Tricks to Riding on the Metro:

Warning: 750 volts, danger of electrocution to any human on the tracks, not applicable to see-if-I-care pigeons who are adrenaline junkies or really dumb

There is almost always someone having some deep, serious family conversation on the metro, no matter what time of the day I get on. Sometimes it’s in Tamil, and I unintentionally eavesdrop on who should be calling whose mother-in-law and that someone’s marks cards have arrived and that if they don’t cook for the father-in-law, he won’t eat. It’s in the ladies’ coach that I hear all of this – but that is also where I usually am. On the few occasions that I have ridden in the regular coaches, I hear nothing but the train rattling on its tracks (probably not a very reassuring thing to hear).

The days that it rained, when the fellowship first began in July, we would walk to the metro station with our umbrellas shielding us from light, persistent drizzles. The trains would come coated with a little sheen of gloss from the raindrops reflecting light. When we passed through a tunnel, the white bulbs affixed to the walls would glint off the water too. At the speed the train was going, it would look like we were catching flashes of falling snow that had been immobilised.

There’s a lot to hear on the metro. The near constant announcements of which station you are arriving at, which side the doors will open on, the voice politely telling you to stand away from the doors otherwise you will get squished like a pumpkin, the beeping before the doors close, and the rumbling of the train itself. There are also the other announcements asking you to give up your seats for the elderly, the pregnant, and the specially abled, and the one for bus services from A entrance of Cubbon Park to Vasanth Nagar. Then there are the small, short dictums saying that you should not play music on the train which unnervingly sound exactly when someone plays something (usually an episode of a TV serial) out loud. Constant surveillance or something like that.

But aside from all of these mechanical sounds, the cogs in the wheel that make the metro system what it is, there are the sounds that make the metro journey what it is. The hushed or loud conversations between students getting off at National College. The woman travelling back from Majestic with her daughter, wearing matching clothes that have been tastefully designed. The three ladies who are making plans to go visit a temple together but are gradually realising that their schedules have been interfered with too much by pesky family responsibilities. The girl talking to her friend about a shop she’d like to visit. In the space between the compartment doors, beneath the dangling handholds, across aisles, these little lives, pulsing by themselves, come into being, for moments and minutes before they are swept away with the hiss of the doors at each station.

Riding the metro means being in the middle of people’s lives. All public transit is like that. For that brief journey, the moments between one stop and the next, all the passengers are locked in one fraction of time that contains all of their gripes, gratitude, inner monologues and external conversations. The passage of the vehicle which puts you in motion along with dozens of others also chucks you, in media res style, into that fraction of time where everyone stays until they get to their stop. People on a vehicle together all have different reasons why they got on, where they came from, and where they are going. I go from MG Road to Lalbagh, and another girl my age and build and perhaps name (I’d never know) goes from Vidhana Soudha to Chickpete. We may or may not see each other again. But for ten minutes, I see her little life, in the earphones she’s digging out of her blue backpack with the grey accents, the book she is taking out to read and miraculously balancing with her phone in the same hand while the other grasps at the overhead rail. She sees my little life – the exhaustion sloughing off my skin, the black patterned lunchbag I am holding, my hair that has been put up in a small tight bun so that the red dye doesn’t accidentally bleed into my shirt from the sweat. It’s happened once and I learnt. She grips her book tightly, and it tells me that she’s learnt something too.

It's easy for us – indescribably easy – to allow our lives to sink into dullness. Things, no matter how fascinating they are in and of themselves, when repetitive fall prey to the great and inevitable fate of being quotidian. They fade into an exceeding and painfully ordinary humdrum. Thus we lose our excitement with the paraphernalia that surrounds us – the internet, water purification systems, galvanised steel, and the metro itself. Aren’t all of these things marvellous by themselves? I mean, people actually figured out how to make these things? Through invention? Is the world, as Richard Dawkins once said in a documentary on religion – is the natural world not thrilling and enchanting enough? But it is true that enthusiasm requires effort, and curiosity feeds on time. Children’s curiosity, if they have the inclination and aptitude for it (and most do) is so beautifully in abundance because they have the time to do simply that – be curious. They can happily be excited about whatever they want. No regulations, no guidelines, no responsibilities, and – worst of all – no dulling experience or knowledge need constrain them. And therefore they can look at an airplane or a fountain or a cosplay artist and exhibit that stunning, winsome, sincere curiosity and excitement.

But we, as adults, are expected to know better. We learn through experience, we are told, the currency through which we prove and negotiate our adulthood. We have different rules because our games are so vastly different. We are bound by games behind games, some of which we don’t know the rules of, or don’t know the existence of. The rude awakening that eventually comes is a ‘reality check’ – a blank and unforgiving statement that declares that this is a preset, unchangeable constant that one must only learn to conform to. Since we are such good adults with so much experience accrued over the grand years of our lifetimes, we do not waste our time on deviating from these realities and escaping into dimensions that could never be commensurate with the ‘real’ games that we are currently playing. We live life heuristically. We don’t have to think too hard, really. We swipe our cards and get on at one metro station, and get off only where we need to. But we don’t go all the way to the end, to see how the engines work, to see when the driver pops out of the engine at one end to hop into the other and start the journey back down the track; we don’t see where this switching happens, when the compartments get cleaned, how maintenance is done for the trains, and neither are we interested. We don’t have the time.

When IKEA opened in Nagasandra, they naturally did a lot of publicity for it, and people swarmed to that end of the green line to visit the superstore. I am not remotely interested in IKEA. But riding the metro to work on the green line, I frequently think about going all the way to Nagasandra just to see if I can watch the trains being switched so that they come back down the tracks in the opposite direction. I just want to know how it works. One day I will make time.

[The trick to riding the metro is to squirrel your way into the aisle (not too near the doors) and either grab hold of the overhead handholds or the bars for the first few seconds when the train is departing from the station. Otherwise you risk stumbling because of inertia and making a fool of yourself. No one cares except you, but that’s bad enough. Then, after the train has begun moving, you can place your feet a little apart, bend one leg and brace the other. You’ll have to keep yourself fluid enough to sway with the motions of the train, otherwise if you keep your spine too rigid you’ll stumble. It’s some physics that I don’t know the full details of, but it’s common sense. It’s why more pliant and flexible saplings don’t get bowled over in a cyclone whereas dry and unyielding trees get snapped like matchsticks. The bend-and-brace formula usually works and you can shift around when you feel like it. But still – keep a steadying hand out for when the train suddenly takes a turn or jolts. When you’ve gotten yourself fairly stable, then you can put your head down and listen in to all the little lives around you.]