In training

Chennai has a city train. It consists of two lines running vertically across the city, parallel to the ocean. I often hear it’s lulling rush at work: a brief reminder of the world outside passing by. Often I’ll use this opportunity to stretch, as if the train took me away, far and fast, for those few seconds. As if the case with most trains with two lines in cities of 8 million, the Chennai train is often not a practical option. But I needed to go to Chennai Central Station, a very practical option for the train, even in India where practicality is not always practical.

Running for about 1 km, from behind where I live all the way to behind the office where I work, with some slack on both ends, is a mammoth concrete structure. This imposing edifice lies unfinished, dormant besides a few seemingly stray workers still shuffling dirt to and fro. There’s concrete staircases, concrete corridors, concrete shop fronts and bathroom entrances; there’s sprawling puddles and drip, drip, dripping water echoing throughout; and every so often there’s the rumble of a passing train. Passing just above and even through the structure really, because this structure is the train station.

I don’t know how much the train costs, but I’m sure it’s worth it. I’m just not sure how to pay this worthy amount. If you try and go to ticket booth (the signage was completed before abandonment) you’ll find it boarded over. Personally I decided not to focus on paying, which shouldn’t have to be ones focus in pursuits such as this but should come naturally as part of the process, and simply concentrated on riding the train, which the abandoned ticket counter might discourage one from. Then, with all moral apprehensions at rest for the time being, simply by climbing several staircases (ignoring the escalator signs, although you may later spot an escalator incised somehow into the concrete mass, not running of course) you’ll emerge onto a platform and, astonishingly, other people will be waiting there as well, on the platform, presumably for this very train you’ve heard so much from.

Anyways I found myself on the train, standing by the open door staring out at the city from above, seeing the slums and poverty and windy roads from a new perspective, sweaty and late for work after an unsuccessful attempt at getting train tickets, thinking about something totally banal. Something I’d thought of thousands of times over and over again. Something like lunch or work. And I looked around and I’m pretty sure that’s what most other people were thinking about as well, aside from a spattering of loved ones and lost ones and past ones intruding into several psyches. And we were all on the Chennai city train, some of us for the first time, most of us not for the last, passing by the outside world full of offices with people stretching, weighing our luck for the day or maybe just relaxing, our spiritual-somethings’ woven together for that brief instant, contained safely within the train.

What does this mean? Maybe I’ve been in India for too long to further avoid spiritual reference. Maybe I should listen to music on the train to avoid such tangents. Maybe nothing.

I think something to do with frame of reference, like when you’re sitting on the idle train and you feel like you’re beginning to move but it’s only the train next to you. Or when two trains pass each other and it seems like you’re going twice as fast from inside either train. Or when you hear the train from office or see the office from the train. This is just what I think though, and it could simply be a result of me writing about trains for so long that they’ve traveled all the way to my critical thinking capacities, choo-chooing all-the-while.

(By the way, I hate this blog entry, but since I wrote it I thought I might as well post it. I don't think it means anything.)