Relevance

I screamed in my head, though I didn’t make a noise, aware that there was nothing to scream about, as I watched the man I’d pushed out of the Bombay Loal train, fall to the tracks… and suddenly my brain was blind, in all senses, A flash of light, as bright as a camera’s and as complete as a blizzard. In my mind’s eye the man’s body fell to the tracks. It bounced off, trailing behind us, very quickly lost to sight, but still, travelling fast enough that the impact with the rails shattered his jaw, and the side of his head collapses into his brain, causing, hopefully, instant death, as his arm snagging on one of the bolts on the railway line, tears of, leaving this pool of blood, similar to those gory images from South Park, or any of those adult animation cartoons which find death such a hilarious joke.

In my mind’s eye, again, since I’m thinking of South Park now, I hear someone say, “Oh my God, He killed ___” I can’t hear the name, of course because, I don’t know it. And I look around me, no one seems to care that a man just fell to the tracks outside our train, perhaps they didn’t notice? Everyone, carries on looking forward, or down, almost unable to move in the press of bodies that is the local. Or perhaps, they do care, but can’t afford the time to express concern, or perhaps are afraid of who I may be, or assume I am somebody, or how else would I have the guts to push someone off the local? Or perhaps they don’t care, they’re zombies?

And the chorus of ‘oh my god….’ slowly fades away. And I think, what if I am ever found? What will I do then, what if the police come down to my new flat? What then? I’m sure my ultra straightbacked landlady will chuck me out, and somehow that seems to be the worst consequence of the event, though honestly, even that seems unlikely. Most people by default assume the police is flawed. And anyway, how are they going to find me? Even if he had samples of my blood on him, the man I killed, they would have to be able to print DNA to find me, and more importantly have my own DNA to match it to. First of all, though, they’d have to care, and from the looks of him he wasn’t someone anyone, let alone the apathetic police I conceived of in that instant, would care for.

I looked back down the tracks, and I can see his mangled body on the tracks still, somehow, though we’ve been travelling for a good minute since I pushed him out, and watched his face twist in surprise more that anything as he realized, this really was it, that his flailing hands weren’t going to find any purchase, on anything… I wondered if he saw the glee in my eyes, as he fell, oh yes, I was I happy to have killed him. But then, first I wondered, if he knew he’d been killed, or did he think he’d just been a victim of fate? I hoped not, I hoped he knew that the hand he’d felt on the small of his back, followed by the shoulder tackle I’d given him were entirely intentional, I had wanted him dead, or at least, I had wanted to kill someone, perhaps not necessarily him. I tried to remember exactly what he looked like, but I couldn’t, unsurprisingly. I’m bad with faces! And he was very literally, one in the crowd (notice the emphasis on was).

I thought of his body, lying there mangled, perhaps, going to be run over by another local! I wondered what angle his legs would be in, I wondered if the dogs from the tracks would lick at his blood, before realizing he was human, and therefore unclean! I wondered what there noses would look like, and their tongues, would their be small red dots on their tips? Would they get any on their fur? Or on their paws? Would they leave paw prints in blood? Wouldn’t those look cool? One of those wolf movies?

Maybe another local would come and run him over, the driver not noticing him, or taking him for a bag of rubbish, or perhaps, realizing he was a dead body, and realizing that a dead man wasn’t worth the energy it would cost to slow and reverse to avoid his body… he would just run him over again, severing his already torn body in new ways, would the trains wheels be stained with blood? Would people at the next station notice? Of course not, no one would. Would the blood splash of the wheels? Like the rain water did?

That was the beauty of it, I had killed a man, and no one would know. Had I not killed him too, still no one would know. That’s the pity of it.

I had killed a man, so many people killed each other, everyday, how many of those deaths, mattered? How many of those deaths that didn’t matter, people cared about? Would he become another Jessica Lal? Or would he be as anonymous as most dead are? I hoped for the latter, and wondered, if there was a lottery out which the dead were chosen to live on… was it really as random, as my choice to kill that man had been?

