A man who I saw crying

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about

Photo by Yash Bhardwaj on Unsplash

It was a Tuesday. I think it was a Tuesday. I remember it was raining the kind of rain that doesn’t end, the kind that has been falling for three days and looks like it will fall for three more, and the platform at Dadar— one of the city’s biggest junctions — was was crowded the way it is during monsoon people were wet and no one really wanted to touch each other.

I got on the my 8:47 local train back home from the office on my way back home from the office. The compartment was as full as it can get, more full than people who haven’t been to Mumbai believe is physically possible. I somehow found my space, which is not a seat but a position, near the door, with my left shoulder against a man in a white shirt who was talking on the phone with someone in Marathi.

A few minutes after the train left Mahim — a station in-between along the way—I noticed something. The man in the white shirt was crying.

He was not crying loudly. He was on the phone, still, talking quietly, but tears were running down his face in a steady way that suggested they had been running for a while. He was not trying to hide it. He was also not asking for attention. He was just standing there, pressed between people, crying while he listened to whoever was on the other end of the call.

What happened next is what I keep thinking about.

The man on his other side — older, in a faded blue shirt, carrying a tiffin — looked at him. Did not say anything. Just reached up and put his hand on the crying man’s shoulder for a moment. Then took it off.

A college student near the door, who had earphones in, took one earphone out.

Nobody said anything. Nobody asked what was wrong. Nobody offered tissues, which, in any case, would have been impossible to retrieve in that compression. The crying man kept talking on the phone, kept crying, and the people around him made a small space for him and asked if everything was okay.

I have thought about this many times since. I’m still not sure I understand it.

There is a phrase that gets used a lot about this city, mostly by people who don’t live here. They call it the spirit of Mumbai. It usually gets invoked after disasters. The 26/11 attacks. The floods. The bomb blasts. Mumbai gets back to work the next morning, the news anchors say. Mumbai is resilient. The spirit of Mumbai is unbreakable.

I have always found this phrase slightly false. Not because it isn’t true — Mumbai does get back to work the next morning — but because the framing makes resilience sound like a choice. As if the city is bravely demonstrating its character.

That’s not what’s happening. The city goes back to work because the city has to go back to work. The vegetable seller at the corner has to sell vegetables or his children don’t eat. The maid travelling two hours from the city’s edge to its richer neighbourhoods has to make it to her first house by 8:00 or she loses the work. The auto driver has to start his shift early because the petrol won’t pay for itself.

Resilience is what you call it from outside. From inside, it is just necessity. The spirit of Mumbai is not the city’s bravery. It is the simple fact that millions of people cannot afford to stop, regardless of what has happened to them or around them.

This sounds like a sad framing, and in some ways it is. But what I keep returning to is that something else lives inside the necessity. Something that I did not understand until I had been here long enough to stop noticing the trains the way commutors notice them, and started noticing what happens inside them.

Photo by Pratik Gupta on Unsplash

My father commuted by local train for thirty years. I never thought about this growing up. He left the house at 6:30 and came back at 8:30, and the train was a thing that happened in between, like the office itself. I didn’t ask about it. He didn’t talk about it. The commute was something that adults did.

I started commuting by train myself about eight years ago. The first time I came home and tried to describe what it was like the way you sometimes can’t tell which limb is yours my father looked at me with a small smile and said, “Now you know.”

I wonder how much of what I read as his coldness was actually exhaustion. The local train, twice a day, for thirty years, is the kind of thing that uses up a particular kind of energy. The energy you have left for your family at the end of the day is different from the energy you had at the beginning. I never accounted for this. I am accounting for it now.

What I saw that day in 8:47 local with that crying man was something I had been raised inside without seeing.

This city is hard. It is hard in ways that are sometimes dramatic and more often boring. The rent is too high. The water cuts out without warning. The neighbours’ construction work begins at 6:00 AM. The commute eats two and a half hours of every weekday. The job that funds the rent is in an industry that has been laying off for two years. The marriage is fine, mostly, but the wife is tired and the kid has stopped wanting to talk and the parents are getting older and somebody has to figure out the home in the village.

Most adults in Mumbai are carrying some version of this. Most adults everywhere are. But in Mumbai you carry it in close physical proximity to other people who are carrying their own versions, and you do it for two and a half hours a day in a train compartment where you cannot turn your head.

What happens, when you do this for years, is that you develop an unwilling competence in reading other people. You can tell, from the way someone holds their face, whether they have just got bad news. You can tell, from the way someone smells, whether they have slept. You can tell, from how a man stands, whether his back hurts in the specific way that comes from sitting at a desk for ten hours, or in the different specific way that comes from carrying heavy loads. You don’t develop this competence on purpose. You develop it because you can’t escape the data.

And with the competence comes something else, which is harder to name. A kind of low-grade sympathy that you don’t ask for and can’t fully suppress. The man crying on the 8:47 was not my problem. But I could not pretend he wasn’t there.

This, I think, is what people mean when they say “the spirit of Mumbai” without quite knowing what they mean. It is not the city’s heroism. It is the daily accumulation of small mercies between people who would otherwise be strangers, who recognise each other’s burdens because they are carrying their own, who do not have the energy or the time to perform compassion but who can manage a hand on a shoulder.

I never found out what was wrong with that man. He got off at Andheri — four stops before mine—still on the phone, still crying quietly. Whoever had been on the other end had gone silent at some point. He was now just listening to something I couldn’t hear.

Tomorrow the same compartment, made of mostly different people, would absorb someone else’s silent crisis in the same wordless way.

I thought, for a long time, about why this affected me so much. I am not someone who cries easily. But what I felt, watching it, was something I haven’t quite found another word for. The closest word I have is gratitude. Gratitude that this city, this particular city, with all its impossibilities, had built a space where a man could cry in public, surrounded by strangers, and the strangers would manage it for him.

Most cities cannot do this. Most cities have designed themselves out of being able to do this. People are too far apart. The shared spaces are too curated. The crowds are too anonymous, or too small, or too watchful. The local train compartment, with its specific compression and its specific necessity, is one of the few public spaces I have been in where a stranger’s pain is allowed to exist without anyone trying to fix it or look away from it.

This is, I suspect, what my father knew. What he was trying to tell me when he said, “Now you know.”

What the spirit of Mumbai actually is, when you look closely, is not a thing the city has. It is a thing the city allows. It is a permission. A permission to be a person in public, in pain, in proximity, without being asked to perform.

It is a permission that came at a cost. The cost is the commute that breaks your body. The cost is the necessity that doesn’t let you stop. The cost is the spectrum of small hardships that shape every Mumbaikar’s life and that the city does not pretend to soften.

But the permission is real. And on a rainy Tuesday in monsoon, on the 8:47 from Dadar, I saw it work for a man I will never meet.

I have stopped finding the phrase “spirit of Mumbai” false. I just think most people are using it to describe the wrong thing.

The spirit isn’t the resilience. The spirit is the permission.

That’s the part nobody outside this city has ever quite seen.