Bombay....

In the days of our courtship, my then girlfriend (now wife) and I used to traipse all over the places that we studied and worked together in. Bombay was one such city that I came to like very much thanks to some happy times we spent together during our summer internship. The local transportation system with the myriad taxies, BEST buses, and of course the ubiquitous local trains were the arteries that used to take us all over Bombay- from the waterfront at Colaba to the hep (and unaffordable for a broke student in love!) restaurants of Bandra, from office at Lower Parel to the used bookstores on the pavement at Fort, from the eclectic paintings at the Jehangir Art Gallery to the hobby shop in seedy Grant Road. Like other couples that I see today around me, we used to be totally engrossed in talking to each other, and hardly even noticed the crush of humanity milling, gawking, thrusting, jostling, and jabbering around us. Once in a while of course, I shunned the cocoon of semi consciousness that used to envelope me, and I used to take some time out to wonder at the parallel lives being led next to me. The group of 'local train friends' who meet in the same compartment on the same train day after day, the working superwomen who are dicing and slicing vegetables in sync with the rhythmic clacking of the wheels, the serious college student, the not so serious ones sharing a raucous joke; near me there's an apparently well read man thumbing through a Salman Rushdie (wondering if Salim of Midnight's Children and he are leading parallel lives), over in the corner there's another fresh faced couple, unable to take their eyes off each other.
At the end of a hard day's grind, it was always a welcome relief to plonk down into the hard welcome of those second class wooden seats, wrap yourself up in the cloak of anonymity that goes with the any railway journey and eventually be ejected out at your station. After today's news of course, I wonder if it will ever be the same again? There’s a flash bulletin which screams that over a 100 people died in Bombay when bombs went off in many local trains. Will I be able to hide my look of apprehension when I see a guy carrying a bag into my compartment? Will I become one of the paranoid across the seven seas who flinch at the merest look given by a radical looking stranger?