Learning Curve

“Can’t you see that I’m tired? Shouldn’t you be giving up your seat instead of me? How are you making me get up? How do you have the authority?”

The acid that dripped was from the mouth of an upper-class Delhi girl no older than twenty-two. I say upper-class, because her defiant posture, expensive clothes and English-speaking accent could not have placed her in any other section of society except that one.

I pull my eyelids apart slowly and carefully, jerking awake from a light sleep at all the commotion. They were stuck together more firmly today because of the heavy Kajal I had applied on the inside of my lower eyelids.

This was the first incident I had witnessed when travelling in the Metro, but it was surely not the first since the start of its operations. Delhi Metro has been registering a continuous increase in ridership since its inception. When Metro services were introduced in 2002, the average ridership was 80,000 passengers per day. As of FY 2016–17, average daily ridership has risen to 2.76 million, with the latest daily ridership record set on 17 August 2016, the day of Rakshabandhan, reporting the highest influx of passengers on a single day.

Travelling in a train such as the Metro, differs from other modes of transport in that it is a step forward towards affordable mobility in one of the most expensive cities to live in. The enormity of the crowd being a commonplace thing one encounters in this city, tactical manoeuvres and ways of negotiating your path through the myriad of stations and line interchanges becomes an ingrained habit of the average Delhiite commuter. An elbow nudge in a cramped compartment after 9 in the Blue Line, a slight push when the doors open at Rajiv Chowk Station, the tapping of a shoulder to ask the person in front of you if they are getting off next. One comes into contact with numerous nameless citizens of Delhi in the form of this kind of scheduled interruption into an individual’s race to reach their destination.

The Delhi Metro is the largest and busiest metro in India by a considerable margin, and the world's 9th longest metro system in length and 16th largest in ridership. A member of CoMET, Community of Metros, which is a system of international railway benchmarking, the network consists of eight colour-coded regular lines, with a total length of 296.1 kilometres serving 214 stations (including 6 on Airport Express line and interchange stations). The CoMET consists of large metro systems from around the world. It currently consists of 17 members, some of which include the Moscow Metro (1999), Madrid Metro (2004), Shanghai Metro(2005), Beijing Subway and Santiago Metro (2008), Taipei Metro and Seoul Metro (2010), since 1994, the latest entry to which is the Delhi Metro on account of its annual ridership which exceeds 500 million passengers.

Thoughts on a Metro are rarely ever centred. They fly off on different roads and return to the original thread believed to have been lost after several detours through windows and station announcements and the smooth swish of opening doors. Sometimes it feels more pleasant to look outside than to look at people’s faces. A space of temporary meetings, the most momentary of connections. The yellow and black tape stuck on the sides of the doors and the yellow caution stickers on thee tops of the doors remove any trace of this journey being an imagined one. They jolt one to reality as gears of the brain kick into motion. Women crossing over from the general coach to the ladies’, women putting their bags and other barriers against their sides, women gathering and standing in a circle in one spot. “Nightie ke neeche jeans pehne thi usne” “Kuch negative bolne ka effect padha hai unke upar”, “Apni izzat pyaari hai, dosron ki izzat pyari nahin hai?” float around the ladies’ compartment where I travel daily to go to college, snippets of whispered conversations one can’t escape overhearing, again firmly placing me in the now. A big woman enters at Moolchand Station and goes to stand smack in front of my friend’s face, watches her take pictures and take notes, a clear example of unencumbered intrusive curiosity. Although to call it curiosity would give it a somewhat innocent appeal, but sometimes, like in this instance, it feels borderline threatening, even if done by someone from the same sex.

The threat for a woman travelling alone in Delhi is a double threat. From my understanding out of experience in commuting by Metro for the last four years, a woman would have to beware not only dangerous movements of big-bodied men and women, but she would have to guard against reaching hands and rubbing body parts from both sexes. The danger posed to a small man would be from a bigger man than him; a woman has to protect herself from being handled roughly as well as be, hope not, touched inappropriately by anyone she has to come in close proximity with. So, one develops inventive ways to guard oneself against potential predators. Rules and safeguards cloak you in a layer of protection, constant surveillance can help you be less on edge, and the threat of prosecution reminds you that simple actions can become great mistakes, pushing you to be more responsible for your own safety and of others’. The female voiceover sends a comforting message in a sea of unknowns.

The above-mentioned dialogue was part of a fight between an English-speaking young girl and an old emaciated woman likely from a village for whom it was the first time in a Metro. As the fight escalated, it inevitably grew louder and became more unintelligible on account of the rapid angry speech that grew more heated, and the passengers took the side of the young girl instead of the old woman. Her skin was falling from her bones, she had never known what it felt like to have a full stomach, and could definitely not understand fancily spoken English during her first ever time in such a new and assaulting experience such as riding in the Metro. I say assaulting here, because the amount of information fed into you via an overhead voice, the humongous crowds, and the structure of the stations are unlike any previously encountered by people from villages and towns.

Granted, the old woman did fit the bill for being a conservative judgmental woman whose speech largely consisted of sarcastic barbs which even if one couldn’t fully understand, one could grasp the essence of, she was an old woman who clearly needed the seat more than the other candidates for whom standing in a moving train wouldn’t be painful.

Despite knowing that, the whole section of the ladies’ coach took the girl’s side when the fight broke out and needed to be stopped before the female guards at the stations penalised them. And what was the fight over? A seat. It was a dangerous realisation that just the fact that you could speak fluent English could grant you access and privilege, even if over other people’s basic rights and liberties. I realise it also might come from where you put up, your financial background, your family background, and various other factors, but to be seen as more deserving of sympathy from strangers because you can speak English? The scales are not simply unbalanced, they are faulty in their very foundation.

After this incident slowly took shape in my mind the way sand piles up to form a dune, I became sensitive to visible markers of class differences during my journeys. The Metro is an introduction into a very real, felt, nuanced understanding of how Delhi works on a daily basis. Let us hope that this learning does not come at too steep or painful a price.