I was invited by friends to take the Ring-rail but never quite made it to the station that's minutes away from my house in Nizamuddin. I didn't know something like this existed. But on Saturday I took the ring-rail service and saw a different city.
An edited version was published in the Real Page 3 section of the Indian Express on June 6, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, June 4, 2010
From the windows of the grimy train of the ring-railway service, a showpiece during Delhi's Asiad Games in 1982, an invisible, embarrassing city unfolds.
This is the city they are trying to hide this October when the tourists come pouring in for the Commonwealth Games. They have built the swanky Metro with its sleek air-conditioned coaches, its shiny metallic body, and there are the new buses. They have fancy stations, modern-day bus stops. That's the illusion of the city.
But a parallel city, the underbelly of the capital, with all its poverty, squalor and vulgarity and numerous slums, spills on to the platforms of the railway line and the train doesn't rush past them. It is not avoiding them. It halts, blows its whistle. People – mostly daily-wage labourers, students, and saleswomen with their sacks – get off. A few get in. Stench from the manufacturing units in Daya Basti, from open-air toilets next to the tracks because in the slums teeming with the poor, private toilets are a luxury, and smoke from the stoves get in too. The passengers don't squirm. They are used to it. It's part of their life. The train is part of their life, too.
The coaches are never full. But the train has retained its loyal passengers like Rajinder Singh who once was tempted with the Metro and hopped on to it once to get to work from Mundka. After changing five trains and then boarding a bus to get to work at INA, he ended up spending Rs. 76. One-way ticket on the ring-railway cost only Rs. 4.
He was back on the sooty, grimy train the next day.
“I have been using the ring-railway from 1985. It takes me an hour to get to Daya Basti and then I take another train to Bahadurgarh. This train has never betrayed me. The city has forgotten this exists because I guess they are uncomfortable to see what lies beneath the polish,” he says looking out of the window.
At Inderpuri Halt, a old man with thick, misty glasses had set up his bidi shop on the platform. The shanties had slowly made their way on to the platform. Tarpaulin sheets and colorful mud walls hid little of the squalor, the crumbling lives, the resurgent spirit. They had all spilled on to the platform. The boundaries between private and public had been blurred. They weren't bothered by the oncoming train. The eyes would rest on them for a moment only. They had an understanding with those who stared out at them. Those eyes were not intrusive. They weren't judging them for their situation in life. The train would go on, show other lives.
“Poverty can't be hidden. On both sides you have slums, you have naked children running around,” he says. “Maybe the tourists should not be told that this train is there. Then they will never know this side of the city.”
On the dilapidated tracks that were laid in the 1970s, the drab train travels around the city, exposing its ugly back lanes, the windows that led into dark rooms, exposed the vulnerability of the walls that had cracks on them because nobody bothered to or afford to fix them.
It's a city that you never see from the steel and metal windows of the metro. The metro never criscrosses its path with the ring-railway. But it can be seen. At one point, the tracks run parallel – one above the ground, the metro train perched on the narrow pillars, the other close to the ground.
There are slanted houses that looked bent with all the people that were sharing the small space, there are threadbare curtains covering up the shame of poverty on the way. But there is beauty, too. In the city that's feeding on aspirations, a journey on the ring-rail is comforting. There are so many who have been left behind in the race.
On the tracks, they are the ragpickers who are busy doing drugs. The train doesn't startle them. They are used ot it. It is always on time.
Rajinder Singh, who works in the Delhi Development Authority, said he likes to look out of the window and ruminate. The train ride takes away all his regrets in life. He thinks of God as the train lurches past the numerous stations. He has done well for himself and his family. He can tell that when the stench from the slums gushes in from the windows.
In the distance, from under a sooty footover bridge, Daya Basti emerges. Kamla rushes in with her two daughters – Aasha and Anuradha. She has been living in the jhuggi for the last 10 years.
She was going home in Gorakhpur and the train would take her to New Delhi Railway Station for Rs. 12 only.
Kamla works at a mobile charger assembling unit in Daya Basti and earns Rs. 3000 a month. That's not good enough, she says.
Everytime she takes the ring rail, she thinks about the metro. It looks enticing. But it is so out of reach. The metro doesn't connect with the ring rail at all. Most of the 21 stations on the circular track are in places that are not connected by feeder services. Perhaps nobody thought of giving that luxury to those who used the ring railway. Maybe she will go on it once, she says.
“But where will I go. It can't take me anywhere,” she says.
Her daughter Aasha craned her neck out of the window and pointed to a little lane. That's where her school is, she says.
A mountain of garbage, colourful with pink and yellow plastci bags, hid the school. Then came the tin sheds at Kishan Ganj and then yet another slum.
The train goes around the city. The life along its tracks too goes around in a circle. The misery, the poverty is a vicious circle too.
There are 12 electric trains on the ring rail and it can accommodate 7,000 people. But many have broken off from the circle and from the ring rail. There's not more than two to three percent occupancy in most electrically maintained units.
There are only four ring-rail services in the day – two in the morning starting at 7 a.m. and two in the evening starting at 4:55 p.m. from Lajpat Nagar station.
The people on it are familiar faces from the city. There are sweaty, tense, and nervous faces. A few urchins squat near the door. Others are quiet, absorbed. Only here you know where they return to when their drudgery in the city of the future ends.
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