Cold tea at Tabriz station

The night train from Tehran to Tabriz left at half past eleven, and nobody in the compartment spoke until Zanjan. The old man across from me held a worn thermos of tea on his knees, steadying it with both hands whenever the carriage lurched, as if it held something more fragile than glass.

Near Mianeh he finally opened it and poured two glasses. The tea was cold. "It's from yesterday," he said. "My daughter brewed it. I couldn't bring myself to pour it out." Then he told me his father had been a pointsman on this same line for forty years, and that he had grown up in a hut beside the tracks, where they knew every train by its sound.

Trains have voices too#

A freight train breathes heavier, he said, and a passenger train is always in a hurry. His father stayed up at night to switch the points for the last train, and he would count the locomotive's lights from the window until he fell asleep.

When we pulled into Tabriz at dawn, the air was still cold and people's breath rose in clouds. The old man tucked the empty thermos under his arm, waved once and disappeared into the crowd. I had never asked his name.

Since that night, whenever I drink cold tea, I think of a pointsman I never met, and of the trains that still pass his hut.