Rush Hour Taught Me Tenderness
Packed trains force a politeness that eventually becomes real.
There is no polite way to board the 8:47 Churchgate fast, so the 8:47 gave up on politeness years ago and invented something better. It took me two years of the same daily commute to understand the difference.
My first week in Mumbai, I stood on platform two at Andheri and watched a train arrive already full. I watched forty women get off while sixty got on, through the same door, in the same nine seconds, and I understood that physics in this city was negotiable but the timetable was not. I let four trains go that morning. On the fifth, a hand I never saw the owner of grabbed my arm and simply pulled, and I was inside, pressed between a college girl's backpack and somebody's basket of marigolds, being carried toward my new job by a force that had nothing to do with my own feet.
I hated it.
I want to be honest about that. I hated the heat of other people, the wet crush of the monsoon months, the elbow negotiations, the way I arrived at work every day feeling like a letter that had been mailed without an envelope. I bought the biggest headphones I could afford and turned the ladies compartment into a blur I traveled through. The other women were obstacles with earrings. For two years I did not learn one name.
But the compartment did not need my permission to teach me its choreography. Some knowledge just soaks in. I learned that you ask "Kahan utaroge?" the moment you board, where are you getting down, so the whole doorway can sort itself by destination like library books. I learned the fourth seat, the sliver of bench that three seated women will summon out of nothing by shifting their hips in unison, because someone is standing and tired and the arithmetic of mercy says three can be four. I learned that a stranger will hold your bag on her lap for forty minutes, no words exchanged, because you are standing and she is not, and that you will do the same the day you have a seat, automatically, the way you catch something falling.
I learned the regulars without meaning to. The aunty who chopped bhindi into a steel dabba between Borivali and Dadar so dinner would be half done before she got home. The fish seller whose empty basket smelled like the sea and who guarded two seats at dawn for her friends with the ferocity of a border force. The group near the second door who sang bhajans on Tuesday evenings, off key and utterly unbothered, their voices swaying with the train.
I noted all of it from behind my headphones, the way you note weather.
Interesting. Not mine.
Then came the June morning my phone rang somewhere near Jogeshwari, and it was my sister... and the word she said was "Papa," and the rest of the sentence had a hospital in it.
I do not remember deciding to cry.
I remember the compartment noticing before I did. The bhindi aunty stopped chopping. A hand reached up and took my heavy bag off my shoulder without asking. Someone pressed a water bottle against my wrist until my fingers closed around it. The college girl whose backpack had been in my ribs for three stations turned around and stood so that her body blocked me from the crowd, a human curtain, and said quietly, "Ro lo. Koi nahi dekh raha." Cry. Nobody is watching. She was making it true by standing there.
The fourth seat opened for me... Of course it did. Three hips shifted and a space appeared, and I sat down among strangers who asked me nothing and gave me everything they had on them, which was a tissue, half a packet of glucose biscuits, and the collective decision to pretend I was not falling apart. When my station came, the bhindi aunty got off with me.
It was not her station.
She walked me to the taxi line, put me in a cab, told the driver the name of the hospital like a woman who would personally find him if he took the long way, and was gone before I could say anything.
I never learned her name. My father recovered... She has no idea.
The city has no room for kindness, so kindness learned to travel light, stand on one foot, and hold on to the railing.
Something changed after that morning, and it embarrasses me how simple it was.
I took the headphones off.
That was the whole revolution. Within a month I knew that the fish seller was Rekha tai, that the bhajan group had lost a member to a transfer to Pune and mourned her like a death, that the vegetables aunty's daughter was getting married in November and half the compartment was invited, including, somehow, me. I stood in a hall in Malad that winter eating wedding food beside women I had only ever seen sitting down, and we kept laughing because none of us recognized each other at first, standing still, in silk, unswayed by any train.
I became a puller of arms myself. That is the part I am proudest of. When the train slows into the platform and someone is running for the door in the wrong footwear with the wrong bag, my hand goes out now without consulting me. I have pulled in students and grandmothers and once a bride in full mehndi, and every time, the same feeling: this is the politeness that stopped being politeness. Forced courtesy, repeated ten thousand times, quietly composts into love. Nobody announces it. You just look up one day and find you belong to people whose names you mostly do not know.
I had been reading essays about writing at the time, including one on why safe poems lose, and it needled me, because everything I had written about Mumbai until then had been safe. Traffic, rains, the sea link at night, postcard material. The unsafe poem was the true one: that I came to this city terrified of being touched by strangers and was saved, on the worst morning of my life, precisely by being touched by strangers. I wrote that one on my phone, standing up, somewhere between Bandra and Mahim, and later entered it into a monthly poetry contest mostly so it would stop belonging only to me. It did not win... The bhindi aunty would not have cared. Half done before you get home, that was her whole philosophy, and it turns out it works for dinner and for grief and for poems.
People who do not live here ask me how I bear the trains, and I never know how to explain that the trains are where I learned tenderness, actual tenderness, the kind with elbows in it. Loneliness in a city is real, I have written about that too, but it was never on the 8:47. Nobody is lonely at the fourth seat.
Most evenings now I get the window. I look out at the backs of buildings, the laundry lines, the boys playing cricket in gaps the city forgot to fill, and I feel the compartment breathing behind me, chopping and singing and holding each other's bags. Somewhere near Jogeshwari, every single time... my heart does a small thing I have stopped trying to name.
The train slows. A woman runs for the door.
My hand is already out.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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