Evening Walk on the Shyamganj Rail Line

I had been following the rail line out of Shyamganj for the better part of an hour, mostly because the light had gone flat and I could not think what else to do with the evening. Mid-May, the air thick the way it gets before the rains properly arrive, and everything had settled into the same blue-grey — sky, rails, leaves, all of it. Not the evening you hope for. I had already decided to turn back.

Then these three came up the track towards me, still in their white panjabis and caps, out from the madrasa boarding for their evening walk. An hour off the leash. They were talking over one another about something I could not follow, and not one of them broke stride when they saw me standing there with a camera — they just kept coming straight down the middle of the line, which out here is as much a footpath as it is a railway.

The white of their clothes was the only clean note in the frame, and that is what made me raise the camera. Everything else was banana leaf and palm and haze. They walked into it and gave the picture somewhere to look. I shot it wide and cropped it tall afterwards, because what mattered was the three of them and the rails running out underneath, not the undergrowth on either side. Off to the left someone was burning something and the smoke had settled into the trees and stayed there.

I had been out in this stretch of country since morning — the paddy fields were from earlier the same day, before the haze rolled in.