Walking In Crowds

By Arunya Sakthi

Walking in crowds never seemed easy. The feet fumble, the sandals slip. The stairs go round and round, a sense of vertigo. You stumble and you fall. The feet hurt, and the elixir has a price after all. You take a wrong turn, and then figure out the correct platform. By then, the train has left. You see glances, you never see smiles. You see dread, you see sleep. You see hunger, you also see disconnect. You see the overhead voices guiding your life fleetingly, you see the signals. The music pauses, then the music plays, all in the tunnels. You see platforms, you see stations, you see moments of talk. But moments of talk never gain momentum. In the stations, every breathing a sign of a story. Countless stories. And stories that walk, putting earphones, on escalators and on trains. Sometimes in the crowd, you miss the train. The train leaves. You are left on the platform. The crowd waits. 

Another train arrives, the crowd rushes into it, the crowd comes out of it. You stumble, you get rushed. You get bruised even. But you are inside the train. The train moves. The crowd waits. 

Walking in crowds was never a desire. For who ever thought a lone sentence could ever make a difference in a volume? Or maybe it does, the quotes. But quotes don't tell you the entire story. A station never did tell you the entire route. You get down at the last terminal, the train whistles away to glory. The station is empty. The crowd still waits somewhere. 

Walking in the crowds feels alien. Because the crowd is mechanic. You see people climbing the stairs, even the stairs of the escalators. Because the train leaves. And then you have to wait. The next train departs to the same destination, but it doesn't have the same stories.

Walking in the crowd suddenly seems trudging. Maybe because it's a speck of a ship in the vast sea. A point. The stories never thought about the nautical points, only the nautical miles. The walking waits, and the crowd waits. The walking crowd waits. 

Walking in crowds is not different. The stories do it every day, it's a part of the story some times, other times it is the story. Walking in the crowds never seemed easy, because it wasn't about walking alas, the crowds never did seem easy. 

By Arunya Sakthi