Bombay is a fast-paced, even hectic city, but it is not, in the end, a competitive city.
Anyone who has a “reservation” on an Indian train is familiar with this word: Adjust. You might be sitting there on your seat, the prescribed three people along with it, and a fourth and a fifth person will loom over you and say, “Psst. . . . Adjust.” You move over. You adjust.
It is a crowded city, used to living with crowds. In our building in Boston, people found it strange when Ana’s mother came to live with us for six months in our one-bedroom apartment.
“Do you really get along with your mother-in-law? I can barely stand mine”, the neighbor says with a mixture of disgust and awe.
Nobody in Bombay asked us how many people were going to live with us in our apartment; it was taken for granted that we would have relatives, friends, and friends of friends coming to stay with us, and how we would put them up was our problem.
I recall a magazine advertisement for an Ambassador car, the sturdy workhorse of the Indian roads, which depicts what I mean. The car, an unadorned version of a 1950s Morris Oxford, is trundling along a rain-drenched street. The ad doesn’t devote the usual lascivious attention to leather seat covers, digital dashboards, electronic fuel injection, or the trim lines of the car’s design.
The Ambassador is actively ugly but lovable in the way elephants are, with a jaunty visor and a wide grin. Instead, there is a snatch of dialogue from within the car. Three people can be seen squashed together in the front bench seat. A man crosses in front of the car, holding a briefcase over his head to ward off the downpour.
“Arre . . . isn’t that Mr. Kumar?”
“Yes. Let’s take him also.”
“But we are already packed?”
“Have a heart, we can always adjust.”
Car ads in most countries usually focus on the luxurious cocoon that awaits you, the driver, once you step inside. At most, there might be space for the attractive woman you’ll pick up once you’re spotted driving the flash set of wheels.
The Ambassador ad isn’t really touting the virtues of space. It’s not saying, like a Volvo ad, that it has lots of spare room. It’s saying that the kind of people likely to drive an Ambassador will always make more room. It is really advocating a reduction of personal physical space and an expansion of the collective space. In a crowded city, the citizens of Bombay have no option but to adjust.
I am on the Virar fast train during the evening rush hour, possibly the most crowded of the locals. I am clutching the strip at the top of the open door with both hands, my only other connection the front half of my feet. Most of my body is hanging substantially outside the speeding train. There is a crush of passengers. I am afraid I may be pushed out by their pressure, but I am reassured.
“Don’t worry, you will be 65 and you will still be hanging here.”, comes a reference to the safety of this mode of travel.
Someone intones, “The crowd is a little lesser today…”
Alex my old friend once drew for me on a piece of paper a diagram of the dance, the choreography of the commuter trains. The Bombay Central contingent stands in the center of the compartment from Borivali to Churchgate. The people surrounding them move clockwise around the BC contingent like this: first are the Jogeshwari batch, then Bandra, then Dadar.
If you are new to the Bombay trains, when you get on and are planning to get off at, let’s say, Bandra, you must ask, “Bandra? Bandra?”
All of a sudden, bodies will align, you will be directed to the precise spot where you must stand to be able to disembark successfully at your station.
The platforms are on different sides of the train and there are no maps to indicate where the platforms will come up. You just have to know. There are no doors, just two enormous openings on either side of the compartment.
So, when the station arrives, you must be in a position to get off, well before the train has come to a complete stop, because if you wait till it has stopped, you will be swept back inside by the people rushing in.
In the mornings, by the time the train gets to Borivali, the first stop, it is usually full to the brim.
“To get a seat?” I ask.
Alex looks at me, wondering if I’m stupid. “No. To get in.”
This is because the train coming in from Dadar has started filling up from Malad, two stops ahead, with people willing to loop back.
It doesn’t help to travel in first class, which is only marginally less crowded during rush hours. Alex’s brother Ramesh has a first-class season pass. But when the train is really crowded, he’ll go for the second-class coaches.
“In the second class, they are more flexible. First-class, you’ll have some Nepean Sea Road(Equivalent to wall street) type of guys. They won’t move, they’ll stand where they are.”
I mention to Alex a statistic I’d read, about the “Dense crush load” of the trains being ten people per square yard. He stretches out his arm, says, “One yard,” and makes a calculation.
“More,” he says.
“More. In peak time, if I lower my arm like this, I won’t be able to raise it.”
Many movements in the trains are involuntary. You just get carried along; if you’re light, you might not even have to move your legs.
When I ask people how they can bear to travel in such conditions, they shrug. You get “habituated.” You get “used to.”
The commuters travel in groups. Alex travels with a group of some fifteen people that take the same train from stations farther down the line. When he gets on, they make space on their laps for him and have a potluck breakfast together; each of them brings some delicacy from home — the Gujarati's bring their khaman, the southies get their idli, the north Indians balance their aloo-poori — as they unwrap their concoctions in the cramped space of the foul-smelling compartment. They pass the hour agreeably, telling jokes, playing cards, or singing, sometimes with castanets on their fingers.
Alex knows where the best singers are on each train. There is a group on the eight-fifteen that sings nationalistic and anti-Muslim songs very well. There are others who specialize in bhajans (Religious songs), and in call-and-response chanting. Thus, the journey is made bearable for those who get a seat and diverting for those standing. When Alex worked from home in Mira Road long after he left the job, he continued taking the train to Bombay Central once a week, just for the pleasure of breakfast with his train group.
The trains are a hive of industry. Women sell underwear in the ladies’ compartment, huge ugly abdomen-high lingerie, passed around and inspected, the money passed back through many hands for those bought. Other women chop vegetables for the family dinner they are going to cook immediately on reaching home.
The ads on the Bombay locals are the same as the ads in the Boston subway, dealing with indescribably private subjects: hemorrhoids, impotence, and foot odor.
In this safely anonymous mass, these ads can be perused; there is comfort in knowing that these afflictions of the body are universal, shared by the flesh pressing all around.
They too need these pills and potions, and their minor home surgeries.
