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Dilip D'Souza

Flamingo Pink, Bombay Blue

It's a vision I have from time to time, and it always brings a smile to my face. What if a dozen or so well-dressed strangers were to meet, let's say, in some public place -- would they consider flinging themselves at each other suddenly to form a tight bunch? So close that a taller fellow's nose was filled with the shorter dude's well-oiled hair? Stay stuck like that for the next hour, maybe? In total silence? Meet to do the same thing at the same time every day for years? Twice a day?

What on earth am I talking about, you want to know, and why is it not about the election that everybody is talking about?

I'm telling you, I've had enough of the election and I just don't want to write this column about them. I'm also telling you, this vision is not some bizarre ritual I dreamed up -- or maybe it is, who knows. You can see precisely this sight on Bombay's suburban trains: during rush hour. And if you choose the first-class compartment, you'll find that silence I mentioned. Yes, here are these men in ties and starched shirts, gold-plated pens sticking from their pockets, rolled-up Time magazine in fist, staring first-classily in any direction at all that avoids their fellow-travellers' eyes; and all jammed together tighter, more incongruously, than corn on the cob.

A more ridiculous sight would be tough to conjure up. But millions do this twice a day, six days a week. So, unfortunately, do I, though not quite as frequently these days. I wanted to start at least one sentence in this column by saying "the train was particularly crowded today." But actually it was really no more so than yesterday. Or the day before. Or any other day of the year. I have a first class pass, but for all the advantage that brings me, I might as well be on top. In fact, next time I think I will try the top.

But the train was indeed particularly crowded that day, the day I realised I was standing on, more or less, one leg.

It had been a long, hard grind at the office. I had not stirred from in front of my computer, struggling to make it perform the tricks I knew it was capable of. Exhausted from the mental effort of the struggle, I leaned my head back in the train and closed my eyes. It dawned on me slowly, inexorably, as the ache spread down my right leg: only one of my feet was firmly on the floor of the train. I could conceive of no way, standing there with bodies all around me, that I could possibly either shift to the other foot or get both feet on the floor.

So I stood, and prayed we would reach my station soon. Since we did not, I consoled myself by remembering some more famous one-leggers. Flamingos.

Ah, flamingos! Just a few weeks before, on a drowsy Saturday afternoon, we had wandered out to Sewri to see them. Ah, Sewri! The very name, among Bombayites, will buy you a few wrinkled noses and the question: Why Sewri? This time, it was because perhaps a mile out from the shore there, about a thousand of these strange pink birds were spending a few months with us in Bombay. Naked-eyed, it's hard to see them, or to quite believe that broad smudge out in the water is a flock of birds. But through your binoculars, they are pink, there are a hell of a lot of them, and many -- just like in the pictures -- stand on one leg.

In search of flamingos, I had travelled as far afield as Calimere on the southeast coast of India, Walvis Bay on the southwest coast of Africa. Even saw flocks in both places. Came back happy I had trudged that far. Who would have ever thought: Sewri? That crowded, dirty, polluted, nose-wrinkling, port area of Bombay?

Flamingos or not, the Sewri shore on a weekend is a deserted, sleepy place; pleasant in a lazy, flyblown, dreamy kind of way. Long roads stretch away emptily, trucks parked on either side. Strange hulks of machinery lie here and there, their disuse falling off them in rusting bits. A few boys play cricket and even they seem half-paced. At low tide, an occasional curlew, a brown hen-sized bird, stalks little curlew delicacies in the mud. On the crumbling piers that dot the area, lonely herons keep watch, hunched and still.

The only real activity is the frenetic performance of the stints -- tiny water birds that collect in large flocks. As one, they wheel and twist above the mud, undersides of hundreds of little flapping stint wings glinting in the sunlight. Without warning, the wheeling is done and they settle somewhere; only to rise up again, phoenix-like, just moments later. They're impossibly busy, active little creatures, true. But even the stints find their involuntary way to add to Sewri's weekend drowsiness.

And rising above the whole scene, almost palpable, almost alive, is a kind of pervasive quiet, somehow achieved without absolute silence. There are sundry sounds that you hear: the boys shouting for their ball, the rumble of a lone truck. You hear them and it's because you hear them that you know how quiet it really is.

Quiet like that is lost in Bombay, nearly vanished from our normal lives: no, not even that starchy first-class silence in the train comes close. If I had started with flamingos as I travelled home in the train, my right foot now numb, it was that quiet I was finally caressing in my mind.

Too often, I'm rushing to leave home in the morning. Rushing up and over the station bridge to catch that 9:21 train (and there was a time I used to aim for the 8:29). Cursing if I miss it. Working through the day, grabbing lunch when I can. Rushing home again, in much the same way. And that's it. The day is gone and I can't even say where it went, what I did, who I saw. Why I live like this.

I imagine that's the story of much of Bombay.

Not that the daily rushing leaves us with more time on our hands. No, there's less every day. I have not written a letter in months. For years, I have wanted to stop and browse leisurely through the books that line the pavements around central Bombay, the pavements I rush along daily. I never do, because I am always sure I'm in too much of a hurry to browse. "Next time", I say, and hurry on. The years meander by, and I have still not stopped to look at those books. Though what I would do with any I might buy is a puzzle indeed. I can't keep up with reading what I already have.

And less time is just one thing the daily rush brings. The sounds of all of us rushing around batter us constantly -- the car horns, the rattling of the trains, the screech of brakes. We push and shove and take impossible risks for a chance at a window seat -- or any seat, or in fact just to get on -- in the train. Struggling to cope with it all, I find myself tired easily, irritated easily.

I imagine that, too, is the story of much of Bombay.

And so the small inconveniences are blown up when they should remain insignificant. Can there be one train traveller in Bombay who has not been in or at least witnessed an angry quarrel over who pushed whom, even though all of us push all of the time? Is there a car driver who has not braked sharply and felt that rush of righteous anger as another car cuts in front? And surely it's not too farfetched to think that, in the same way, what are non-issues take on often monstrous forms? We've seen plenty of those, whether it's the mindless renaming of things, the bandying about -- or not -- of peculiar apologies, even the exact birthplace of a certain legendary figure.

Yes, it is a crowded, polluted, noisy and sometimes violent city I live in. But there are still some places where, some times when, the crowds and the noise are only memories. Where it's hard to remember even recent, even important reasons for anger. They are only as far as an afternoon watching flamingos on the Sewri shore.

So come to Bombay to see them. Walk east from Sewri station. Stop when you come to the shore. Remember to leave that starched shirt at home.

Dilip D'Souza