The Green Line

The Green Line of the Delhi metro is the slowest.
For the green line, each station is a
dear friend’s birthday and the journey to every
stop a stroll down the tracks of the time
it shared with them.
It’s almost as if it wants
you to let go of your destination and
fade into its thronging, metallic belly.

So, the world slows down from Inderlok to Peera Garhi.
The relentless pace of life Delhi has gifted me
with gives way for those 25 minutes, and
even though I see the world outside
the glass panes of the metro struggle to
catch up, it fails to outrun the zombies
of the cracked memories I had long since suffocated.
The silver surface of the train turns a
wild orange, mirroring the fires lighting up in
my brain as the women’s compartment becomes a
purgatory for the repentance of the sins I had
ignored the existence of.

Sometimes, the metro skids to a halt a few metres
before the station and declares that the stop
has been reached, as if trying to cheat the
passengers out of their destination
the way I had tried to deceive my brain
by showing it the corpses of the past.
And as the announcements declare how the metro
has reached yet another station that is not mine,
the rotting bodies pick themselves up and
shake out their putrefying limbs.
The stench of their decay
invades the cool, sterile air of the train,
it reaches my nose, clogging it,
making it hard to breathe.