train tracks.

We sit rumbling along, eyes averted to the passing landscape rolling by on either side. Yellow mustard seed fields cascade across the horizon, a beautiful bright yellow hue, as if someone dipped a paintbrush in a mustard jar and carefully splattered it all around. She is sitting next to me, but I have yet to see her face. Tanned toes, sprinkled in jewels and elaborate patterns of henna, protrude from beneath her orange sari. Golden sprinkles strewn all along her veil, covering her face entirely, not a single strand of hair, not a freckle, and not even a smile can be seen. She sits there underneath this shield and watches the world created on this train, without uttering a word. Silent. No eyes. No voice. Only ears and hands. To hear, to listen, and to cradle her baby until he falls asleep in her arms.
I am sitting across from you. My arms are bare. My neck is bare. My face and hair are revealed for all the world to see. I sit here with my book, absorbed, studying. I sit in between your husband and his friends. A place reserved for you, but you silently decline. As if revealing anything of yourself to these men will change the world forever. It's as if our lives have been molded like clay, with sets of hands. And these hands shape us with different colors, different textures, and different paints. Af if your portrait is the negative to mine.

The tracks are lined with rubbish. Discarded plastic bags, bottles, shoes, food wrappers, and human feces. Piles and piles, strewn in a mosaic of colors and textures. People throw things out the window. Cups of chai, old dinner plates, cigarette butts, food and plastic. Always plastic. Adding to the river of rubbish lining the tracks. Squatters watch as we roll by, leaning on haunches with pants rolled around their ankles. They relieve themselves out in the open air, on the open tracks on the railroad. Tracks that carry us from one world to the next, sailing us across land, villages, towns, and cities. Tracks that connect our lives so vividly from place to place. Tracks that invade the natural landscape, natural environment, and tracks that stretch from sea to sea. When will people realize that tracks are not a rubbish bin, just as the sea is not fit to carry our leftovers.

As we sat by the water yesterday, in a daydream haze of Bombay, people came and went all afternoon. Some to get their fare share of eyes on us, others to toss their garbage into the sea. Rubbish piles neatly tied into a ball, wrapped in plastic, and floated out to sea. They fling them gently, like a bowling ball fluttering through the air, until the plastic crackles with the impact of waves and water. It is as simple as throwing a frisbee. As carefree as strolling on the beach. As mindless as watching a sitcom rerun over and over.

How can this mindset change in a city of 20 million? Bombay is literally packed in like sardines, people living on top of people. Cars moving at a stand still, never able to accelerate past the traffic jam. People sit, wait, stand, sleep, eat, and walk together. A moving mass of people, like the waves washing up the Arabian Sea, never settled or still.