not know what I have done, which means I can again pretend to be better than I am. Then I will start cutting corners again. Small lies, small cheating. A clean page is a dangerous thing for some people. For me, it is safer when my mistakes walk behind me like shadows."
So he stayed.
People were cruel for a while. Children shouted "thief uncle" and ran away laughing. Shopkeepers refused to give him credit. Some homes would hide their jewelry when he entered.
"But this town is funny" he said. "After they talk badly about you for a few years, they get tired and start talking badly about someone else."
Slowly, someone needed a guide for their relatives from Bangalore. They decided to take a chance on the man they had once seen on a police jeep. When nothing went wrong, they told others.
"You know, he has done his time. Now he is careful like a person who walks near a well."
In time, "thief uncle" became "guide saar" again.
"Do you ever meet her now" I asked quietly.
He shook his head.
"She went far ahead. Big stages, television, foreign shows. Once, I saw her face on a poster on a bus that passed through town. For a moment I thought God had decided to punish me personally that day."
There was no hatred in his tone. Only a tired fondness, like someone looking at the ruins of a house that once sheltered him.
"I heard she changed her name" he added. "New life, new spelling. People in cities like to do that."
"And you"
"I kept my old name" he said with a small shrug. "Someone has to live with the original spelling of our sins."
That night, back in the lodge, I could not sleep.
Maybe it was the train dust in my hair or the over sweet tea in my stomach. Mostly, it was the story of a man who chose to live in a town that remembered his worst mistake every single day.
From my window, I could see the river, a darker line in the darkness. Somewhere near its bank, he would be sleeping in his one room house, the cotton bag folded near his head, ready for another day of pointing at old buildings and trying to make strangers fall in love with them.
The next morning, I did something I had never done with any guide before.
I asked him to show me his life instead of his town.
We went first to a small house tucked behind the bus stand. The walls were painted a stubborn blue, peeling in places. A string of jasmine that had dried to a faint yellow hung above the door.
Inside, there was not much. A cot, a steel cupboard, a small wooden table with a framed photo of his parents. In the photo, his mother wore a flower in her hair and looked as if she was trying very hard not to smile.
"She forgave me before she died" he said. "But she did not forget. There is a difference. Forgiving is for the other person. Not forgetting is for yourself."
On one corner of the table lay a notebook. The pages were filled with neat little columns of numbers and names.
"Temple tickets, auto, snacks, boat ride" he explained. "Every rupee I take from a tourist, I write down. At night, I sit and check if the amounts tally. I know it sounds funny to you, but for some people, honesty is not a habit. It is a treatment."
"When did you start doing this" I asked.
"The day I came back from jail" he said. "A man in there told me, if you have stolen with your mind, you must learn to fear your own handwriting."
We laughed, but I could see how serious he was about it. There are people who pray to God every morning. There are others who balance accounts. For some, both are the same act.
From his house, we walked to the old school ground where, every Sunday, he conducted free tours for the children of the government school.
"I do not charge them" he said. "Their only fee is to listen without looking at their phones."
The children adored him. I watched as he gathered them in a circle and told them stories of the town in a voice that made trees and stones sound adventurous. He showed them carvings hidden behind ugly paint, told them about the time the river had flooded and carried away half the market, explained why the big temple gopuram was slightly crooked on one side.
At one point, he asked a boy to come forward.
"This fellow's father once scolded me in the market in front of everyone" he said with a twinkle. "He said his son should never become vague and useless like a guide. Today, his son knows more history than his father."
The children giggled. The boy grinned proudly.
"And you" I asked him later, when the crowd had dispersed. "What do you get out of this"
He thought for a moment.
"Guides are people who walk in front of others" he said slowly. "My whole life, I walked in front while taking people on the wrong path. Now at least on Sundays, I want to walk ahead on the right one."
By the time my last day came, the town no longer felt like a place on a map. It felt like a person, with moods and habits. As if the hills were its shoulders and the river, its long sigh.
On the final evening, we sat again by the river steps, watching women fill copper pots and children trying to catch small fish in plastic bottles.
"I have a question" I said.
"Ask, sir."
"If you could go back and change one thing, what would it be"
He did not answer for a long time. A train whistled somewhere far away. A dog barked at nothing in particular.
"Everyone thinks I will say I want to change the day I cheated her" he replied at last. "But that day was only the fruit. The tree had grown long before. If I could change something, I would change the first time I cut a corner and congratulated myself for being smart. I would change the first time I said, this is only a small lie for a good cause."
He looked at me, and in his eyes I saw not drama, not self pity, but a simple, painful clarity.
"A guide does not get lost in one day" he said. "It happens turn by turn."
We sat in silence after that, each of us lost in our own unspoken maps.
Finally, he stood up and dusted his hands.
"Your train is at eight thirty" he said in his usual practical tone. "I will leave you at the station."
As we walked, I felt a strange heaviness in my chest. In two hours, I would go back to my world of air conditioned meetings and polite lies. He would remain here, walking these streets, telling the same stories, one careful rupee at a time.
At the station, he insisted on carrying my bag till the compartment, though it was not heavy.
"Next time you come, I will show you the temple festival" he said. "They light lamps along the entire river. Even the mosquitoes look beautiful on that day."
"I will come" I said.
"Tourists always say that" he replied, but there was no accusation in his voice. Only a kind of tired affection for human predictability.
I took out my wallet.
"How much" I asked.
He hesitated.
"For three days, sir, moving around here and there, including auto, temple tickets, snacks, boat ride, and emotional discount" he said, trying to lighten the moment.
"Emotional discount" I repeated.
"Yes. You listened to my story without looking at your phone. Very rare nowadays."
I paid him more than what he asked for. He looked at the notes quietly, then folded them into his cotton bag with the same care he used for his account book.
The train horn sounded, long and impatient.
I climbed in and stood at the door. He remained on the platform, hands clasped behind his back, eyes following the coach number, making sure I was in the right place. Old habits are hard to give up.
As the train began to move, he took a step backward. For a moment, he was framed by the door of the next compartment, standing exactly at the center like a figure in a painting.
On impulse, I shouted over the noise.
"Hari."
He looked up, surprised. People do not usually call their guides by name. We prefer to keep them as background, part of the scenery.
"You know" I said, struggling to be heard over the increasing roar. "You keep calling yourself a prisoner. But I think you are the freest man I have met in a long time."
He frowned, as if I had said something mathematically incorrect.
"Why, sir" he called back.
"Because most of us are still pretending we do not know what we have done" I shouted. "You at least have finished that journey."
I am not sure if he heard those last words. By then the train had gathered speed, and the world had begun to slide away in long horizontal lines.
But I did see one thing.
For a brief second, as the platform blurred and the town began to recede, he lifted his hand, not in a supplier's farewell to a customer, but in the shy, careful greeting of one human being to another.
The repaired smile on his face looked a little less repaired that evening.
I returned to the city, to deadlines and promises and the endless race of being seen as successful. On most days, the town by the river felt like a dream I had imagined to survive a bad week.
Then, whenever I found myself tempted to cut a small corner, to justify a harmless lie as smartness, a face would appear in my mind. A man with a faded shirt, counting rupees in a blue painted room, teaching children about crooked gopurams, writing down every little earning as if each number was a step away from the person he had once been.
It has been months now. I still do not know if I will ever go back to that town.
But whenever someone asks me what I did that weekend, I tell them I met a guide who had finally learned to guide the only person that truly needed it.
Himself.
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