Two Years Between Us - Mumbai

The train doors are already closing when Aarav gets his shoulder through, and the edge of the door drags across his bag and shoves him the last step into the vestibule. He lands against a man who smells like hair oil and yesterday's sweat. The man doesn't move. There's nowhere to move to.

Aarav gets his bag in front of him and stands the way everyone stands, angled, one hand up on the bar, weight forward. The floor is a wet grey and his chappals stick to it. Somebody behind him is breathing on his neck and there is no way to ask them not to. The fan in the vestibule clicks through its arc, pushes the smell around. Wet platform. Diesel. Someone's tiffin, something with mustard in it.

He checks his pocket with two fingers, quick, the way you check. Not because he thinks anyone took anything. He just likes to know the wallet's still there. It is. Inside it is one hundred and forty rupees and a bus pass with three holes punched in it, and he knows the exact number because he counted at the door and he counted again at the platform, and both times it came to the same thing. Nine days to salary. Four hundred and sixty to the last EMI on his phone. His mother's message has been sitting unread for twenty minutes. He knows what it says. He could write it himself.

Beta, did you eat? Then a voice note. Then, if he doesn't reply by evening, a third one, and the third one is never about food.

The announcement comes over the speaker, the voice calm and bored, first in Marathi, then in Hindi, then in English, the same three sentences in three languages, and nobody listening to any of them. The train pulls out of Andheri and the world outside turns into the back of a slum and then a wall and then a string of hoardings for a coaching class. Two boys under the last hoarding are flying a kite off a roof. No wind yet. The kite just hangs there, doing nothing.

Aarav checks his phone again. His shirt has gone dark under both arms. The humidity does that, and by the time he reaches Churchgate the whole front of him will look like he stood in the rain for a minute. He's thought about changing his route, taking the fast train from a station further out, paying for an auto to get there. He's done the math on that four times. The math doesn't change. Save the sixteen rupees. Let the shirt happen.

His mother's message gets opened. He reads the first line and puts the phone back in his pocket.

Beta, Vandana aunty's son got selected in Infosys. Twenty-four thousand to start. She called me specially to tell me.

He didn't need the rest.

The train comes into Bandra and the platform is a wall of people. This is where it gets real. Bodies enter from both sides and there's a squeeze and then a squeeze back and then the compartment does something a compartment shouldn't be able to do, which is fit more. Aarav's bag is now up against his chest and his left hand has lost the bar. He gets it back. A boy with a stack of books on his head slides through the gap like he's been doing it since he was five, which he probably has.

A woman next to Aarav is on a call, holding the phone up near her mouth because of the noise. "Haan haan, I'm on the train only. I'll reach by nine-thirty. Just keep the file ready. Keep the file ready, Sunil, I don't want to hear it later."

Two men in the corner are arguing about a seat. Not fighting. Arguing the way people argue on trains, like it's a hobby. "Arre, this is a first-class compartment." "It's a first-class ticket in my pocket, sit down."

The train pulls out and the crowd rocks with it, all of them, one body, and Aarav rocks too and his bag digs into his rib.

He gets his phone out one-handed and answers his mother with his thumb, one line. Okay ma, I'll call tonight. Then he looks at what he wrote and writes again. I ate.

Both are lies. He'll call tonight, probably, but the phone call on a Monday is a long phone call and it always ends in the same place, with her asking about the bank job, the bank job his uncle promised to ask about, which has now been asked about twice and mentioned three times and has produced exactly one phone number that never picks up.

He deleted the number last week. He hasn't told her.

Something nudges his calf. He looks down. It's an umbrella, the curved wooden handle of one, wedged under the bench between two people's feet. Nobody's reaching for it, so it must belong to someone who's standing, which means it's going to get stepped on. It's a good umbrella. Brown check. The kind his father had, and his father had it for eleven years and then lost it in a taxi and talked about it for another two.

The train brakes into Dadar and the whole compartment lurches forward and back, and the umbrella rolls out from under the bench and gets under a man's shoe, and the man doesn't feel it, and the umbrella bends.

