the 8:12 from Rajiv Chowk

There is a woman who boards at Rajiv Chowk every weekday at 8:12am and eats a paratha from a steel tiffin she carries in a cloth bag. Not self-consciously, not in the furtive way people eat on the metro when they know they're not supposed to. She just eats. Like she's at her own kitchen table. Like we are all lucky to share the carriage with her. I have been taking this train for two years. I have seen this woman maybe forty times. I don't know her name or where she gets off or whether the paratha is aloo or gobhi, though from the smell I think gobhi. She always has a window seat. She always finishes before Moti Nagar. What I think about, standing pressed between a man in a hard hat and a schoolgirl listening to something through earphones: nobody who grew up in this city grows up gentle. The elbows, the honking, the standing in queues that aren't really queues. You arrive at adulthood a bit sharper than you needed to be. But this woman has made her peace with the commute. She's decided that 45 minutes between home and office is her time, and she will eat a hot paratha in it, public be damned. I've been thinking about that. About what it would mean to decide that. I still haven't figured out what my 8:12am equivalent is. Some days I read. Some days I stand and hold the overhead bar and watch the city go past through the window, the backs of buildings, the water tanks, the small lives visible through distant windows at that hour. That's something, maybe. She got off at Dwarka Sector 10 last Tuesday. I don't know why I thought it would be somewhere more dramatic.