Every evening, it’s a scene straight out of the Exodus: an endless march of battered railway coaches, bursting at the seams with compacted human cargo.

There is only one way to survive: shut your eyes, hold your nose, and pretend not to feel the encroachment of flesh and sweat against your skin. It helps to dissociate from yourself altogether, a technique employed in near-death encounters. Because, you see, in Mumbai’s local trains, every journey is a small death — the death of personal privacy, dignity, identity.

Perhaps that’s why, when Death actually came calling, we were unprepared. Unprepared for the spectre of that familiar flesh, lying lifeless on railway tracks. Unprepared to face the fact that this faceless fellow passenger was somebody’s husband, wife, father, child. Unprepared for Sorrow to take the place of Survival.

Seven bombs at seven key stations.187 dead, 817 injured. Unconscionable. Yet every year, 3,500 commuters die in railway accidents, felled by the quotidian cruelty of Mumbai’s trains. Surely terrorism took its cue from this casual savagery.

Now, one year later, nothing has changed.

As usual, the 5.19 Virar Fast pulls into Churchgate Station, to be besieged, conquered and annexed by its captors. Regular pass-holders are grudgingly awarded the prime window seats, like regal lions after the kill. Other scavengers settle for less plum positions. And the meek inherit the aisles, until they are unceremoniously disgorged at their stations. The foolish and the brave cling to the doors or clamber onto the roof, to risk being struck down by a passing lamp post or electrocuted by overhead cables.

... contd.