Like they say... every step leaves behind a memory and every trip leaves behind plethora of anecdotes, waiting to be opened and spread.
Similar was my condition when I recently went to a very famous Hindu shrine, Vaishno Devi in Jammu. While on our way back to the railway station, we had a very interesting encounter with this driver who was driving our cab, and who seemed to be bumming with enlightening knowledge that the routine had imparted to him.
It happens many-a-times that we know something better, not because we have been reading or studying about it, but because we have been breathing with it since ages. Similar was the condition of this very fair person who had many things to tell us, the city people, who he thought must be only surviving on the daily dose of newspaper nuggets!
Initially, his gyaan seemed to be mere blabbing, until he suddenly switched to an intense topic, terrorism, the moment we crossed a divergence, in which the other way lead to Srinagar. There he went ahead, with altogether refueled blood in his veins and boundless excitement in his mind. That surely shooed away my travel fatigue as well.
This person said that watching terrorists was quite a norm there. Acknowledging his own courage and giving us a reason to raise our eyebrows, he said that he had seen a terrorist few days back, an unbathed, real shoddy, dingy in all senses man, dressed in green and carrying a machine gun on his shoulder. Absolutely ignorant to worldly pleasures and mighty demands, this person seemed to be very energetic, though looked just waked, having gathered information from his body language.
Indeed, that raised my goosebumps, not because the story sounded way too amazing to be able to excite any zombie, but because of the fear of catching one on our way back. Anyway, we reached safely and so ended our pilgrimage, but engraved in my mind is that driver, his encounter, and his very weird habit of a storyteller, which made me enter his mind and talk to his experiences… I still tremble… Oh my God! He has seen a terrorist!
