Life in a Metro

Some notes scribbled while waiting for an empty train at Majestic

I was a passenger princess before the concept was invented. All my life I have been chaperoned around, first in my father's smart Suzuki Samurai — the kind that you had to kick into gear — then in a modest scooty and for the last few years in our powder blue WagonR. It was only natural then, for my parents to suggest that I be dropped off and picked off from work, as I have long abandoned my car driving lessons. Or at least hire quasi-private mode of transport like an auto. All advice, was of course, well-intentioned. My mother, whose 40 km work trips on buses every day had successfully bred an abhorrence for BMTC buses, wants me to travel comfortably. But I shrugged and took the metro, embracing the working girl aesthetic of loud stations and uncomfortable formal shoes.

A grown woman taking the metro is hardly something worthy of a personal blog. If anything, it sounds awfully out of touch, because well, it is. I could venture to defend myself by adding that my inability to navigate public transport was concerning enough that my friends would get off their train, step down to the station and handhold me to the correct platform and continue with their journey. This then, was something I could be proud of. I could also make this a post about "adulting", featuring me running around to some fancy corporate office, with The Bangle’s ‘Manic Monday’ playing in the background, a veritable liberal feminist dream. But that kind of a post would only send me into a spiral of whether freedom feels like a glitchy Citrix desktop and a cubicle painted in mental asylum grey.

But as I'm typing this on the transit between Cubbon Park and MG Road, with one hand clutching the bar in the women's coach, I am thinking of how freedom does look something like this. An older friend had taught me a trick when I was in school. When travelling alone in an auto rickshaw or cab, pretend to call an older male relative so that the driver is aware that people know you’re in his cab. There are other such tricks made up by women when a constant stage of danger forces them to turn entrepreneurial. Share your location when on a date. If a man approaches you, cross the road and walk on the other side. Walk like you know your shit. Turn your keychains into pen knives. Be hyperaware of your surroundings, always.

I remembered this trick as I caught myself staring out of the wide window along the distance between two stations. I don’t want to pretend to call an older male relative on my phone. I want to stare out of the window on a monsoon evening, at the duotone skies and think about how my friend said that the skies in Bengaluru never turn black. Or think about what a lovely title ‘Nadaprabhu’ is as the train enters Majestic. I do not want to be hyperaware of my surroundings. I just want to be a girl. A girl watching a Netflix show on her phone, some lucky woman with a seat catching a wink of sleep — I want to be her. I do not want to continuously ping my friends whether they can still see my location moving on the map, I want to be the college girl reading a paperback (and lessen my guilt for not doing the same). Somewhere on the other end, I hear a woman chatting away incessantly, happily. I want to be her. I want to be a relaxed, happy woman in public in India.

None of this is to say the woman’s coach is Eden’s paradise. I want to admonish a woman who is pushing herself into the coach when it’s at full capacity. I have caught my consciousness leaving my body when there isn’t enough space to even look at my phone and there is nothing to do but stare. I’m constantly surprised at the new ways in which my vertebral column can bend itself. But who said freedom was easy?