Metro
There is no getting away from the Mumbai Metro project. It seems as if the entire city is under seige from some disinterested enemy – an enemy that has us surrounded by barricades (Upgrading for You! Moving Mumbai Forward!), broken pavements, slushy roads and huge machines (the spouse looks at them admiringly and gives me technical details – all absorbed beautifully into the sinkhole of my brain, never to again see the light of day). The relentless noise of drills all day long and the mysterious sound of earth jarring thumps only in the middle of the night add to the disorienting landscape. City dwellers, used to calamities hitting us as scheduled, immune to a regular time table of disaster and drama, have learnt to ignore the Metro. This too shall pass, is the gritted teeth, burning ulcer attitude of the Mumbaikar. We shall overcome, even as the Metro tunnels its way under our feet. (Undermining us, forgive the pun.) Ekla chalo re, because, honestly, there’s very little pavement left where two may walk side by side.
The Metro and the Mumbaikar – the intense passion of this love hate relationship has sustained us through the last few years. The drama (Aarey, anyone?), the tears (our beloved old trees chopped down at Churchgate), the hysteria have all helped to keep the interest alive. Will its completion be the anticlimactic wedding day? After years of conflict, angst and passion, one can only hope that the mundane everyday running of the Metro doesn’t prove to be the end of the high stakes romance.
Whichever side you’re on, and this is a tetrahexaoctagonal conundrum, there is also a quiet and unsung human side to the saga. While the political animal slugs it out with the environmental lobby, and the average Mumbaikar moans and groans about the inconvenience of it all, this is a group that quietly goes about its job – the workers who are building the Metro.
The supervisors are easily indentifiable with their spiffy sunglasses and mostly clean clothes and one must admit, a certain superfluousness. The workers are just as easy to mark – most of them wear dirty jeans and tee shirts, sometimes a ganji or a full sleeved shirt. They wear their orange safety vests and yellow hard hats all the time – as if it’s just too tiring to take either off. Their feet are sensibly protected by heavy duty boots. They seem well equipped for the hard work.
Clothes and shoes don’t tell the real story though. Their faces are weary and coated with dust. Most won’t look you in the eye. The heat and noise seem to have formed a hard casing around each man – their eyes gaze out blankly, even as they work shifts underground in claustrophobic, ultra-heated conditions, or high above ground, manning the machines that are tearing up the ground to create a new world.
Their voices are hoarse from months of dust inhalation. I think of coal miners. They joke and laugh as they work but catch their eye and they become steely eyed and solemn. Where do they come from? These are not local boys. They speak a rough dialect of Marathi, or another language altogether – snatches of tamil or that peculiar hindi of the Bihar hinterlands. They are tough but so young. Some of them seem wired, strung out. Drug deals go down by the side of the road, casually run by the little street kids. Others are simply exhausted. It is stamped on their faces, the toll that this endless project is taking on its creators as well.
They have nothing to share with the people who live and work on the Metro routes. Their body language as they walk past is carefully aloof – we are not you. Leave us alone. You see this work we do? Stay ungrateful. Use it, abuse it, we don’t care. Forget about us. They are building this huge project but it’s unlikely they will ever ride the metro themselves. They’ll be gone by then, heading to the next big development site.
It suits us too, to make them a part of the machinery, the noise and the commotion. If confronted by their humanity, it might be unbearable to board that spiffy air conditioned metro in the future. If we allowed ourselves the weakness of empathy, it might be too great a debt, one that we could never pay back.
So it suits us to stare past them, to fashion a monolith of machinery and men and consign it to the list of inconveniences we deal with in the city every day.
I was at the neighbourhood chemist the other day when a Metro worker came in. The chemist is located at the end of a large department store and the boy was seriously frazzled by the time he made his way past all the glittery costume jewellery and shiny cosmetics and toys and the mounds of mithai. He was younger than my older son, maybe eighteen or nineteen. His body was wiry and tough but he looked miserable. He had a terrible cold, he looked feverish and there was a slight tremble as the air conditioning hit him. The chemist ignored him as long as he could. He stood patiently, his orange vest and clothes radiating heat and diesel fumes. Finally, he was asked what he wanted. His voice was hoarse and just breaking. He haltingly described his symptoms. Fever, cold, sore throat. Please could he have a tablet? The chemist had obviously dealt with this before. His voice was matter of fact as he said he couldn’t sell a single tablet, the entire strip would have to be purchased. The boy, too, had been through the charade before. He didn’t put up any argument. He sniffed, wiped a runny nose and left quietly with no medicine.
As he left, I cursed myself for not reacting quickly. I could have easily added a couple of strips of paracetamol to my bill. I said this to the chemist who has known me for over twenty years. He’s only my son’s age, I said. The decent man replied, let it be. Why should you bother? And anyway, these fellows misuse the medicine. Two middle class Mumbaikars quickly wrapped up an uncomfortable conversation, I paid my bill and went home. That young Metro worker has troubled me since then. He probably reported back to work, feeling ill and miserable. I imagine my son in a similar state. I know I’d make him go to bed, thermometer in mouth, some soup and medicine on his bedside table. What did that worker do? I wonder if he bought a packet of some substance to keep him going or found a more sympathetic chemist. I hope he felt better soon. Certainly, he deserved some empathy from me, something more concrete than the lingering regret at my inability to help him. I owed him human decency and I didn’t step up. I try and justify my inaction. Perhaps the gesture I imagined making would have only embarassed him.
These young construction workers are everywhere – building the Metro, high rise buildings and malls that we simply can’t live without. It’s easy to ignore them, to give them all a generic shiftless, no-good, untrustworthy character. It’s easier than to remember, for even a moment, the hard knocks of their lives, the jobs they do to earn a living, jobs that we would never or reluctantly consent to our children doing. And to acknowledge that they’re somebody’s son or brother or boyfriend? Those human relationships are best left unarticulated. The Mumbaikar and the Metro worker – we may live side by side for now, but that doesn’t mean either has to like it. The job is almost done, the Metro will soon run smoothly underground (we hope) and these uncomfortable truths will disappear into our subconscience as well. The workers will move on, perhaps to more caring cities, hopefully to better lives than the one they have lived in Mumbai – city of dreams.