The Man Who Reads Poems on the Local Train
Every 8:40 compartment gets one stanza whether it wants it or not.
The first time it happened I thought he was selling something. A thin old man in a pressed grey shirt stood up in the middle of the 8:40 slow to Churchgate, raised one hand like a traffic constable, and announced to a compartment full of half asleep office goers: 'One minute. Only one stanza. Then I will sit down.'
And then he read a poem. Out loud. On a Mumbai local. At rush hour.
You have to understand what the 8:40 is. It is not a train, it is a compressed cube of humanity with a train around it. People conduct entire careers standing on one foot. Nobody makes eye contact, nobody speaks except to say 'aage chalo', and the only sounds are the fans, the rails, and forty private phone screens. Into this, poetry.
That first morning he read four lines of Gulzar from a fat notebook held together with a rubber band. Four lines about rain remembering the city. Then he said 'Bas. Thank you,' and sat down and looked out of the window like nothing had happened.
The compartment did what Mumbai does with all inexplicable things: it absorbed him. A few men smirked. One uncle said loudly that some people had no shame. The man in the pressed grey shirt seemed entirely untroubled, as if shame were a station his line did not stop at.
I was twenty six and furious about my life in a low grade way, earphones in before I even reached the platform. I remember my exact first thought about him... I hope he is not a daily feature.
He was a daily feature.
Every morning, somewhere between Andheri and Bandra, the hand would go up. 'One minute. Only one stanza.' Always one stanza, never two, a man of scrupulous portions. Tagore in Bengali on Tuesdays for reasons he never explained. Faiz. Bachchan. Sometimes Marathi lines that made the vada pav seller's side of the compartment go suddenly soft. He read badly by any professional standard, too slow, overstressing the rhymes, and it worked the way home cooking works.
The compartment's surrender happened in stages, and I watched all of them. First tolerance: the smirkers stopped smirking. Then accommodation: the card playing group started pausing their game for exactly one stanza.
Then, unmistakably, appetite.
The loud uncle who had said shame now said 'thoda zor se' when the fans drowned a line. A college girl started filming, then stopped filming and just listened, which on a train full of phones is the highest possible review. The man playing Candy Crush lowered his phone every morning at the raised hand, the way you lower your voice inside a temple.
One Monday the man was silent, just sat there with the notebook on his knees, and the compartment grew restless. Somewhere near Mahim a voice from the luggage rack end called out, 'Kaka, aaj kuch nahi?' A dozen heads turned with the question. He looked genuinely startled. Then he stood... and I swear the fans got quieter.
We never asked his name. He was simply Kavita Kaka to the whole 8:40, and the 8:40 became, for one stanza a day, the strangest little village in the city.
The morning everything changed for me was a July Wednesday, monsoon slamming the windows sideways. The train was even fuller than usual and Kaka, pinned near the door, caught my eye and held out his cloth bag. 'Beta, hold this, I cannot raise my hand and hold my bag both.' I held it. The notebook slid half out, swollen with rain damp, and I did what you do... I looked.
Two handwritings.
Page after page, alternating lines. One hand cramped and forward leaning, blue ink. The other rounded, patient, in pencil, the kind of writing that wins prizes in fourth standard. Line by line they took turns down every page, one poem after another, two people passing a single poem back and forth the way you pass a plate.
He watched me see it. That morning's stanza was one of those, though the compartment did not know. Afterwards, sitting down, he tapped the pencil lines and said, 'My wife. Forty one years. We wrote like this, one line me, one line her, since before my daughter was born. She said a poem written alone is only half true.'
'She writes well,' I said, idiotically, and he smiled at the window.
'She wrote well. Three years now.'
He wound the rubber band back around the notebook with great care, the way you fasten a seatbelt on a child. 'Everyone told me, uncle, keep the notebook safe, laminate it, lock it up. Lock it up! Poems die in drawers, beta. Out loud, they get to outlive everybody.'
Poems die in drawers. Read out loud, they get to outlive everybody.
So that was what the 8:40 had been absorbing every morning without knowing it: one man finishing, in public, at volume, a forty one year conversation. Every fourth stanza or so, the whole compartment had been hearing a dead woman's pencil lines through her husband's voice, between Andheri and Bandra, and going soft without knowing why.
He missed a week that August... Seven mornings, no raised hand. The compartment was unbearable, a room with a stopped clock. The loud uncle asked around. The card players asked me, because I had once held the bag, as if that made me family. On the eighth morning he reappeared, thinner, a hospital band still on his wrist, and before he could even stand, the luggage rack voice called 'Kaka!' and something suspiciously like applause moved through a Mumbai local at rush hour. He stood. 'One minute,' he said, as always. 'Only one stanza.' His voice shook and nobody minded.
I went home that night and wrote a poem. First one since school, and it was terrible... and I wrote it anyway, one line at a time, hearing pencil lines answering me back. It was about my mother's phone calls, about love that arrives disguised as nagging. I rewrote it eleven times. Then, because Kaka had made the idea of strangers listening feel survivable, I posted it on a community wall for poets, and later sent a braver one to a monthly poetry contest, my heart going like the wheels over the Mahim creek bridge.
But first I did the frightening thing. One Friday I printed my poem, and on the platform I gave the folded page to Kaka and mumbled something and nearly missed my own train getting away from the moment.
Monday, 8:47, somewhere after Andheri, the hand went up. 'One minute. Only one stanza. Today, something new. A young poet. He is not famous.' A pause... and I felt him deliberately not looking at me. 'Yet.'
And then my lines, my clumsy, eleven times rewritten lines about missed phone calls, went out into the compressed cube of humanity in that slow home cooked voice. The college girl listened. The Candy Crush man lowered his phone. The loud uncle grunted at the right place, the exact line I had been proudest of at 2 a.m.
I looked at the window so nobody would see my face, and the window, being a train window in July, kindly showed me nothing but rain.
I still catch the 8:40 when I can, though my office has moved. Kaka is old now and misses more days than he makes. But here is the thing about that compartment: last month, on a morning he was absent, the college girl, who is a working woman now, stood up somewhere near Bandra, raised one hand like a traffic constable, and said, 'One minute. Only one stanza.'
The fans got quieter.
The village has a second priest.
The notebook, wherever it eventually rests, is never going into a drawer.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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