Eyes wide shut
It was the end of a regular workday in London. My journey back home was slow, with the stuffy Bakerloo line doing its usual thing of stopping abruptly and throwing unsuspecting passengers around before moving again. Defence mechanism firmly in place, I had wedged myself in my favourite spot between the door and the barrier where the movement would not affect me and I stood with my headphones on, lost in oblivion. As someone who has always preferred standing to sitting down in public transport, especially on this unglamorous train, with its torn and soiled seat covers, I concluded it was better to hold my breath and compress myself into a vertical space than sit cramped between strangers.
Trying to shrug off the long day, I looked around at my fellow passengers to see if anybody caught my eye in particular. What a pity, I thought to myself. There goes 1 out of 3 things I look forward to most about daily life in this city. That casual hope of bumping into a beautiful stranger. All around, I only saw dreary faces staring into nothingness. That’s something we have in common, I thought. If not eye candy, at least our lives seem to begin and end on a similar note. At this point, and as happens quite often with me, the mind slowly started drifting off in different directions. We are all faces and bodies that leave home every morning with make-up, coffee and anticipation only to end the day in a carriage full of strangers, with a whole lot of mundanity. This, and several ideas about beginnings and endings, about how life really is one big, never-ending cycle, and how most of us go through it feeling like a hamster on a wheel consumed my thoughts.
The train came to a sudden halt, interrupting my reverie. I stepped out, took a few steps and paused, debating whether to use the escalator or climb the 100 odd steps to reach the top. Escalator!, my body screamed. Do the right thing and take the steps, M, my mind said. As someone who has never been very good at that mind over matter juxtapositioning, I decided to step onto the escalator. It had been a long day and while I would try to fit in some sort of physical activity to end it well, today just didn’t seem to be the day. I tapped my card at the exit gate and smiled at the chubby TFL officer who sat by the turnstile. What a life he must have, I thought. Watching thousands of people enter and exit everyday, without going anywhere himself. Much like the elevator attendant back in India, who would cover hundreds of kms going up and down a building but never really reaching somewhere at the end of it. Ah yes, the mind was rambling into seemingly insignificant areas once again. Observing people had always been a favourite past time. I have often wondered what I get out of it and over the years, concluded that it is a strange sense of equanimity about the world, and my place in it. The idea that we are inherently not very different from each other, that underneath all our pretences and posturing we are all pieces of the same pie reassures me. And so over time, my desire to people watch and escape, has only grown more indulgent.
As I turned to exit, I felt the wind whoosh against me, and grudged that all too familiar tunnel effect of London’s 19th century stations, so not designed for women who hate their hair flying about. Tying it firmly in place, I looked up. The sky was dark, and the one thing I had become used to not questioning i.e. how much this city could rain, was in its full glory. Let’s do this, M. Ten minutes and you will be home. Mechanically, I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head, checked that the zip of my bag was closed and pushed my phone deeper into the pocket. Small habits I had inculcated as a substitute for carrying an umbrella which I found all too cumbersome. The pavement shook a little as I purposefully stepped onto it…or was it just my imagination trying to hammer in the guilt of choosing the escalator over the stairs? Argh. Moving forward, my mind started walking on but my eyes abruptly stopped to take in the sight in front of me.
There was nothing particularly novel about this sight. Traffic. Wet roads. Bare trees. Rain. I had been seeing it almost every day this month, and for most months in the last three years of living at the same address. So why did my eyes notice this? And what exactly did I notice? The parts or the sum? Definitely the sum, I concluded. Still, I couldn’t comprehend why in that moment it felt as if everything just fit like a frame. As I chewed further on this thought, my feet stopped and I looked down to see what happened.
London is a walker’s paradise and I am, for the most part, a solitary over-thinker, so I fit in quite well as a walking thinker or thinking walker. I don’t stop to think, no, never, and hence this felt like a strange aberration.
I looked at the frame again. And slowly realisation dawned that maybe, this was my ordinary day desperately trying to show how it could be a bit extraordinary. That if I denied its existence, I could just walk on home and nothing would be amiss. But here it was, this moment, with something beautiful, something that fit perfectly together. By now, I was starting to feel the rest of the world slow down around me, and a sense of validation creeping in. All that scuttling about since morning, chasing, following up, being chased was leading to this moment, almost. Riding the highs, ignoring the lows, and the analytical me, trying to view everything and everyone with an objective eye — all of these things, it seemed, were now trying to tell me, you did what you had to do, now this, right here, is your time to let it all go and just absorb what may be your picture perfect moment of the day.
I am not a big believer in magic. Until recently, I did not believe in soulmates either. Somehow after years of sharpening my left brain, these things seem like a departure from everyday reality. But chancing upon that sight on that ordinary day, I realised that life sometimes gives us moments of magic when we least expect it to. We don’t always notice them, or may notice but refuse to acknowledge their existence. This is in spite of how every author, poet and singer tell us otherwise. About magic that tries to sear through the mundane, to make us stop and see it. The kind of magic that is often lying around in corners, hidden in places and in people. Magic that wants us to look past our ordinary lives, and open the eyes we have kept wide shut to see only itself. That day, and in that moment, my rambling mind concluded that the magic I was skeptical about stood still in time, right there. Waiting patiently for me to notice it.
And so I gave in, allowing the symmetry of that frame to fill me up completely. Something about that surrender felt honest and sweet and a hundred times better than all those endorphins my workout could have given me. And I smiled, thinking how this hamster had for one small moment in time, taken a leap of faith, jumped off the wheel and learnt to live a little.