"Arre." A woman reaches down and pulls it clear, fast, before the man can shift his weight again. She's standing, one hand up on the bar and one hand on a bag that's small and square and worn on the bottom corners, and when she straightens the umbrella comes up with her.

The man whose foot did it says, "Sorry, sorry," over his shoulder and is already gone into the crowd.

"That's a nice one," Aarav says. He doesn't know why he says it. He says it loud, over the noise, because if he says it at normal volume she won't hear him and then he'll have said something to nobody.

The woman looks at the umbrella in her hand.

"Not mine," she says.

"I know. I saw."

"Then why'd you say it's nice."

"Because it is."

She looks at him for a second. Not friendly, not unfriendly. Like he's a form she has to fill in. She's maybe a couple of years older than him and there's a smudge of something on her left knuckle, ink or a bruise, and her hair is pinned up and coming down, and her shirt is ironed, which means she got up early and ironed it and it's already ruined.

"Okay," she says. She puts the umbrella handle-down on the floor between her feet and stands over it, which is what you do with an umbrella that isn't yours and you don't know what else to do with. The train moves again.

She gets her phone out. This is the thing Aarav notices over the next few minutes, because there's nothing else to do and she's directly in front of him. She reads on the phone with her whole face. Not scrolling. Reading something long, and the way she reads it she moves her head a little when she gets to the bad parts. Her thumb doesn't move for a long time and then it flicks once.

The train jolts at Mahalaxmi and she grabs for the bar with the hand that's holding the phone, and the phone goes up and the bag swings off her shoulder and into Aarav's chest.

"Sorry," she says, and gets the bag, and gets the phone, and gets the bar, all in about a second and a half.

"No problem." His ribs would disagree. "You okay?"

"Why wouldn't I be okay."

"Because a bag hit me and you asked if I'm okay."

"I didn't ask." She's got the phone back up. Then she lowers it an inch. "Sorry. That was rude."

"It was medium rude."

"Medium." She almost smiles. It lasts about half a second and it's mostly in the eyes. "Fine. Medium rude."

The compartment fills again at Mumbai Central and for a while there's just bodies and heat and nobody talks, and Aarav stands there with his bag against his chest and tries to think of something else to say, and doesn't. What is there. What are you reading, is it long, do you do this every day, do you also count your money at the door. The last one he wouldn't say out loud to anyone.

The wet air comes in through the open doorway, thick and warm, and out past the doorway the city goes by in strips. A man washing a taxi. A row of men on a wall with chai in paper cups, all of them watching the trains go by like it's a channel. Two kids in school uniforms on a bike, the one at the back holding a lunchbox over his head because it's started spitting again, the first real rain of the day, just enough to make the platform slick and the air heavier.

His shirt is finished. He can feel the collar lying flat and wet against his neck.

The woman's phone pings, and she reads, and her face changes. It's small. Her jaw goes a certain way. Aarav has seen that face before, on people at his office when the email comes from the client and it's a Friday afternoon. It's the face of the message saying when can you send this.

She types back with both thumbs, holding the bar with her forearm. It takes her a while.

"Bad news?" He says.

She doesn't look up. "Why do you keep talking to me."

The question lands flat. Not mean. Just a question.

"Sorry," Aarav says. "Train habit. You get bored, you talk to strangers. Forget it."

Her thumbs stop. She looks up at him over the phone, and this time she actually looks, the way you look at a menu when you're not sure yet.

"It's my boss," she says. "He's sent the same mail he sent on Friday. With more exclamation marks."

"And you have to answer it by..."

"Now. Ideally by now." She types one more line and pockets the phone. "I answered it. I'll deal with it at the office. That's the thing about the office. It's where you deal with it."

"What kind of office."

"Media. We do property listings, content for builders. Brochures, ads, that side of it."

"So you're selling flats to people who can't afford them."

"I'm writing the copy that sells flats to people who can't afford them." The corner of her mouth does something. "Different job. Better paying."

"My cousin bought a flat in Kalyan," he says. "Two years ago. We don't talk to him anymore. Not because of the flat. But probably because of the flat."

