Life on Tracks by Kailash Chander Moryani is one of the stories from the anthology Stories from Trains. When I first saw the title, I had already imagined a very different story. I thought Life on Tracks would take me into the world of a locomotive pilot, perhaps telling the story of someone who had spent years travelling these tracks, watching stations, landscapes, and countless lives pass before him.
I was wrong, and I am glad I was, because what Kailash gave me was something I hadn’t expected at all. This wasn’t a story about a life spent working on railway tracks. It was about a son taking a journey he was supposed to make with his mother and slowly coming to terms with the fact that she would never be sitting beside him. As I read further, I realised that the train journey was only one part of it. What stayed with me was Kabir’s journey through grief, his regret over things he never said, and his gradual understanding that losing someone doesn’t mean losing everything they gave you.
Kabir loses his mother just thirteen days before they are supposed to travel together to Mussoorie. This was not a casually planned holiday. Mussoorie belonged to their past, to a photograph of three-year-old Kabir sitting on his mother’s lap against the Himalayas, a photograph she had kept beside her bed for thirty years. When Kabir sees the two confirmed berths they had booked for the journey, he makes a decision that becomes the heart of the story. If his mother cannot make the journey, he will make it for her.
There was something about that decision that moved me immediately, perhaps because grief often leaves us holding on to plans that suddenly have nowhere to go. A ticket, a reservation, a promise, or even a conversation you thought you would have next week can become unbearably precious when the person connected to it is no longer there.
What I liked most about Kailash’s writing is that he doesn’t try to make Kabir’s grief loud. Instead, he allows us to find it in the ordinary things left behind in his mother’s room. Her reading glasses are still on the side table, her cardigan is lying on the armchair, her prayer beads are beside the photograph, and the room still smells of her. These are such familiar, everyday things, yet after someone is gone, it is often these very things that hurt the most. The person is absent, but their presence seems to remain everywhere.
The detail that affected me most in the early part of the story was the empty berth. Kabir had booked two berths, and both were confirmed, just as his mother had believed they would be. One would now remain empty. I could picture that empty space beside him, and somehow it said more about his loss than a long description of grief could have done.
Kabir’s journey through the train also felt meaningful because the people he meets don’t seem to be there merely to move the plot forward. Each encounter touches a different part of what he is going through. In the crowded general compartment, he watches a mother holding her crying child close, quietly creating a safe space for him while people push and move around them. It reminds Kabir of something he had carried all his life without consciously thinking about it, the security of knowing that his mother was there and that, somehow, she had him.
I found that thought very relatable. As children, and sometimes even as adults, we don’t always recognise everything our parents do for us while they are doing it. Their presence becomes so much a part of everyday life that we assume it will always be there, and sometimes we understand the depth of that presence only when it is missing.
Then Kabir meets Tukaram, an army officer who has also recently lost someone he loves. His grandfather has died, but Tukaram is returning to duty because his orders remain. When he tells Kabir that it takes courage to show up for someone who is no longer there to see it, the journey to Mussoorie begins to feel different. Kabir is not simply going somewhere his mother wanted to visit. He is keeping a promise to her, even though she will never physically see him fulfil it.
But the part that touched me most was Kabir’s conversation with the elderly man in S4. Until that point, Kabir has been carrying his grief, but beneath it is something even more painful: guilt. He finally admits that he never properly told his mother everything she had done for him or how much she meant to him. I think that regret is what made his grief feel so human to me, because many of us are guilty of leaving our deepest feelings unspoken with the people closest to us. We assume they know, or we tell ourselves that we will say it another day when there is more time and when the moment feels right.
The old man’s answer, “Unsaid and unspoken are not the same thing,” was the line that stayed with me long after I had finished reading.
There is so much comfort in those few words. We may not always say “I love you” or “thank you for everything you have done for me” as often as we should, but love has its own language. It is present in the way we show up for one another, in the small acts of care that become part of everyday life, and in the things we do without needing to explain why. Kabir may regret the words he never spoke, but the old man helps him see that his mother did not necessarily need those words to know that she was loved.
At the same time, that part of the story made me think about something else. We shouldn’t always rely on the belief that the people we love simply know how we feel. There is nothing wrong with saying it while we still have the chance. We postpone so much because we assume time is waiting for us: a phone call, a visit, a journey, an apology, a thank you, or simply sitting beside someone for a little longer. Life on Tracks reminded me how easily “someday” can become something we wish we had done yesterday.
There is another thought in the story that I found equally beautiful. Kabir slowly understands that his mother has not disappeared from his life completely because so much of her has already become part of him. The way he packs carefully, his neatness, and the little habits he has absorbed over the years are hers as much as they are now his. I think most of us recognise this when we think about the people who raised us. We catch ourselves saying something exactly the way they used to say it, preparing something the way they did, or following a habit we once barely noticed. In those moments, we realise how quietly people become part of us.
By the time Kabir finally reaches Mussoorie and makes his way to Lal Tibba, I felt as though the journey had changed him. He finds the place where that old photograph was taken and holds the photograph against the mountains before him. The landscape is still there after all those years, while the little boy in the photograph is now a grown man and the mother whose lap he once sat on is gone.
When Kabir says, “We made it, Maa. We made it,” I felt the weight of everything that had brought him there. Those words are not simply about reaching Mussoorie. They hold the trip that should have happened, the years that passed, the mother he misses, the things he wishes he had said, and finally, an acceptance that although she could not sit beside him on that train, she had travelled with him in every way that mattered.
After finishing the story, I also understood why Kailash describes writing as an “excavation,” a way of reaching feelings that live too deep for ordinary conversation. He draws from people, travel, loneliness, and those unexpected connections that happen when strangers find themselves together at just the right time. All of that finds its way into Life on Tracks. Kabir meets people he may never see again, yet each of them leaves something behind in him, and I liked that because life can be like that too. Sometimes a stranger says something at precisely the moment we need to hear it, without ever knowing what those words will come to mean to us.
For me, Life on Tracks is not simply a story about the death of a mother. It is about what remains after someone we love is gone. It is about regret, memory, promises, and the strange way grief can sit beside love until we slowly learn that one does not have to replace the other.
The closing thought, “Some journeys don’t take you to a destination. They bring you home,” felt right because Kabir’s real destination was never Mussoorie. His journey was towards understanding that his relationship with his mother did not end with her death. She was there in the photograph he carried, in the habits she had given him, in the memories that surfaced unexpectedly, and in the person he had become because she had been his mother.
Perhaps that is what touched me most about the story. We spend so much of our lives thinking of people as being beside us, and when they are gone, we fear that all we have left are memories. Life on Tracks gently reminds us that sometimes they have left us much more than memories. They have left pieces of themselves within us, and we carry those pieces into every journey that comes after.