It is only in the absolute stillness after a high decibel noise is suddenly silenced, that you realise just how loud and incessant it was. The silence brings home the level to which you’d become accustomed to the sound. If life in a teeming metropolis has an unceasing cacophony as its background score, then the movement of the local trains provides the steady bass. Not the gasp-inducing lead guitar riffs, but more the undertone that sets the rhythm. When that sound stops — its essentialness to life in the city becomes evident.
Every day, six million people — that’s six million lives, six million dreams — crowd together within nondescript coaches, separated only by the walls put up by their earphones, where they’ve come from (shanty/one room kitchen/three bedroom apartment/ from a happy family or a sad one/from an isolated space or one crowded with people) and where they’ll finally alight. Those walls have a way of crashing down under the force of chaos, as they did last Wednesday, when the local train services on the Central and Harbour lines abruptly stalled, leaving passengers facing an interminable marooning, a long walk along the tracks or a ride hanging off the stairs of a bus as they tried to find an alternative way to get to where they wanted.
I wasn’t one of them, as my days of commuting by train ended about a year ago. Since I was forewarned by a friend, the 30-minute wait for an available cab (and more importantly, a willing cabbie) and the hour-an-half long sweltering crawl to my workplace along congested roads wasn’t unanticipated. All day long, there was a muted sense of pandemonium, a strange feeling of unreality, that heightened over the next two days when three people were killed and 32 injured in two separate incidents.
The incidents occurred because in the ceaseless game of musical chairs the trains engage in — ferrying 50,000 people to Spot A, another 30,000 to Spot B, day in, day out — we take it for granted that most of us will find only toeholds to secure us onto our ride. In a city where space is at a premium, we know that legroom in a local train is a luxury.
We accept that part of living in the city and travelling by the local train means spending as much time in close proximity with complete strangers as we do with our families. Sometimes we try to make connections with them — through bhajan groups, by coordinating travel times with familiar faces, or by choosing partners for a game of cards — either because we’re genuinely interested in getting to know our travelling companions, or because we’re trying to appease our consciences by believing that these are friends we’re spending time with.
Sometimes, as we’ve seen, the sheer numbers lead to injury, even loss of life. At others, they can offer a kind of safety, especially if you’re a woman. The numbers let you forget the vulgar doodles on the wall, accept with equanimity the drunk who will clamber into your coach or the groups of hooligans and junkies — both young children and older teens — who want to travel in the (relatively) more spacious environs of the women’s compartment. Why then are we so loyal to the trains? Maybe it’s because they let us enjoy the illusion that we’re all moving speedily and irrevocably forward, even as we hurtle inwards to some unknown destination. But the truth is that the trains simply make the city move faster, while we stand still. When the trains stall, that illusion becomes difficult to sustain.
So here’s hoping that they enjoy an undisturbed run, and that their “sound” continues unabated — until the monsoons at least.
This is the fourth of a series of columns that will dwell on the issues plaguing Mumbaikars — traffic snarls, uncooperative civic servants, unreasonable landlords, arrogant cabbies and lots more. Watch this space.