The city in you

 (As posted on LinkedIn)

The City in You

It was a rainy day and my first day at St. Xavier’s. I was traveling by train for the first time. Mom (and I) had wanted to travel by car but my father had insisted that I take the train. Second class that too. He’d told me that there was no point in studying in the city if I didn’t see how the other people living in the city travelled to work as well. I was scared. Those days, Bandra station was really a no man’s land. You got tickets from a tiny hole in the wall. It was a cardboard rectangle of paper – perpetually damp, God knows from what, that had nothing legible on it. Whether it was Churchgate or Charni Road – you couldn’t really tell from the ‘type’ – just the cost of the ticket. The platform numbers weren’t written. I didn’t know that ‘Fast’ and ‘Slow’ locals did not refer to speed as much as the number of stations a train stopped at. (This also translates into lesser time taken to reach the destination but anyhow…) Then the journeys started – the crowd, the pushing, the strange camaraderie that developed with the women who would travel in the same train at the same time – that look of recognition, that smile of familiarity, and the melting away into the crowd. The purse being pick-pocketed at Kurla station and the night at the station master’s office in Kurla (where Kurla looked like something out of a Victor Hugo novel – dark, labrynthian, meat shops with carcasses of goats and large slabs of meat on the tables), the tedium of waiting for cancelled trains, the sights of filth when you stand by the train but then – in that filth, you see a strange, beautiful purple flower blooming from a cracked wall. It was all walled and balled inside me - the fear and the frustration – and what inevitably follows both these feelings – freedom.

After a long, long time, I had to take the train again – this time to Vashi. I took a train after nearly 15 years. At first, it was all very overwhelming and scary. The resistance was deep and walled-up – that I should not have to get back here. This is what I worked so hard to escape from. But it was a beautiful afternoon – cool and grey. Bandra station was reasonably empty. I sat and finished a rather dull thriller that everybody had raved about, played with a cute child who was tugging at my shirt, chatted with a woman who asked me about my chipped mail paint – and just like that, I was home.

I get the strange feeling that something will shift in my life soon that will require me to start again – a prospect I want to avoid at this age and stage. But given that I was to avoid it is how I know its inevitability. The safe house is the spot to vacate. And it’s important to carry that part of the world with you that represents all the pieces you can pick up to start over again. In my case, it’s the Mumbai local.