Dead on Arrival

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.

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.

But once the ranks have settled and the wheels start to click, aggression miraculously turns to amiability, belligerence to bonhomie. Time to swap recipes and stock tips, sing bhajans, chop dinner vegetables into handy plastic bags, play rummy on briefcases, haggle for hairclips with a five-year-old salesman — get on with the Journey of Life on this tenuous, one-track lifeline.

The 60 km crawl home takes nearly two hours. The seats are hard and unforgiving, the windows barred with chicken mesh, the smell of rusting iron seeps into your skin, and the tired old fans try valiantly to stir the stale air. 6.1 million daily commuters. 184 trains. Two lines. One seat for every three passengers.

For fifty years, we have been promised better: more rakes, faster engines, fewer delays, additional lines, foot over bridges, safer subways, increased security, disaster cells, cushioned seats, air-conditioned carriages, electronic ticketing, swanky stations, gourmet catering, piped music, pneumatic systems, sky trains, underground metros, better services.

... contd.