Maximum City (81 page)

Then we walk to V.T., where we find Babbanji’s grandfather sitting on his bag, placidly chewing his pan. The grandfather is an old man in a dhoti. He doesn’t want to talk about his grandson. He wants me to come to Bihar. “There is a lot to see in Bihar,” he says with pride: Buddha’s birthplace, Patna, many places of great natural beauty. I ask the father if he wouldn’t care to take the night train and see a bit of Bombay, now that he’s come here from across the subcontinent. “If I see my son I see the whole world,” Babbanji’s father points out. “My light is here. I see the world through him. I will see you through him, I will see America through him. He is my screen.” And looking at the seventeen-year-old beaming at me, his eyes and his heart eager to discover, to react, to live, and the father next to him, now also smiling, I believe it. There will be many long evenings now, after all the explanations have been made, perhaps after a thrashing from his mother, after a sense of disturbance has passed, that Babbanji will sit on the cot in front of the lecturer’s house in the stifling small town in Bihar and tell him about the Queen’s necklace, about the screen goddess he
had seen weaving a garland of jasmine into her hair, about the big cars and the people living on the sewer, about the English poets with their drink, about the building that fell down and the people it fell upon, about the fight for water in the public toilet and the small kindnesses of the footpath dwellers. Isn’t that why we have children, after all: to see the world a second time, on their screen?

Standing in V.T. under the big clock, where the commuters come and go, Babbanji says good-bye to me. “I feel like I’m leaving home. In Bihar I will meet people from Bombay, people who have come back for the summer holidays, and I will ask them about Bombay, get news of Bombay. This is just a break for me, not a stop.”

I ask him why he has come to feel this way about the city. “Bombay is in my mind because it has given me something to write.” The simple truth of this statement comes home to me.

We embrace in parting. He takes my hand, bows, and touches it to his forehead. And so I leave him there, in the gigantic terminus, with the train announcements booming overhead.

“I’ll go to the Patna branch of
Time
magazine and write for them!” he yells out to my departing back.

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 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 Manhattan, people found it strange when Sunita’s parents came to live with us for six months in our one-bedroom apartment. Our landlady withheld part of our security deposit for “excess wear and tear” caused by the presence of two more adults. 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.

A recent magazine advertisement for an Ambassador car, the sturdy
workhorse of the Indian roads, illustrates what I mean. The car, an unadorned version of a 1950s Morris Oxford, is trundling along a rain-drenched street. The ad copy 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 ungainly pachyderm, holding a briefcase over his head to ward off the downpour.

“Arre . . . isn’t that Joshi?”

“Yes. Let’s take him also.”

“But we are so many.”

“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 station wagon 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, if they push you out they also pull you in.”

Someone says, “This is a cattle shed.”

Girish 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, Dadar, you must ask, “Dadar? Dadar?” And 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. There are no doors, just two enormous openings on either side of the compartment. So when the station arrives, you must be in position to spring off, well before the train has come to a complete stop, because if you wait till it’s 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 always chockful. “To get a seat?” I ask. Girish looks at me, wondering if I’m stupid. “No. To get in.” This is because the train 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. Girish’s brother Dharmendra has a first-class season pass. But when the train is really crowded, he’ll go for the second-class coaches. “In second class they are more flexible. First class, you’ll have some Nepean Sea Road type. He won’t move, he’ll stand where he is.”

I mention to Girish a statistic I’d read, about the “super-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. In 1990, according to the government, the number of passengers carried in a nine-car train during rush hour in Bombay was 3,408. By the end of the century, it had gone up to 4,500. According to a letter to the
Times
by G. D. Patwardhan:

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. Girish 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 Gujaratis batatapauua, the Telugus upma, the bhaiyyas alu-poori—and they unwrap their contribution in the cramped space of the compartment. They pass the hour agreeably, telling jokes, playing cards, or singing, sometimes with castanets on their fingers. Girish 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, and in call-and-response chanting. Thus the journey is made bearable for those who get a seat, and diverting for those standing. When Girish worked for Kamal right at home in Mira Road, 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 abdomen-high panties that are 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 New York subway, dealing with indescribably private subjects: hemorrhoids, impotence, 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, this minor surgery.

T
HE WESTERN BRANCH
of the train terminates in beauty, the eastern branch in horror. On the Churchgate train, past Charni Road station as it sees the sea, past the gymkhanas—Islam, Catholic, Hindu, Parsi—as the shacks fade away, Bombay becomes a different city, an earlier city, a beautiful city. All of a sudden there is the blue sky and the clear water of Marine Drive, and everybody looks toward the bay and starts breathing.

The eastern branch, the Harbour Line, toward its end passes slowly through people’s bedrooms: in stretches the shacks of the poor are less than a yard away from the tracks. They can roll out of bed and into the path of the train. Their little children come out and go wandering over the
tracks. Trains kill more than a thousand slum dwellers a year. Others, who are on the train, are killed by electricity poles placed too close to the tracks, as they hang on to the train from the outside by the windows. One such pole kills about ten commuters a month as the train comes rushing around a curve. One of Girish’s friends on the 9:05 from Jogeshwari was killed when he was hanging from the window and a pole loomed up, too close, too fast. Just the previous year another of that group, playing the daredevil by riding on top of the moving train, was hit by an arch and survived. Girish muses on the injustice of the two accidents. The showoff survived and the shy window hanger, to whom Girish had only minutes before offered a place inside the train, died.

Paresh Nathvani, a kite dealer from Kandivili, performs a singular social service: He provides free shrouds for those killed by train accidents. About a decade ago, the kite merchant saw a man run over by a train at Grant Road. The railway workers tore down an advertising banner to cover the body. “Every religion dictates that the dead be covered with a piece of fresh white cloth,” he realized. So every Thursday, Nathvani visits four railway stations and supplies them with fresh shrouds, two yards each. The biggest station, Andheri, gets ten shrouds a week. The stationmaster initials a ledger that Nathvani maintains and stamps it with his seal. He runs through 650 yards of cloth a year. But it’s not enough; it’s a long way from enough. The trains of Bombay kill four thousand people yearly.

T
HE MANAGER
of Bombay’s suburban railway system was recently asked when the system would improve to a point where it could carry its 6 million daily passengers in comfort. “Not in my lifetime,” he answered. 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. A lover’s embrace was never so close.

Asad bin Saif works in an institute for secularism, moving tirelessly among the slums, cataloging numberless communal flare-ups and riots, seeing firsthand the slow destruction of the social fabric of the city. Asad is from Bhagalpur, in Bihar, site not only of some of the worst communal rioting in the nation but also of a gory incident where the police blinded a group of petty criminals with knitting needles and acid. Asad, of all people,
has seen humanity at its worst. I asked him if he feels pessimistic about the human race.

“Not at all,” he responded. “Look at the hands from the trains.”

If you are late for work in the morning in Bombay, and you reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform, you can run up to the packed compartments and find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outward from the train like petals. As you run alongside the train, you will be picked up and some tiny space will be made for your feet on the edge of the open doorway. The rest is up to you. You will probably have to hang on to the door frame with your fingertips, being careful not to lean out too far lest you get decapitated by a pole placed too close to the tracks. But consider what has happened. Your fellow passengers, already packed tighter than cattle are legally allowed to be, their shirts already drenched in sweat in the badly ventilated compartment, having stood like this for hours, retain an empathy for you, know that your boss might yell at you or cut your pay if you miss this train, and will make space where none exists to take one more person with them. And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or New York or Jogeshwari; whether you’re from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.