barefoot girl with shoes on

some days i’m really pleased to have lived in Bombay. This story about a particularly awesome bombay-dweller is from Jordan [don’t miss the videos]. It’s a little disconcerting when you think about the millions of people you share breathing space with everyday, and how few of them you’ll ever know and how you’ll never meet most of them.

I did met some super people, especially traveling in the second-class ladies’ compartment every day, for two years of college. there was a girl who’d picked up a good deal of English selling hair doodads to mostly college girls on the train, and she couldn’t have been over 15.

If I had the time and patience, I would love to be an ethnographer of women in Bombay trains. I remember there were five or six women on the train — different ages, different professions, differnt stations where they boarded and left — who always got in the same ladies’ compartment of the same local, i think the Karjat 8:15 to Victoria Terminus. there must be millions of people who find themselves shut up for interminable hours in the same space with the same people everyday, who never interact, never register each other’s presence; strangers in any other place anywhere else in the city, these five women somehow noticed one another and the way their lives intersected on this train. I never knew them, but sometimes I’d find myself in a compartment with the group, and they would be celebrating one of their birthdays, cake candles and all. or singing the latest bollywood songs together. I liked thinking about how that friendship might have first started: did one of them start a random conversation one day and the rest joined in? Or better yet, did they get into a jostling pushing screechy fight as often happens on crowded bombay locals, in a sudden flash find the whole thing quite hilarious, and end up fast friends?