That gets a real laugh out of her, one short one, fast, like she didn't plan it, and she covers it by looking out the door.

"What about you," she says.

"Office. Andheri. We do... data." He says it the way he always says it. "Entry, cleaning up files, reports for a logistics company. Whatever they need."

"That's a lot of whatever."

"The pay is also a lot of whatever."

She nods slowly at that, and something in her face says she gets it, and she doesn't say anything about it, which Aarav appreciates more than he can explain.

The train comes into Charni Road and brakes hard and the whole compartment pitches forward, and for a second Aarav's hand is the only thing keeping him off the woman in front of him, and the umbrella on the floor slides and hits his foot and the woman grabs for it at the same time he does, and they get it together, his hand on the shaft and her hand on the shaft, both of them bent forward, faces about a foot apart.

She's got a small scar on her chin. He files that. He doesn't know why he files it.

"Okay," she says, straightening up. "We can let go now."

He lets go. She sets the umbrella back on the floor.

"That's going to get stepped on," he says.

"It's not mine."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

Somebody behind Aarav puts an elbow in his back, and he moves forward, and the gap between him and the woman closes to almost nothing, and then the train comes into Churchgate and everything happens at once.

The doors open before the train stops. That's a Mumbai thing, everybody leaning to be first, and the platform comes at them and the compartment empties like water out of a tipped bottle. Aarav gets shoved out sideways with the flow and his bag catches on someone and he has to turn to pull it free, and when he turns he's facing back into the crowd coming off the train.

She's in there somewhere. He can see the top of her head, the pinned hair coming loose. Two women with big bags push between them. Someone's suitcase. A man with a trolley yelling for people to move.

"Hey," he calls. It's stupid. He doesn't even know her name. "Your umbrella's getting stepped on."

"Good," she calls back. "It's not mine."

And then the crowd folds over and she's gone toward the exit and Aarav is going the other way because his office bus picks up at the other end of the platform, near the taxi stand, and that's just how it is.

The rain has actually started now. It's coming down in that early-monsoon way, warm and heavy and not committed, and the platform roof drips in three places and the drains smell and a vendor near the stairs is doing a roaring trade in cutting chai, fifty cups in about four minutes, his hands moving faster than they should be able to.

Aarav buys one. Six rupees. He counts his change and it's right and he puts the change in his wallet and the wallet in his pocket and checks it. Still there.

The chai is too hot and too sweet and it's the best thing that's happened to him all day, and he stands under the roof edge with his cup and watches the taxi queue and the people running with jackets over their heads when the jackets are already useless, and he thinks about the umbrella, and about the fact that she said "good" and meant it.

He doesn't think about her, particularly. He thinks about the umbrella, and how she'd stood over it for four stations and then told him to let it get stepped on.

The bus comes at 9:20. He gets on and takes the last seat and puts his bag on his lap and the bus joins the traffic on Marine Drive and the sea is grey and enormous and doing nothing, and his phone buzzes and it's his mother again.

Beta did you see the message about Vandana aunty's son. She is only asking about you also.

He stares at it. He types back.

I saw. Good for him.

Then he puts the phone away and leans his head back against the window and shuts his eyes for the eleven minutes to the office, and behind his eyes, for no reason at all, he goes over the exact way she said it.

It's not mine.

Not the umbrella.

The umbrella was the second thing he checked for, at his desk, before he even turned the computer on. He put his bag down and unzipped the front pocket for his ID card and there it was, wedged in next to the card holder, curved wooden handle, brown check, and he stood there in the doorway of the office with people walking around him to get to their desks, holding an umbrella he must have grabbed off the floor in the crush at Churchgate without knowing he had.

He doesn't know her name. He doesn't know where in that crowd she went. He knows she works in media and writes copy for builders, which in this city is about ten thousand people.

Aarav puts it in the bottom drawer of his desk, behind the files, and closes the drawer, and sits down, and pulls the first report of the morning onto the screen.

Outside, the rain keeps coming down, soft and steady, the way it will now for the next three months.