A quiet erosion
Dr Fahim Chand | Monday October 6, 2025 06:33
The carriages swayed with an almost artful rhythm, the whistle echoing across vast stretches of wilderness where electricity was scarce and darkness pressed close.
Smoke curled into a sky jewelled with stars, as if the locomotive were sketching secret maps amongst the constellations.
Each flicker of dim light revealed faces half-lit, half-hidden, travellers suspended between the known and the unknown. Beyond the windows lay thorn trees, unseen rivers, and perhaps the watchful eyes of wild creatures.
The train itself was never just transport; it was a moving stage for anticipation, where mystery wasn’t a backdrop but a fellow passenger.
For me, that sense of mystery began long before boarding. My home in Lobatse sat directly across from the railway station, a front-row seat to wonder.
At seven, my imagination was endlessly kindled by the hypnotic chook-chook of the Rhodesian Railways steam train as it laboured into view.
Its cowcatcher jutted forward like a knight’s shield, while the colossal headlamp carved tunnels through the African dark, promising adventure to all who boarded. The world had yet to weave itself into the invisible web of silicon and electrons; mystery still reigned supreme.
Where the internet would one day spark imaginations with code, mine was already ablaze, fired by the sparks of iron wheels and the electricity racing through a child’s neurons. On this day, excitement rose higher than the station’s smoke plumes: my parents, Aunty Amina, and Uncle Hamid from Canada were joining me on a journey to Selebi-Phikwe, to a farm where adventure waited beyond the tracks.
My father held my hand as I climbed the steps and entered a world I had only dreamed of. We slipped into our cabin, the whistle pierced the air, and my heart raced as chemistry and physics conspired: burning coal fed the great engine, smoke unfurled into the African sky, and we rumbled forward.
Night descended, the sun’s farewell replaced by enveloping blackness. As the world outside vanished, my imagination took charge. Perhaps fierce creatures stalked the dark, or bandits like those Clint Eastwood dispatched in the Westerns at the Cumberland Hotel. His cowboy legacy still rode comfortably through my hippocampus.
Sleep came and went. Confusion followed. The train stopped in the dead of night; was this Phikwe or some nameless nowhere? The conductor was nowhere to be found, and debate flared among the adults. Bags in hand, we disembarked into uncertainty, only for the train to surge ahead, abandoning us.
Voices sharpened, irritation rose, yet there was no choice but to walk toward a distant, invisible station. My Uncle Hamid grumbled as he hauled his suitcase, unused to such ambiguity. After all, in Canada stations announced themselves with bright lights and certainty. I, meanwhile, half-expected a lion to pounce at any moment.
We reached safely, of course. And while the night’s peril dissolved into memory, what endured was my Uncle Hamid himself. An exceptional man whose humour, intelligence, and sincerity lit every room. He passed last year, but his legacy remains etched in the lives he touched. In the end, isn’t life exactly that: our adventures distilled into cherished memories, carefully bottled and preserved against the dark?
And yet, when it comes to preservation, the brain is our most delicate archive, with its shelves easily worn, its pages easily smudged. Recent research warns that artificial sweeteners may be quietly eroding this library.
In a study of over 12,000 adults, heavy consumers of low- and no-calorie sweeteners showed the sharpest declines in memory and thinking, the equivalent of an extra 1.6 years of brain aging.
The effect was dose-dependent: moderate users declined 35% faster, heavy users 62%. In chasing guilt-free sweetness, we may be bartering away the very vault that guards our stories. And what is life if not the ability to keep our adventures, our laughter, our loved ones, forever readable, even as the night closes in?