Rush Hour

short story | scenes from the Bangalore metro

Rajiv Chowk, Delhi. Rush Hour. (Wikimedia Commons)

Rush Hour

6 PM. Everyone in the metro holds their breath because of what is about to happen. 

And what is about to happen is this: the glass doors slide open and a large, heaving, shoving crowd gushes in. A flurry of arms and legs and spasms of languages. I am pushed deep inside the crowd, the sight of my feet vanishing under the skirt of a sari, a bulging grocery bag, and a gaggle of coughing children whose heads knock against my legs. 

And now another stop, another crowd peering through the glass door. The man at the very front of the inside-crowd wags his hand furiously at the outside-crowd. ‘Space illa, space illa!’ No space! He warns. But such gestures are meaningless at 6PM. At rush hour, space is always negotiable, never finite. More of it can be made if one is skilled enough. The outside-crowd melds into the inside-crowd, squeezing and jostling their way in defiantly. The doors glide shut. Now we are all in this together. 

‘Side, side, side!’ A frail, old lady yells at me, her nostrils flaring and her eyes scowling at me through the heavy gold rims of her glasses. I glare back petulantly. I can barely take a breath, there is no question of stepping aside. When I refuse to move, she plunges a sharp elbow into my ribcage and forces her way through. For a moment, the impact stuns me, emptying the wind from my lungs. But I am unsurprised, there is no strength stronger than in the elbow of a plucky old woman at rush hour in an Indian train. Her husband gives me a sheepish smile and an apologetic flourish of the hand. ‘Sorry ma, she is like this only,’ he says, before slinking off into the humming throng of passengers.

The couple standing behind me giggles at my plight. He is lanky with an open, smiling face and a shockingly black mop of hair. She is wide-eyed and blushing, with a delicate moon-shaped vitiligo patch on her check. They have been flirting for the last twenty minutes in a language I can’t place. Konkani? Tulu? Either way, I know they have been flirting, their damp foreheads lightly cradling against each other. Some languages we all recognise. Unlike me, they seem to delight in the accident of having been pushed closer together by the crowd, the sweet deniability of it. He whispers something in her ear and her cheeks flush, a coy laugh bubbling out of her. Beside them, a small child watches the couple curiously, her dark beady eyes darting between the man and the woman. Her mother makes a stern tutting sound, flicks the child on the shoulder and tugs her swiftly, shielding her from this perceived indecency. Furtively, the child steals one last glance before turning away, content in the fact that she now knows something she should not. 

Another stop. The hiss of the door. A trickle of people slither out of the metro like quick snakes. A smaller crowd lunges in. College kids with chirpy voices and laptop bags that they use to muscle their way through. ‘These kids and their bada bada bags.’ A gruff, moustached man grumbles, shaking his head at a world that is changing faster than he can keep up with. He pinches the bridge of his nose and wipes a glisten of sweat off the deep furrows in his forehead. Then he makes a guttural sound from his chest, clearing his throat. No one acknowledges his mumbling. He goes quiet. The metro grinds into a tunnel and everything goes dark. In an instant, the margins of our bodies disappear. The hard lines of skin fall away. We sway and jerk in a singular choreography. Fused. Wriggling like a bad meal inside the metal belly of the train. A dense, grainy black. And then. Light. We are flung out of the darkness all at once. Into a rough gasp of sunset. Hurtling past a thick slab of evening sky. The heads of trees in bloom flitting before us, bright against the blurts of concrete.  

I squirm, trying to free my arm so I can reach up to grab a handle. My effort is futile, my limbs packed tightly between the herd of commuters. But it doesn’t matter. When the crowd is like this, I cannot fall. No matter how the train heaves and shudders, I will land somewhere in this sea of bodies. At rush hour, I am held. Bound by something that is larger than I am. I become aware of the babble of chatter around me. ‘No kanna, I won’t be home for the festival aanh, sorry -’ ‘Listen, can you tell this Malathi to give me a call, I don’t understand why -’ ‘This job is giving me a bloody headache yaar, I can’t even -’ ‘No, no Rohith and I aren’t -’ ‘Sorry? What? What? I can’t hear you bro, I am inside the metro -’ 

I am inside of every hushed, stilted, raucous conversation around me. Everyone’s stale perfume and sweat stench and rotting jasmine smell and hot breath ripe in my lungs. I feel the twinge in the shoulder where the child got flicked by her mother. I hear the bellowing emptiness inside the gruff man’s chest. I touch the prickling heat rising between the couple. I see the slump of the years in the old woman’s arms. The train slows down, but we are still moving. Like a throbbing muscle. Like a lurching nausea. Forward and then back and then forward again. Staggering through slats of space and time. Finally, here comes my stop. I brace myself. I don’t step out of the train, rather, I am pushed out of it with the crowd. Spat out of the belly of the beast like a fishbone. Finally, air. The throng thins out. Soon the spaces between our bodies will reappear. Soon we will get on other trains and become other people again.

Strangers, merely passing through. 

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