The fringes of existence.

The fringes of existence.

Everyday, I cross four railway tracks to reach Lajpat Nagar, and catch a cycle rickshaw to college from there. My ride is almost twenty minutes long, and is definitely one of the most uncomfortable parts of my day – I spend it tense as I cross roads against the direction of the traffic, past whizzing silver cars and blaring yellow-green buses, all the while just managing to hold on to the rickshaw bars that preventing me from sliding off altogether.

The four tracks I cross each morning to reach the rickshaw stand converge about 200 meters ahead at the Lajpat Nagar Railway Station. They run over an open sewage – which goes on to flow through Jangpura, where I live. On one side of the tracks is a large, open community garbage-dump, always overflowing with last week’s half decayed waste. Dogs, cats and cows and the occasional hungry rag-picker haunt its broken, filthy blue and white walls, filled with the pungent stench of days of un-cleared garbage. On the other side is a smallish basti (slum), which perhaps holds seven to eight households in all: filthy, naked children run about, happy: oblivious to the danger of the trains, the filth, the basti itself.

This is the description of the area I have to cross to reach my cycle rickshaw stand. Its just one little point in the long journey the tracks make: I am sure it is duplicated elsewhere, everywhere. Before crossing the tracks, I look left and right to make sure no train is approaching. In the morning I see full grown men and women relieving themselves on the track, and beggars, sitting on the hot stones that line the tracks, with their hands out, hoping to incite some sympathy in the breasts of the commuters as they pass by. In the afternoon, on my way back from college, the same scene meets my eyes.

It is not that before yesterday I did not notice any of this. I saw everything but chose not to think about it. I chose to banish the images from my mind, and did so successfully. Crossing the tracks became just another part of my day, my journey to college, a sedate prequel to my interesting and tense adventures on the rickshaw.

Yesterday, on the way back from college, for the first time, I met a train on those tracks. I had finished crossing the first two, saw a train approaching from the right on the third, and so was forced to stand and wait for it to pass. It was a brown, ordinary goods carrier train. I waited.

As I stood there, re-adjusting the shoulder strap of my bag, impatient to get home, I saw from the corner of my eye, a figure slowly appear on my left. I was looking straight ahead at the train, and did not turn to see who it was, because everything that I could see from the corner of my eye told me that it was a beggar woman.

When you have grown up in India, especially Bombay, where beggars line the streets like streetlamps – you know that looking at a beggar is the surest way to catch their attention, and make the situation much more uncomfortable. You learn, in time, that one way of dealing with it all is to look away, or worse, look through them, as though they don’t exist. So, that is what I did – I ignored her, did not validate her presence by even stealing the tiniest half glance at her. Instead, I dropped my gaze from the train to the track, and concentrated on its rhythmic movement, the loud, clanging sounds filling my ears.

Yet, I could still see her, standing there. She had started inching toward me, slowly, her hand partially outstretched. She was about ten meters away from me when I began to feel uncomfortable. I shuffled my feet a little to the right, still not looking at her. I turned right and strained my neck to try and get a glimpse of how long the train was, and how much of it remained to pass. I could not see the end of the train.

When I returned my gaze to the tracks, I found that she had stopped inching towards me. Perhaps she had sensed my discomfort, my distrust. I could tell that her hand was not partially outstretched anymore: she was just standing there, looking at me, in my pink salwaar khameez, restlessly readjusting the strap of my shoulder-bag, looking intently at the tracks, pretending she wasn’t there.

For me, all existence was suddenly concentrated into that one moment -- looking at the monotonous brown carriages as they passed by, feeling her eyes upon me, the sound of the train blocking out all thought. I was in prison, in a cell in a zoo with strangers ogling at me, I was the rag-picker in the garbage-dump, the stench filling my nostrils, I was the naked child running aimlessly beside the tracks – I was her, I was every person she had ever been. In that one moment, life, like the train, was whirring past – but I was imprisoned by it – caught between my life and hers, on the fringes of existence.

Then, suddenly, the train had passed. The sound of the clanging tracks faded away. I found myself looking across the tracks, into Jangpura: my home, MY world. I turned and looked at her. For one second. She was still facing me, looking at me. Young, thin, wearing a filthy red sari half tucked up, revealing her knees; short hair, probably sacrificed to the gods. I avoided her eyes. With a practiced step, I turned and quickly made my way across the remaining tracks. Once I reached the other side, I turned and stole one last glance at her. She was standing as I had left her, immobile.

I turned around, crossed the street and walked towards my gate.

Crossing the tracks has never been the same since. I shall never forget her, or what it was like to be her – those few seconds, when I stood on the fringes of existence, and understood what it was like to want to drop out of it entirely.