Short Story: A Day On The Mumbai Local Train

Sudha Vishwanathan shares a poignant story capturing the ordeal of daily commuters on the local train in a city like Mumbai.

As a twenty-seven-year-old woman from the tranquil town of Tirupur in Tamil Nadu, the stories about the place, Mumbai, I was expected to call home after my wedding, felt like something out of a storybook.

However, it turned out that people who painted a lovely picture of the cosmopolitan city had never experienced the local train system.

What struck me as amusing was how effortlessly the locals discussed train schedules—