The one who stepped out of line

He was sitting alone by the window in the rickety old bus we were traveling, and I don’t know what prompted me, I hardly knew him, and he was just a trainee for God’s sake and I was a manager, but I went and sat near him. He smiled, a bit surprised, and pulled himself together so that even our clothes did not touch. We were already a couple of hours into the trip and the city limits had given way to luxuriant wayside foliage of impending mountains. “It is beautiful,” I remarked. An acceptable gambit with a near total stranger. He agreed in silence. “Look at the tree lines, almost a straight line,” I tried yet again, with a clear lack of imagination, pointing to the trees that lined the road. He looked at me closely. “Do you know what is really called a tree line?” I did not know, but I hated my ignorance. Ignorance is something that catches you unawares and leaves you looking like a beached whale. “It is also called timberline,” he said unaware of my discomfiture or blatantly disregarding it. “It is the very edge of an environment beyond which trees refuse to grow.” He was sincere, he was somehow different. He caught my interest. After that, the conversation was basically about trees and – you guessed it – tree lines. In the next hour that we spent jolting inside the bus, he explained to me everything I would ever need to know about alpine tree lines and arctic tree lines. We ploughed through how the altitude differed from place to place, whether the trees ever tried to grow beyond the line, whether there was a definite line per se, and the curious thing was I never had to stifle a yawn. It was all interesting, coming from him.

He took out a cigarette. “Smoking is injurious to health,” I predictably conveyed to him. “We are all cigarettes burning away,” he retorted mystically, “to a habituated end.” But he kept the cigarette back. I respected him for it.

The journey ended, we smiled at each other, got down and mingled with our own petty little groups. There were about 40 of us, a pleasure trip, and pettiness was our second skin.

Later, somewhere along that burning distance of our cigarettes, we parted ways.

I later heard from my friend that everybody considered me and him to be a pair. “But,” I remonstrated, “we hardly knew each other. We have hardly talked.” “There was that trip when you hardly had eyes for anybody else.” She reminded me. We only talked of tree lines, I reminisced.

I later heard that he was a college dropout, a no gooder, who couldn’t keep any jobs, or girls.

I later heard that he had a lover.

I later heard that she ditched him and he took it hard.

I later heard that he died in a biking accident somewhere in the foothills of Himalayas.

Did he go there for his tree lines? Will we ever learn from a tree not to step out of line? I wondered with a pang.