The Geography of Waiting

YEARS ago, while I was waiting on Platform Number Three at Dadar for a local train that might be a little less crowded, an elderly man approached me and asked, “What place is this?”

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“Dadar,” I said.

“I have to go to Mumbai,” he said.

“The CST train will come from that side,” I told him.

“That will go to CST,” he said. “I want to go to Mumbai.”

“That is Mumbai.”

“Then what is this?” he asked. “Is this not Mumbai?”

“This is also Mumbai.”

“But you just said this is Dadar.”

“All of this is Mumbai,” I said. “Dadar is inside Mumbai.”

Now irritated, he said, “Just tell me one place—only one—whose name is Mumbai. That is where I want to go. Someone tells me Bandra, someone Borivali. Someone says Mulund, someone CST. Where is Mumbai? No one tells me.”

Muttering to himself, he walked away.

Who was he? Perhaps he was an anti-philosopher character from Jorge Luis Borges—someone who, walking along an indifferent sentence in one of Borges’s unwritten novels, reached its very edge and fell out of the page. Perhaps he has been wandering ever since.

Whenever I recall this scene, I realise that in those moments I was there, and Dadar station was there too—but the elderly man was nowhere, just as Mumbai itself was nowhere. Mumbai was, in a manner of speaking, all around; yet in truth, it was nowhere at all. It was as if many places had been gathered under a single name, Mumbai, and in that very act of naming, it became clear that places reside less in geography than in the mind. One may stand in Mumbai and still go in search of Mumbai itself, and it is entirely possible that one may never find it—much like those who, while living within themselves, spend a lifetime searching for who they are.