She did not have the pleasure of doing it many years ago, and today, while sitting inside a crowded train in the sweltering heat of a July afternoon, paying attention to feisty children and listening to a fastidious man who liked to complain about things he could not fix, she resented that her life was one big mistake. She never took the time to think what was good for her own sake, and postponed everything for the future like a greedy person who starved every day to save for tomorrow.

The train started to crawl and then slowly picked up speed as the houses and fields on both sides of the track looked stretched and hazy. She wished the train had not left the station so that she could take another look at the man she saw on the platform. When she was a child, her grandmother used to hide a coin in a pail of rice and tell her she could keep the coin if she found it. The face she saw on the platform looked familiar to her, one which was lost in the concourse of faces in the world never to be found again.

The locomotive was now racing at top speed, circling around the edge of the city like the tortuous body of a slithering serpent. Her husband closed his eyes to mutter the verses from the holy book, his way of asking God to make his journey safe and smooth. She looked at his face and wondered how she was living with a man who would not even make love to her without muttering his verses first, a man who lived his life in contradiction, complaining about the inadequacies of this world but surrendering completely in praise of its Maker.

She found it difficult to gather her thoughts, while her body was rocking in the bone-shaking speed of the train, blowing its whistle from time to time like a wailing soul screaming in grief. But the face kept flashing in her mind like sparks in a faulty power line. It looked so familiar, reminding her of the face she was looking for countless years, the face which haunted her like a ghost of the past, sitting heavy inside the heart like the epitaph of fallen dreams, buried in the shifting soil of her subconscious mind.

The elder son wanted to drink water, and she pulled out a fat flask from a tightly packed basket, pushing back her dosing husband whose head was bouncing like a ball on the spring. She poured water with the balance of a juggler as the jolting motion of the train was unsettling her hands holding the flask and the glass. She scornfully looked at her husband and felt the urge to pour the water on his head. This man conveniently says his prayer and goes to sleep, while she is always left to stay up and stew in her own juice.

The face flashed in her mind again, and she wished she could turn the train and go back to the station to find out if it was the same face which she has been searching for all these years. The face looked shrivelled and anguished, lines and creases crisscrossing it like a scarred terrain. Those were the heady days of conceited youth when every girl believes that she is such a precious thing that any man who wants her must suffer for it.

He spoke to her, she said nothing. He called her, she hung up on him. He wrote to her, she warned him. He waited for her, she ignored him. He sent flowers, she abused him. Then one day he held her hand and she slapped him in the face. It looked like that same face she saw in the station, the face which quivered on that day in shame and anger of being humiliated, tears rolling down its cheeks, glowing red like fires burning in full fury.

He left the university after that day, and then he also left the country, while she realised what she had done, dislocating a life with one dastardly sweep of her delicate hand. Sitting inside the belly of a racing beast that pierced through the vanishing landscape, she felt despaired in her heart that her life should have come to this. She insulted a man because he loved her and now that insult was being returned to her every day as she was compelled to live with a man she hated.

Her grandmother used to tell her that life could be treacherous, since she had seen so many people in her life to end up wanting what they avoided earlier. That is how destiny takes its revenge by taking pride to its fall. That face she saw today, the face, which stood in the crowded platform, must not have noticed that she was sitting inside the train. Yet as the train sped away further from the station, she felt heading closer to that face at an accelerated pace.

Her husband opened his eyes to ask how many more stations were left to go, then instantly went back to sleep. She thought of her misfortune, how she was going to cross as many stations sitting all by herself. The clank and clatter of the train resounded inside her head like blacksmith's hammer hitting on an anvil. One of life's many contradictions is that people could feel lonely inside a crowd and she knew it better than others how it feels to suffer that loneliness, that simmering fire which burns everything without giving out smoke.

It occurred to her that the train must have stopped at a number of stations on the way and she did not notice because she was engrossed in her thoughts. It was amusing that thoughts were racing inside her head, while she was travelling inside the train, which was running inside the globe that was spinning around the sun. Everything about life was relative, yesterday, today and tomorrow, everything depending on time and motion, everything having its rightful place in the stream of events from birth to death.

Once the fire of youth burned inside her body and beauty was nothing but dancing flames glowing on the skin. That fire is now all but spent, and beauty has abandoned her in a corpulent body, which is growing weaker in the midst of rioting wrinkles, falling hairs, dimming eyesight, anxieties, diseases and a gripping sense of futility. But she would like to see that face again, before it is all over for a life that has come to nothing. She must be able to touch that face, which once had to bear the brunt of her audacity, and ask for his forgiveness.

The train stopped with a screeching sound, like a raging beast brought to a halt on a tight leash. She woke up her husband and children and organised the basket in preparation to get off the train. It was a journey within a journey that had come to an end. But she has a long way to go to find that face. Until then she cannot get off the other train.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.