When Locals in Locals lost their Lives - July 11, 2006

I travel by local trains, almost every day of my life.

I’ve been travelling like this, on a regular basis, since the last three years.

When you share a compartment in a Mumbai local train, you bond with the others in there.

You may not know them, you may not want to know them and if they step on your toes during rush hour, you may hate their guts and mutter death-threats under your breath ... But when they actually die, it screws you up in the mind, see. When they die horrible, painful, slow, drawn out deaths, something happens to you.
There is a bond between all passengers who have travelled in Mumbai’s locals. For a while, you feel like they are your own flesh and blood.

You shower in the morning, put on a clean, pressed shirt and leave for your destination, travelling in the 11:22 AM Churchgate slow. Come Bandra/Dadar, a horde whose number would have made Genghis Khan proud, gets into the compartment you’re in. If you’re standing, you’re immediately crushed. So much, that you can’t breathe normally. You labour and strain to take a single deep breath. But you’re alright with this; another five to six hundred commuters are experiencing the same thing. Maybe worse. The sweat from someone’s brow is dripping onto your shirt-sleeve, but you’re ok with that. Your nose is pressed firmly against someone’s armpit, but that doesn’t matter either.

What matters is that you’re all in it, together.

You’re trying to get somewhere. So is everyone in the compartment with you. That’s the common link, that’s what creates this bond, I mentioned earlier.
On the 11th of July 2006, at least some of those people I’ve travelled with at some point or the other, must have been killed in those serial blasts. Many more of them must have been seriously injured.

This affects you, if you’re a regular on Mumbai’s local trains. How?

A sort of emptiness is created, within. At least, that’s how I feel.

I didn’t personally know any of the victims, killed or wounded. Yet, that they were affected by the blasts, upset me.

The first thought that came to my mind was, "These people didn’t deserve this, man. They were just like me. I’ve travelled with them, shared seats with them, stood with them, got off at stations with them, read books with them...

I’d have been doing something like that, had I been on one of those trains. That’s what many of them on those trains would have been doing.

And then... All of a sudden, BOOM.

There’s no book, there’s no seat, there’s no passenger; no recognisable remains of any of the three, that is.

Thoughts of terrorists, thoughts of blaming them, thoughts of friends and family in mourning...all that comes later.

The first thing that the common local-train commuter thinks is -

Why?
The second thought -
Oh, shit, damn, what the...I mean...But...Oh, shit.
And then again -

Why?

We may analyze the ’mind of the terrorist’ all we want. We may spend days and months probing the failure of police intelligence. We may have Rajdeep Sardesai egging on members of the audience in his show, to admit that they hold a certain community responsible for the blasts.

We may do all this and more, have all this and much more.

Speaking on behalf of my family (yes, I call it that because I believe it is that) of local-train travellers in Mumbai, I guarantee, at the end of all this, when the media finally tires of the 7/11 story, all us relatives will STILL keep going back to that same first thought, that same first question -

Why?