The Man Who Stared, The Ghost He Carried, and The Story I Had to Write

The 36-hour train journey was a capsule of humid air and shared silence. I was an Associate Director, buried under the unique clutter of my trade: script boxes that whispered of other worlds, a camera bag, props that looked absurd out of context. My fortress of solitude.

And then, there was him.

He sat diagonally across. A government-issue man. Crisp shirt, quiet posture. And his eyes—they were on me.

It started as a pinprick of annoyance. Here we go again. The familiar, wearying script where you become a spectacle for a pair of male eyes. I shifted, angled my body away, the universal female signal for I see you, stop it.

But the gaze didn't waver.

Hours bled together. The initial annoyance began to curdle, turning into a low, thrumming fear in my veins. The compartment was a symphony of snores; the granny by the window was lost to the world. I was alone with The Stare. I tried to read, but the words swam, my focus shattered by the weight of his attention. I felt like a specimen, pinned and studied.

My movements became calculated. I ate dry snacks from my bag, avoiding the long walk to the end of the carriage where the toilet was: a vulnerable journey I didn't dare make. Every rustle of his paper, every shift of his feet, felt like a threat. In my mind, I had built him a monster. A predator in a polite disguise.

Then, lunchtime.

The air filled with the clatter of tiffin boxes. He reached into his bag and pulled out his own. It was steel, simple. He opened it, and the humble, glorious aroma of ghar ka khaana "home food" cut through the tension. He looked from his food to me, and then he smiled.

It wasn't a leer. It wasn't triumphant. It was… shy. A little awkward.

"Are you working in movies?" he asked.

The world tilted.

In a single, gut-punching moment of clarity, the monster I had built crumbled to dust. I saw myself through his eyes: the script pages peeking out, the camera, the odd-shaped props. I wasn't a woman to him in that moment; I was a doorway. A doorway to the magic of stories, to the glittering world of cinema that feels a million miles away from a long-distance train.

The shame was hot and immediate. I had painted a whole, cruel story onto a man who was simply curious.

My own smile felt wobbly with apology. "Yes," I said.

He gestured with his tiffin. "Please. Have some."

I took a little. The food was simple, delicious, and tasted of a profound, unexpected kindness. It also tasted of my own home, and a sudden, sharp homesickness made my eyes prickle.

The ice melted. We started to talk. About films, about stories that move us, about life. The fear was gone, replaced by the easy rhythm of a long journey shared.

And then, as the landscape flew by, he trusted me with his ghost.

He told me his family’s legacy. That his ancestors were the executioners for the British. The hangmen. The ones whose hands pulled the lever that ended lives. This was the shame they carried, a dark birthright. Their name was synonymous with death. They were the "low-born," the touched, the ones from whom people averted their gaze.

He told me how he finished school and ran. He ran from the name, from the shame, from the heavy shadow of the lever. He built a new life, a new identity, brick by painful brick, in a government office. He did it so his children would never have to introduce themselves with that weight.

I sat there, utterly still. His story entered me like a chill. This man, whom I had feared an hour ago, carried a haunting far greater than any I could have imagined. It was a story about the prisons of the past, and the brutal, desperate courage it takes to break free.

That story never left me. It lived in my bones.

Years later, when I started writing Hands On The Lever, I wasn't just writing a thriller about a Journalist, Mira, I was writing about that man on the train.

I was writing about the levers pressed upon us.

For him, the lever was a legacy of shame. For my character, Mira, the lever is her grief, her powerlessness. The world expects her to be a journalist with steaming stories. But she makes a choice. She decides to put her own hands on the lever of her destiny.

That is the journey so many of us know. The moment we stop being defined by the story someone else has written for us—whether it's a stare on a train, a family name, or a devastating loss—and we decide to write our own.

This book is my love letter to everyone who has ever had to reinvent themselves to survive. To every woman who has been underestimated and has used that as her fuel. It’s a heart-pounding thriller, but its soul is that conversation on a train—a story about the ghosts we carry, and the incredible strength it takes to finally, gently, or fiercely, set them free.

Jyothi Gupta