The Train That Never Had a Driver

The station slept as if it were tired. Only the lamps were awake, humming softly over empty benches.

People said the train arrived when it chose to. Not by timetable. Not by men.

Bilal swept the platform at midnight. He was small and quick, good with stolen moments.

He liked the quiet. He liked the way the night let him think without being seen. That was when he first heard the wheels. Slow at first. Then nearer

. Not the usual rumble.

It sounded polite. Like someone knocking, softly.

The train slid to a stop. Lights on. Doors sighed open. No driver. No uniformed man peeking from the window. Not even a conductor. Just empty seats and a smell of cardamom and old paper.

The engine breathed, but there was no hand on a lever.

Bilal stared. He leaned on his broom. He should have called the station master. He did not.

Something warm and dangerous tugged at him. Curiosity.

He stepped inside. The first carriage was full of suitcases that moved like sleeping animals.

Each had a name tag, but the names were weird. Names of old songs. Names of apologies. Names of “one day”. A woman sat in the corner knitting a sweater she did not wear.

Her fingers moved but her eyes were on the door. She did not look at Bilal. She did not seem surprised to see him.

Bilal walked down the aisle. The lights above hummed like bees. The windows showed places he had never been. A desert with a single orange tree.

A city where all roofs were green. A sea that sighed like a tired lover. The train did not need tracks for those places. It needed something else.

He found the carriage where people kept their voices. Old men selling stories from jars.

A child trading a secret for a small coin. A woman writing a letter she no longer dared to send. Each person boarded with something in their hands and left with something different. Some left lighter. Some heavier.

Bilal wanted to know who drove the train. He wanted to see the driver’s face. He wanted to ask a simple question: why? So he walked to the last carriage

. The engine room was not a noisy, metal place. It smelled of tea and rain. There was a small desk. On it lay a ledger that had no dates—only promises.

The ledger’s pages turned themselves, leaf by leaf, like a tree in a slow wind. Bilal peered. Each line was a promise someone had made and then forgotten. “I will come back.”

“I will write tomorrow.” “I will hold your hand.” The ink glowed faintly. The ledger did not need a hand to turn its pages; it needed a holder. Someone who believed.

A voice spoke behind him.

Not from a mouth. From the air. “We run on the weight of what people leave undone.”

Bilal jumped but did not run. He had the stubbornness of small boys who have seen too much and learned too quickly. “Who are you?” he asked.

Silence answered. Then the voice, soft as steam. “We are the train that carries unfinished things.

We have no driver because no single person steers what so many have left behind.”

Bilal thought of his father’s sandals under the bed, of the promise to take his mother to the sea one day, of the stories he had said he would tell. He put his hand on the ledger. The ink warmed. His own name did not appear. Not yet.

“Can I leave something?” he asked. His voice shook. It left a small fear behind.

“Everything that goes in must want to go,” the train said. “And everything that leaves must forgive being left.”

Bilal wrote a single line on a scrap: For my mother—a morning by the sea. He folded it and tucked it under his heart. The carriage swayed. The lights brightened. Outside, the platform blurred. The train moved without the push of a man. It moved because a promise was heavy enough to steer it.

When the doors opened again, Bilal stood on a wet shore he had only seen in dreams. The sea was small that day, polite and gentle. His mother laughed like a bird.

He kept his promise because the train had given him the chance. He kept it and the memory fit him like new clothes.

He returned to the station.

The ledger lay where he had left it, patient. The train hissed and the lamps blinked. People still said the train had no driver. They were right. It had no single hand.

But it had a very old rule: if someone remembered to carry what was forgotten, the train would carry them where they needed to go.

Bilal kept sweeping. But sometimes, at night, he left his broom by the bench. He walked the platform and listened for wheels that knocked politely. He listened for the places where promises were waiting.


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Final Thought

Not all journeys need a driver. Some need only a promise heavy enough to move mountains—or a train. And sometimes, the bravest act is to remember what you once said you would do.