Notes From The Underground
Avishek Parui Picture a train leaving an underground station. Neither the name of the station nor the destination of the train should be important. Names and destinations rarely matter. You could be anywhere while picturing the train. Anywhere with a river before you, preferably standing on a river-bridge. For rivers are like trains. They help you imagine moving bodies. Moving bodies help you make memories. The loveliest memories are of course of things and events that did not happen. How many real rivers have you really seen? Liffey, Brahmaputra, Thames, Ganges. But don’t digress. Bring yourself back to the image. Picture a train leaving an underground station. Of course you are in the train. On a lovely window seat if you like. Looking out at yourself standing on the platform. Two pairs of hands waving goodbyes at each other, if you want to picture something more sentimental. This isn’t a dream by the way. This isn’t real by the way. There aren’t many ways anyway. You look at yourself leave in the train. You think of leaping in front of it. Not now, not yet. But that would be so much better than jumping off a window ledge or a bridge. You could never do it. You have tried. Why only last night. You were sitting on the ledge of your hotel window. Overlooking the Liffey with all its bridgelights falling across the cold Dublin nightair. For twenty minutes or so you ceased to care. You felt so free that you wanted to fly, knowing you will fall. You didn’t care. You just wanted to end it all. But it never works out that way. And you always end up with a tiredness that traps you back. Then it all dies with the thoughts about things to do and stuff to produce and reproduce. Stuff you know you cannot produce and reproduce. For your life is a long lonely struggle not to be found out. So you step down. From the ledge or the bridge. Hoping you will climb again soon. Your stories are never complete. Waiting for trains in a platform full of strangers is a good exercise in existential solidarity. For you end up sharing a slice of time with a random group of people, a slice of time that will slip into all your lives and connect you all for as long as you live although you may never see each other again. All your lives will always contain this wait. Standing with strangers in a metro station makes you feel most comfortable with yourself. You feel freer, sweat lesser and breathe easier. Away from the familiar faces you endlessly entertain with your overdone orchestra of mindful mannerisms and manoeuvres. Waiting at a metro station is a pleasant break from the barbed wires and booby traps in the world of contraptions above. Till the train that comes to take you back. There’s always a train to take you where you don’t want to go. To what you don’t want to know. But waiting for a train isn’t that bad. Especially in the underground where the white platform light oversees yellow trains swishing in like monocled machines. The lights cross and mix with the electronic announcements and screeches. Like metronomic music pieces. Triggering off a synaesthetic stream of consciousness. Together the alchemy makes you feel more alive than you really are. Everyone seems to behave better in the underground. And noises turn to smaller sounds. You may also want to experience the smells in the underground station, if you like. It’s that time of the night when the smell of bleach mixes with sweaty shirts in quiet corners. You have always thought bleach smells a lot like rotting knee-wound, especially mild bleach of lesser quality. You could be mistaken. Perhaps you smelt bleach right before or after you first smelt a rotting knee-wound. Your knee-wound. Perhaps that memory stayed with its associative effect. Memories of smells and their subconscious stains. But you digress again. Meanwhile, someone in the platform has just peeled off an orange, or a peach, if you please. An orange smells better though, you think. And then there are evening newspapers with coffee smells and old leather bags and warm groundnuts bought from the station entrance above. Smells bring back memories, as scientists say and novelists show. Almost everyone around you is remembering something now as the bleach, sweat, orange, coffee, leather and groundnuts mix in unequal intensities. The train is still leaving the station. Slowly slowly slowly. Just in case you don’t lose sight of it in your mind. You can quicken or slow it down as per your wish. Remember. You are in it. Step back a bit. Step up again. Position yourself in the platform perfectly diagonal to the driver’s cabin. Till the train becomes a hazy yellow. Till the only things clear are a wholly peeled orange skin on the platform and you sitting in the moving yellow by a glass. Let a moment pass. The faces around you have become apparitions. Apparitions in a cold morgue like metro. Think of all the madmen you have met. The ones who revisit you in narcoleptic afternoons, standing on the edge of your Rapid Eye Movement visions. By the Brahmaputra, the Thames, the Liffey, the Ganges. Rivers again. Rivers leave memories and madmen behind by their muddied banks. By the bridges. The Howrah Bridge, Old London Bridge, Ha’Penny Bridge. All have homeless madmen along their railings staring at stars. Not all madmen are homeless though. Some draw salaries and drive their own cars. Look at yourself sitting on the train looking at you on the platform. One of you should be leaving behind the other. You aren’t sure yet who is really being left behind. The train is now a river. A yellow river with no name. Remember. A certain madman before the closed Coffee House in Calcutta had told you that the State shouldn’t exist, except as an idea