The Night of the Dancing Light Poles

I don’t know how to write about it.

It was the night of the 9th of Dec 2005, and I was in the S11 coach of the Karnataka Express traveling to Bangalore to visit K and K. It must have been around 1am in the morning, and I was trying sleep in the middle berth of a 3 tier sleeper. It was cold. Unable to sleep, I was gazing out of the window. It was then that I saw the dance of the light poles. Describe?

Imagine staring through the train’s window into pitch-dark farms though which the train is bulleting though, trying to make up for the time lost during the day. These pitch dark farms are interspersed with lamp posts desperately fighting the darkness of the night with their 40watts. In the night, all that is visible are the small zones of illumination which the 40watts is able to create. Something like floating oranges in the night. Now, some of these orange are closer and some are further away from the train. Hence, when the train moves left to right, the oranges seem to move right to left. However, due to the different distances between the train and the various oranges, the closer oranges seem to move across the seemingly stationary distant oranges. Half a dozen of these differentially placed oranges on the screen make a very interesting “dance of the light poles”.