Note not so deadly

Traveling on a train I woke up in my upper berth. I had a long day in the office. The paperback I was reading fell off my chest. It was semi dark with a night lamp on in the aisle. The train was picking up some good speed. I saw a young girl on the bottom berth rose and picked up the book. I was afraid she saw the note that would have slipped out of my book. I took back the book from her hastily and looked for that. Lo, it was not there. Did she take it? Again when I looked down she was not found. Maybe she got down at the station we just passed, or she might be in the bathroom. I jumped down from my berth and quickly checked for her baggage. It was in place. I checked the bathroom and found it was unoccupied.

My heart raced. That note was important to me. If the contents leaked my future as well as my company’s shareholders’ would be in jeopardy. I was on the board of a company. I couldn't imagine our shares plummet, come next morning, all because of me. It was already 10 pm.

The ticket examiner walked into the coach from the adjacent compartment through the connecting duct. I asked him about the lady passenger in the bottom berth. From the sheet he had in his hand he read out the name as Ms.Rita and also disclosed she was bound for the same place where I was going to.

Surely she must have been a spy engaged by our rival company or a decoy planted by my co-directors to fail me out of jealousy. Quickly I opened my laptop. I scanned my mail box. Then and there I emailed my assistant to text me the complete profile of any girl with the given name of Rita in our payrolls.

Dinner had just arrived. The pantry man set a second tray on the lower berth obviously for the now absent Rita. She reappeared from nowhere as if her food beckoned her. She started eating quietly. I made some noises to start a small conversation. She did not respond until she had pushed the empty tray right under her berth. Oh Boy, she must have been really hungry. After a while she smiled at me. That was a beautiful smile, but all her feigned innocence was yet showing. I asked her whether she did find a note slipped out of my book when it had fallen down. She confessed that the note had really interested her and so she gave it to her cousin who was traveling in the same compartment.

I asked her why she did that. I was surprised at her nonchalant answer: That she found some pure poetry in it, and since her cousin happened to be an editor of poetry for an online literary journal she wondered why not she shared the pleasure with her. She said she was sure her cousin would post it from her laptop for the benefit of the poetry lovers even by then.

I took from Rita her cousin’s berth number. I dashed toward the other end of the compartment following the latter’s seat number. Lying in repose, a stout girl in her mid thirties was reading a book. I asked her to return the note that Rita had just given since that happened to be my property. She said she tore it down into pieces and used the same to clean the food counter lying in the aisle. Then she helped me out with a hint that the torn pieces of the note might have been collected by the pantry staff along with the empty food trays.

Hearing the same I heaved a sigh of relief for her action saved my company’s future. Next I asked Rita’s rotund cousin what she might have posted in her online journal about my note.

With a cocky smile she replied, ‘No doubt your note reads well. Yet I decided not to post it in my journal. You know, your writing has no heart in it. According to me a poem should be honest.’

I shook my head in shame and returned to my berth. Until then no one knew I made out suicide notes at the end of each day in the form of poems. I promised myself that from the next day onwards I should be writing some ‘honest’ looking notes for my muse.