Why do some people become symbols? And others don’t; who picked kurt kobain to be the symbol of grunge, or chandrshekhar azad, of the indian revolutionary, or lenin of communism, and trotsky of the conscientious dissenter? Or well, Jessica Lal, herself, for the people who didn’t get justice, and what happens to all those others, like my little victim, who were forgotten? When we salute Azad, or Lenin, what happens to all the others? What happens to me, when Jessica Lal’s murderer goes to jail? NOTHING, or maybe I go hungry, if I don’t feel like cooking anything that night, or maybe I feast at a nearby restaurant, or go to a bar, and drink too much old monk and make an ass of myself, and puke on the roadside… the point is, it doesn’t matter…

It doesn’t matter that I’d killed the man standing next to me, and it doesn’t matter, that another man who’d killed someone else, was finally punished… and somehow I couldn’t think beyond that. What then did matter? I look back over the people I hadn’t yet pushed out of the train, to find an answer… what did matter? They were blank. A sea of anonymity, I didn’t see one face, or character there that I’d ever be able to pick out of another crowd, nor, did I expect them to pick me out, in fact they wouldn’t even remember me, just like I didn’t remember the man I’d pushed out of the train.

And I thought about that, it was actually possible to forget a murderer, despite, and this could have been quite literal, having smelt his breath? They seem to have forgotten the murder already, and my station was fast approaching anyway.

 Even now, I could barely remember the man’s body, or wait, where was it, that I’d pushed him out? I didn’t even remember, and the train in the last ten minutes had covered so much ground it was impossible to find out, and then I remembered the tall 12 storry building that I’d been trying to see, before I pushed him out, I would recognize that, (not the scene of crime, but a symbol of progress) and know where it was that I’d killed a man. If I remember to check, I reminded myself. If… if …

Wait, but why did I kill him again? Not because he was blocking my view, no that wasn’t it, why? Was he in my way? Did he smell bad? No… wait, what was it? Oh yeah, I just wanted to watch something die, because of me. Really?  I asked, yup. Oh, well, was it like you thought it would be? Actually, no it far less spectacular, and easy, I just pushed him. I didn’t even have a second of doubt. I saw him there, I saw no one was looking, and I moved in behind him, like I was going to get off at the next station, and I gently pushed him out. He was too shocked to scream… and he just fell, arms flailing at the empty air, till his head was knocked in by the rails, and already he had fallen behind our wagon, when that happened. Its so easy to move past these things!

But wait, I came back to the question of why did I want to kill him? I didn’t really right? I just wanted to kill something, and he was available, and so I chose him, and now he was dead, and nothing had changed in my world, or anyone else’s. hmmm… wow, it was that easy, I could kill again then, perhaps the guy behind me? How? Hmm… it’s possible though. And I could kill him, and kill again, and it wouldn’t make a difference. I remember reading somewhere, that in Delhi, everyday 10 people die on the road, and someone had told me that over 34 people die each day in Delhi, overall, the total here in Bombay, was marginally lower, but yeah, even if I killed a man each time I was on the local, I wouldn’t raise the average. I only take locals twice a week, and 4 deaths spread across thirty days was… 4/30=.13 of a death each day. (yes I did the math) No my killings wouldn’t even impact that statistic.

Well, if killing another man had no consequence, I thought to myself, then what did? Nothing, it would appear… which is extremely liberating to think of, except that the rumble in my stomach reminded that, even murders need food, and food requires money, money requires a job. So being over heard abusing my boss (come on, we all do it, we just hope no one else hears) would actually have a greater consequence on my life than killing this man… hmm… an interesting perspective.

How cheap is human life? I asked the man I’d killed, as he alighted at the next station, and reality came flooding back in, as I fought to stay next to the door, in position to alight at my station. Reality and life with all its smells, and shoves, and stares, and the sour taste you get on your tongue when you’ve eaten something too spicy for your lunch. All of that came back home, as I watched the man I’d killed walk down the platform, and casually pick someone’s pocket.

No one noticed, just as no had one noticed him dying. And I checked my own wallet. Hmmm… loosing a wallet, that could have consequences!