trains (bombay)

A year ago, here in Oxford on a summer day much like yesterday's--class, students, a field trip to a museum, and then a sudden cascade of calls and text messages--there's been an explosion on the Tube. The rest of the day surrounded by worried people making phone calls, checking on family and friends and friends of friends. Yesterday the process repeated itself all over again, and again ended with relief: all the loved ones are safe.

The station names all so familiar: once upon a January I had a whole string of them memorised, especially from Bandra to Goregaon, so I could count them down one by one and position myself to step off at the right stop. The trains were the most intimate way I experienced the city, since R and I would always part ways on the platform, and I'd head to the ladies' car for the duration of our journey. Up until my last couple of days there, the trains were just about the only place in Bombay where I wasn't accompanied by someone, the only place I moved unmediated, as a solo foreigner. I've always had a strange penchant for big public transport systems--the Tube, the subway, the Metro, Istanbul's ferries and trams-- I love the quick encounters, and passing glances, the people-watching opportunities, little acts of kindness and rudeness witnessed, and above all the fleeting sense of being a small moving part of some grand mechanism, an intricate social machine.

Many friends (both tangible and ethereal) have written from and/or about bombay this week: uma, thariel (1, 2), buchu, amitava, amardeep. They have more meaningful things to say than I do here: this essentially boils down to a memory of the odd pleasure I took in those train rides, and the friendliness of the people I encountered there. My thoughts are with them tonight.