Passerby

I was but a passerby

I saw you but from a frosted window pane,

A city came alive

You never let me in,

Into your many lives

I stood looking at all the things you were,

Your beauty mesmerized,

And just when I felt I knew you,

You left me again surprised.

 

I was but a passerby,

When you pushed past me to get to work,

And when you sat staring at the distant tide,

When you aimlessly walked home

 

I was but a passerby,

When you cruelly crushed dreams everyday

Of a million hopeful eyes,

And weaved new ones every night

 

I was but a passerby,

When you stayed awake all night,

In the alleys that breathed a different life,

Of the underbelly of dark, dark lies

 

In a million ways, in all these days,

I hated you with all my heart

Till now no more hate remains

And I leave now simply because,

I’m no longer just a passerby.

There’s something wrong with this city

This morning I saw something disturbing while on my way to work. Just before Lower Parel Station, I man lay on the tracks. For those who live in this city and travel often by train, this isn’t an unusual sight. We accept it as unavoidable accidents in a system that takes so many people to their destinations everyday. We deposit any feeling of discomfort to the almighty repository of fate and move on, station after station.
But today was something different. I said a prayer in my mind, so did some others who saw him. And then we got off the train as usual and went our way. But little did I know that a far more disturbing sight awaited me at the station. On the railway bridge, flocks of people gathered, craning their necks over each other and squeezing into the gaps to get a better view of the gore.
There was no sympathy in their murmur. No shock, not even discomfort at seeing another human being’s lifeless remains pecked at and scavenged by opportunistic crows. They just stood there, staring. It took me about 10 seconds to cross the bridge and all along the grilled fence, people stood, quietly absorbing the scene before them. Scavengers of another kind.
I don’t know how many of them realised that this was a human being, just like them. I don’t know if it entered their consciousness that what they were seeing was not just a murder of crows (I just realised the irony in that collective noun) feasting, but they were seeing the end of a life, much like their own, in the most disgraceful fashion possible. I wondered what was wrong with this city that I loved so much…
As I walked out of the station, into the scorching sun of the city, there was a world just like the one standing on the bridge. Only this one was speeding by. It was rushing about, feeling important. But both these worlds were deeply voyeuristic. Both these worlds had seen so much hardship and had survived it every day, that death and tragedy were but a spectacle, seen and forgotten.
Maybe then, this isn’t whats wrong with this city. Maybe this makes this city what it is. It gives her the strength to live through the gore and the scavengers, live through the hardships and eke out an existence, and again wake up in the morning, take the train, and live another day.

Love Story

‘Next Station: Bandra’ said the recorded notification system of the local train.

She climbed into the crowded compartment with her father. The compartment was too crowded to afford either of them a place to sit and in the jostling of the crowd that followed, she was pushed further and further away from her father and landed up right in front of him. She looked up at him, slightly uncomfortable at the proximity and in a moment their world changed. In that one unexplainable moment, it was like a star was born in a faraway galaxy and world stopped moving. The heat, the dust, the crowd all blurred into the city that sped by outside and they both just stood there looking at each other. There was something in the way she leaned into him when the train curved sharply on the tracks and the way he stood firmly before her. And all of a sudden, the next station came and her father pulled her away from him and she was lost in the crowd. He remained there, stunned, as the train began to move again.

‘Next Station: Santacruz’