Passenger density on Mumbai’s local trains is as high as 15 people per square metre in peak hours – but such proximity to their fellow workers has seen commuter friendships and folklore flourish, writes Jerry Pinto
A young man in a safari suit that marked him out as a junior bureaucrat told me the saddest story I have ever heard about commuting in the city of Mumbai. “Last Sunday, my wife gave me a lime sherbet. My son looked up and wailed, ‘Ma, you never give me lime sherbet like you just gave uncle’.”
When the city of Mumbai sells its land at prices comparable to that in Manhattan or Tokyo, but only offers its middle-class developing-world salaries, home can be a two-hour train ride away from work. Commuters see far more of fellow commuters than they do of their families. In Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Today’s Big Changes, Mark J Penn defines supercommuters as those who travel more than 90 minutes a day to get to work. That’s practically half of Mumbai’s workforce, supercommuters all. Just watch out for the capes.
It’s no joy ride, either. Each train carries between three and five times as many people as its maximum capacity. As Suketu Mehta writes in his Pulitzer prize-nominated 2004 novel Maximum City: “Certainly, if you commute into Bombay, you are made aware of the precise temperature of the human body as it curls around you on all sides, adjusting itself to every curve of your own.”
On the 5:46 Andheri Local, Mumbai poet Arundhathi Subramaniam finds “Like metal licked by relentless acetylene/ we are welded” into “A thousand-limbed million-tongued multispoused Kali on wheels”. This is another way of living and so it has thrown up its own rules.
Firstly, you don’t travel alone. You get together with a group of friends who will look out for you. The most able-bodied will fling themselves into the train before it has stopped and reserve a place for you by throwing their bags, handkerchiefs, newspapers and other makeshift place-markers about the compartment.
Sometimes, that may not be enough. That is when your group does “up-down”. After a hard day’s work in the south of the city, you want to be seated going home (which is in the north). Your station is three stops from the southernmost terminus. Instead of going north, you go further south in search of a seat. You have to study the trains carefully so you know which southbound train will morph into the fast train that will take you north.
In the hierarchy of the trains, the top rank goes to those who do “end-to-end”. These are the commuters who go from one end of the suburban railway line to the other. They must catch fast trains or their commute time will be doubled. If you get on to one of their trains and try to get off halfway down the line, they will punish you by refusing to let you off. No violence, of course, simply an unyielding line of bodies that will teach you to use one of your own trains and not take up lebensraum in theirs.
Next come those workers who live at least a couple of hours away. Not quite “end-to-end” commuters, but, still – in the event of train cancellations – they will sleep on the platforms or in their offices because they would never get home if they took a bus or a car.Those who travel by the slow train are the wusses. Everyone knows they could walk home on a bad day, a mere two-hour trudge from home to office, what of that? The residents of the island city do this at least once a year when the monsoon comes thundering down and the sea tries to reclaim its own.
Even below them in the testosterone stakes are the bus people. They are the herbivores of Mumbai’s commuters. They hardly travel 45 minutes; they almost always buy tickets; they give up their seats for women and the old; there’s even a conductor to limit the crowds.
As for the taxis, they are the last remnants of the socialist system of government in which you were punished for wanting a bit of comfort. The taxis’ windows are at the same level as the exhaust pumps of the big trucks, so – as you sit in the back of a cab whose seats have collapsed – you can choose to inhale the miasma of hair oil and nicotine the driver gives off while sweating half of your body weight away or you can open the window and let in the diesel fumes.
But you can’t complain, you dare not complain. Only train commuters have the moral superiority that accrues during those long hours in a tin box with fans that don’t work and the smell of the tanneries wafting in through the windows as the thunder of metal on metal slowly and literally deafens them. Their right to complain is the fruit of their suffering.
For it’s the trains that have the magic, the trains that are the life-line of the city, bringing food and produce, men and machinery, the raw goods of industry – and young studs courting death by electrocution by travelling on the roof. It’s on the train that you clean your vegetables, sing your hymns, write the name of God a million times, play cards or make a series of endless, meaningless mobile phone calls. (It is possible to learn to say “so, what’s new?” in 20 different languages on one local train ride.)
It is here that stories bloom. The train is a festival of alternative Mumbai, they say. “My train friends came to see me when I was ill,” a young woman says. “They missed me on the train and, after two days, they went to my office to find out how I was. I was so touched because they missed the Ladies Special just to find out.” Or they tell you of the young man who fell off the train just “under my eyes and bounced twice, thup, thup, like a bag of rice and then went still”. Or about a young couple who got off a train that was stranded in one of Mumbai’s heavy floods and died when another train ploughed them under.
Like the city they spawned wherever they sent out their metallic tendrils, the trains of Mumbai have generated their very own mythology. |
