METRO RIDE

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

~ Ezra Pound

Ever tried taking the metro to commute? Well one doesn't really have a choice when that is your sole means of transport to travel from one end of the city to the other. Life has become much easier though and traveling much smoother with the insertion of metro rails into our city life.

The Underground Railroad was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th century Black slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists who were sympathetic to their cause. The London Underground is both the world's oldest underground railway and the oldest rapid transit system. It is usually referred to as the Underground or the Tube and it began its operation way back in 1863. The Kolkata Metro, first to ply in India started its operation only in 1984, and twenty years later was followed by New Delhi in 2004 which has a combination of elevated, at-grade and underground lines.

Enough of historicising the Metro. But ever wondered that the pregnant metro has a whole new world to offer, almost a microcosm of our own world up here. The routine metro ride to the Delhi University and back is so routinized and by the clock that i never can sense or feel as to exactly when i woke up, freshened, left my place, boarded a bus or an auto, alighted and boarded the metro and reached my class. It becomes so regularized like brushing your teeth that you can never reflect back on it, almost like a zombie you travel. But is it so? Not really, because your sensory perceptions are at work and your mind registers what your eyes observe.

The millions of faces we encounter daily, hooting-scooting, hustling-bustling, almost as if in a whirlpool of maddening rush, all appear faceless in the sense factory products, the same stuff packaged separately. Those eyes look at you, questioning, searching, condemning, remarking, condescending, praising, appreciating, superimposing all in their minds but nevertheless looking at you through and through. Yes the GAZE...the very gaze that makes you awkward, uncomfortable, almost as if being naked amidst a crowd of onlookers. The men and the women look for the same things, for instance how revealing your clothes are, and if permitted men will strip you down literally with their gaze while women will strip down your consciousness for not conforming to the norms, for not covering your so-called "honour", for letting the hawk-like men to prey upon them through their very gaze. Or something as baseless as judging other people by the kind of clothes they wear. But then this is something typical not of the metro but the culture where we hail from, and will be found rampant even on the streets, in the bus, at any and every place, be it public or private.

Coming back to the sub-terrestrial world of the metro, it's almost ghost-like panoramic atmosphere, "The Wasteland" that Eliot had spoken of, Dante's "Inferno", the Hell, all juxtaposed. The blank expressions of the faceless millions haunts and surfaces to our minds each time we try to reflect at our experience inside. And amidst the memory of the hoards of people, surfaces that one face which has or might have a strong resemblance with someone we know or assume we have seen somewhere. Déjà-vu, as it is known, the same face we have seen we might see again reinforcing the strangeness of how strongly we think we know the face, those very features but just can't place the person behind it. Perhaps someone from our past lives? Maybe...who knows! Everything is possible. The workings of the human mind and the subconscious is a real mystery.

The world within the metro is like a parallel world, a surreptitious universe running beneath our very feet, lying underneath cocooned by the earth around.

And each metro ride is associated with some or the other memory - whether cracking jokes and bursting out with friends, bitching and back-biting, observing the onlookers in solitude having nothing better to do, reading that favourite novel, plugging onto the I-Pod, a brief conversation over the phone, brushing up the notes, last minute preparations before the exams, trying to catch a glimpse of that cute guy sitting across, or just trying to brush aside one's disheveled fringes being reflected on the glass pane on the doors and windows. Memories...memories... every day, each metro ride has a story to tell, only if one bothers to listen.