Travelling back from the new city to the
not-so-new-yet-not-quite-branded-old at the hour when some buildings glitter
and others take on a cold, dank hue, I am offered unaccustomed views into the
life of this predatory, leaching, leaking metropolis that my daytime commute
obscures. If that is a sentence too full of qualifiers, well, sorry, that’s the
nature of urban habitation these days. Or perhaps habitation anywhere on this
planet.
Night has its unexpectedly revealing ways. It wakes you,
when you least expect to be woken, and presents you with fears that you never
knew existed. It can nudge you with a seductive brush into confusing dreams
with reality. And it can render transparent the sheen (and the dust) that the day
layers over the lives of others.
So it is that one evening, late out of work and wishing to
beat the roadway traffic I am persuaded by a kindly colleague to take the train
that passes for rapid transit. It takes the back route that ploughs through the
underbelly of industrial estates, forgotten now by all except those who have
made their homes along the walls and gutters and the faithful railroad that has
no option but to run new cars over the old lines. A diverse array of workers—blue-collar,
white-collar, collar-less—people the compartment along with a range of those
who travel daily in search of diplomas and degrees…or just in search. I am
fortunate to sit by the window, and I slide a sly glance over at the young man
across from me. He is shut off from the sights-sounds-smells of the immediate, plugged
in through shiny blue earpods to a sonic world of his choosing. Two others
jostle in the single seat next to him sniggering at something on their phones,
a WhatsApp forward perhaps? They look furtively at me, clearly unbelonging in
my tightly clutched bag and marble-printed silk, unconvincing in my adoption of
a slower, more reflective mode of travel, one that forces you to stare life in
the face instead of beeping it out with impatient honks and swift overtakes. I
move my gaze to the grilled window through which the peripheral city air blows
in, carrying the remnants of many workdays—thing-making, metal-beating,
brick-laying, beam-hauling, garbage-clearing, load-lifting, truck-driving. All
the multitudinous ways in which the city makes work that makes a living—barely.
Houses—homes—lie folded in untidy rows on either side of the running track,
their interstices sometimes wide enough to allow a shiny bike, a resting auto,
a hopeful car; at other times narrow enough for skipping children to find their
way home from school.
I wonder if I can find this clutch of life on Google Maps, an
old wrinkle in the young skin of Cyberabad?
At other times all it takes is a different turn, one that
follows intelligent navigation instead of time-worn instinct, to find oneself
in the middle of something that seems straight out of some futuristic
architectural vision. Except that this is right here, right now. Steady lights
on all fourteen floors, the smart set waiting on the sidewalk (yes, there
actually are such things in this part of town!) for the next cab, wondering
whether to go straight home or stop at some new-age adda for a drink and good natured cribbing about the tedium of
coding. Across the broad avenue two large earth movers work overtime, lifting
rubble and making space for more towers, more lights, more homes, more offices, more shops, more cafes.
More.
As for this clutch of life—such as it is—I’ll have no trouble
locating it on that intelligent map.
I need to get on the train more often. To see the city that
I’m losing sight of, to trace its lines on a map whose features are
disappearing beneath the neat, unerring stream of data that’s redrawing it anew
in ahistorical clarity.
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