Taking the Metro isn’t my favorite thing. On most days, it may be my least favorite thing. I hate the fact that people are impatient when they are getting off, that women become public properties while aboard on a non-ladies’ coach and I what I hate the most is the way everyone just stares at everything from your face to the text message you’re sending.
The day in question was no different. I took the train, much like any other ordinary one. The game of musical chairs like the one’s played at uncomfortable children’s birthday parties started. One person got up, and everyone ran like hounds to grab the vacant seat. I sighed at the only one tiny difference, these people were not children. So anyway, I won and got a seat (which comes with people giving you bad looks, for those who don’t know) and started reading. The little children of a mother who didn’t think it was important to tell them to behave, were running around and yelling making the early (not to mention coffee-less) morning even more painful than usual. It bothered me so that I started the nearly never-ending search in my bag to find a pair of earphones. The next time I looked up, as if to take a break, an extremely old lady was sitting next to me. She was alone and probably the most beautiful woman the train had aboard that whole day. She asked me what time it was and how much longer would it take her to reach her station. After a few minutes, she smiled at me and said, ‘You look like my granddaughter, she reads all the time’. I was overwhelmed. I have probably never met someone on the Metro and thought of anyone, let alone thinking of someone I might actually like. After a few random sentences on her granddaughter, I knew that the book would have to stay in the bag for the rest of my trip. She asked me very little, and told me a lot. She told me about how her family left Lahore, Pakistan and moved to India and how much she longed to go back to see the place where she played as a little girl. She told me about the day Gandhi was assassinated. And when she noticed the sad expression on my face as a result of her stories (that didn’t end very cheerfully), she told me about trip to someplace in Punjab that made her feel at home. I smiled because she knew that she didn’t have to help me feel better, but she did anyway. When I told her that most of my family moved too, she concluded that I was more like her granddaughter than ever. It made my day. It’s rare to find a person who has nothing to do with you actually caring enough to make you something that intimate for even a little while. My destination was the next stop so I began to pack everything up and leave. Just then, she put her hand on my head and said, ‘May you win every battle you chose to fight’. It was the most genuine and heartfelt thing I’d heard ANYONE say to me, and it came from I had met her 30 minutes ago.
She reminded me of so many things that I had forgotten in the monotony of my every day. Well, firstly, she reminded me that blood may be many things, but definitely is not always thicker than water. She made me think about my grandma and the stories she told us when I was younger. She always told us something funny after a fable ended at an unhappy note. But mostly, she reminded me that being nice to someone is so easy that it might not even take your time. You could just smile at someone without thinking too hard about how it would be perceived, or you could just help someone out even if makes you look more available than you are (or ever intend to be). She made me feel at home outside these four walls from which I write now, in a city that I nonchalantly call my own.
And can you imagine I almost did not take the train that day.