For so many months I have been replaying a scene in my mind, again and again. The man running alongside the train at Patuli Junction as it rolled away…the man reaching his hand out to help the straggler in. Moments later, there was a hum that someone got killed, just yards from where I was sitting. I didn’t have the stomach to look for myself to know if it was the same man running along its side.

I could find no mention of the death from any newsource the following day, or those thereafter. It was said to me that it would be highly unlikely since train deaths are so frequent in such an over-populated country. I was repulsed by the sentiment, “life is not sacred.”

Digging further into research, the only thing I could come to a conclusion on is that nothing is clear or certain. Three news sources reported three wildly different figures. Railway deaths in India had different notations from more than 25,000 per year, to 254, to one claiming a 94% reduction with only 37 deaths by the latest annual figures.

The writing in this book is fragmented stream-of-consciousness, mostly as dialogue towards the anonymous man who was killed. It was painstakingly typewritten on strips of newspaper. I originally wanted the number of pages to represent the number of deaths, as a way to make a statement that, yes, every life *is* sacred– but I could not find a solid figure to work from. Instead, I stopped when I realized I could not hold this inside of me any longer. I let it exist, raw and messy, just like life.