Push

©  2006  Rose George

For those of you who accused me - rightly - of a lack of adventurousness because of my refusal to entertain a short career as a Bollywood extra, I have a response:

Indian Train At Rush Hour.

Though I cheated a bit. Proper Indian rush hour would be to go from north to south Bombay in the morning - 9-11am, this being a late-waking country - and the opposite way any time between 5pm and 9pm. Instead, I had a pleasant journey northwards at 11am in the Ladies Carriage, whose tagline - Ladies only for all the 24 hours - proves that Indian English is often an improvement on its original. In the Ladies Carriage, a woman, as Lonely Planet had predicted, was shelling peas in a corner and leaving the pods in a pile, probably for all the 24 hours. (The pile was beneath an ad for the Shah piles clinic, appropriately.) On the way back south at 6pm, having by then taken two taxis, two autos and one train, and having ingested enough traffic fumes to turn my nasal interiors black, I had a short rush hour experience. From that I learned that Indian Rush Hour is density combined with brevity. There are crowds, and there are trains that only stop for ten seconds in the station. This creates a situation where being shoved violently onto the train by someone behind you seems to be considered a civic duty on the part of the pusher. For the duration of one station, I stood with my bag clutched like a weapon in the midst of many men, and I think my grim grimy face successfully deterred them from eve-teasing (also known as sexual harrassment). In several days in Bombay, I’ve been eve-teased only once, when a man felt my backside - I should say ass, as Indians use backside to mean round the back of a building - and then turned round to grimace. If I hadn’t been engaged in attempting to cross the road, which requires Schumacherian skill and has taught me the whole new sport of taxi-dodging (because they will make no attempt to dodge you), he would have got some of what rhodri calls my Yorkshire ways. Still, there are five more weeks in which they can be unleashed.