In the early morning, before golden streaks of light wash the sky, I head out. Breezing past the long, unspectacular Telegraph in fits and stops, idling at traffic lights, the pace and my focus high. I wind up through the ramp in the Macarthur parking structure, the first curlicue spin through the morning, straighten the car hastily into the spot after two tries, and rush through the elevator into the street and then the Bart station in my average heels. With seconds to spare, I board the San Francisco-Millbrae train and settle into the first haul of my trip to the Peninsula, South Bay, almost halfway around the Bay on the other side. My first hour of work begins and I concentrate steadily on completing my memo, mind numb to the landscapes that roll by, vaguely conscious whilst the train rumbles through underground stations, the slow incline into the tunnel after 12th Street, the loud, fast channel beyond West Oakland under the Bay.
The train crowd peters out after the four downtown San Francisco stops, but none of this leaves an impression on my mind even if it seeps into my subconscious. I ease into subtle relaxation for another thirty minutes or so, which, with the morning beating faster and faster, are over in an instant.
It’s time travel of the subterranean kind. The journey has its own rhythm matching the classical piano station I plug into for the ride.
At the final station in Millbrae, just after we pull in and I go between platforms, a second train takes off, beginning for me another travel dance to work, where my heart resonates with excitement every moment of the day.
*****
In my hometown, Lucknow, in northern India, riding in tight crowds was a constant while losing myself to my thoughts, to my songs wasn’t. I took the bus to middle school and jitneys to high school; there was no lack of local transit options despite the city’s soaring population, more than two and a half million, or maybe because of it.
In those packed shuttles that wove their way through the congested streets, with passengers, young men mostly, hanging partially out the side openings with no guard rails; squeezed amidst other girls and boys, red, magenta and yellow hues, body odours disparate; I couldn’t imagine doing anything but getting off at my stop. Headphones weren’t common and I hadn’t yet started reading for pleasure. I didn’t think of time spent in transit as wasteful; no one did. Far fewer things competed for my time in my simpler life then. Taking public transport gave me independence away from being an otherwise protected homebody. The negotiations while hauling and getting into the jitneys, the hunger for dignity among tight spaces, the awkward gazes with strangers, I was united with them through these and in the precise direction of our journey but was also heading on to a remarkably different life path with rare chances of an overlap ever with them or so that I could not fathom then.
The first time I find myself truly alone on public transit—emotionally if not physically—is during my commute to and from graduate school ten thousand miles away in Berkeley, California about five years later. Without a driver’s license, I resort to the bus and train connections between home in Fremont and Berkeley’s classrooms. Ninety minutes door to door each way, a punishing routine that takes away time from a household in need of constant attention and a school experience vital to my future but also a sole joy in my complicated married life. Morning trains for rich course readings in urban planning and evenings for browsing the Sunday sections of the New York Times, each journey bookends the pressure cooker life at home with a saving grace but, in its utility, and simplicity, one that also lacks desirable pleasure.
It’s only when I become more independent, with a job and a driver’s license, that bus and train travel follow more from my choosing. Work is an easy mile from home, and, for weekend excursions, San Francisco is only a thirty-minute train ride away. I’m a new divorcee and there is no hurry to get anywhere. I take in every urban delight that I can reach by bus with my newfound freedom, often lost in memories of the inexplicable paranoia and the acute frugal living I’d left behind.
When I remarry, four years later, it’s to another urban planner. Three years into our marriage, I convince him to buy a car for the ease of hauling groceries or for spur-of-the-moment getaways to wine country. The role of public transit in our lives recedes then, though only for a little while. Almost overnight, driving starts to make me uneasy, especially the astronomical speeds on freeways. So, he drives, and I tag along, meaning that when on my own, buses and trains become necessary again. Like years later, when I accept a job in Silicon Valley, fifty miles from my house in the East Bay, possibly only because of the nondescript Caltrain station connection at San Antonio, that I could walk to from my new office in twenty minutes.
On crisp mornings, the walk to work is punctuated by the chirping of birds. The walks back in the evening are a bit of hustle and bustle; commuters push past each other to board trains going north to San Francisco with me or further south to San Jose. One evening, the employees of a tech company cluster together to talk excitedly about the new programming project they’ve spent the day working on. Another night, a group of friends drink beer in their train seats, cheers-ing each other, while around them people are plugged into their phones and tablets, chipping away at work that will probably continue into the night. Out the window, rooftops interspersed with trees roll into a grey haze as I close my eyes, Farida Khanum’s song “Abhi na jao chod ke, ki dil abhi bhada nahin” in my ears; it’s a melancholic love song, the soothing effect of which lasts over several repetitions, through the two fifty-minute train rides home.
*****
The commute between Berkeley and Silicon Valley takes me five hours a day. My passion for the work drives me through and past my need for sleep, for food, for tea, for a bio break. I cook on weekends for the full week rather than unwinding. Every day’s success depends on a sharp routine and taking public transit inculcates the discipline I need for it. The morning 7:50 train from Macarthur, the following 9:10 one from Millbrae gives me focus on work projects. On the 5pm train from San Antonio that connects to the 6pm BART at Millbrae, I reflect on a day well spent or numbly gaze out of the window at the townscapes, luxurious in the way they are wasteful. Returning home, time always stretches longer, as if everything is in slow motion.
One afternoon, after leaving the office early to join a political rally calling for more funding for San Francisco’s unhoused, there’s an accident and the train gets stuck on the tracks. Time expands on the return trip alone to almost six hours. I take a cab from the next station stop, two hours into the journey, when the route skirts around towns and traffic, taking me through uncharted territory. Neighbourhoods, interspersed with fields, crops rising almost to the height of the car, I would never visit otherwise. Tracking the ride on my phone, from the isolating backseat of the taxi, I recognize that I am not saving time. Somehow in these long commutes, I have learned not to mourn lost time, as I know I cannot beat it with anything no matter how strong my impulses to be efficient are. But on this evening in the car, I take solace in the forward movement as just as it would for an infant, it feels more soothing and less idle than standing still.
In the end, I don’t so much lose time that day as much as I gain it. All I have is time. It swells outward, every long moment home to some new emotion, a new depth in my bodily discomforts and desires: fear, hunger, thirst, loneliness. They play out after one another, asynchronous yet in unison, lending a new dimension to the overall time, expansive, billowing, fluid, malleable, porous shear that tests its limits but never splinters. I never balk and stay grounded until the final act is over, and I arrive home. I hear from my office the next day that I can work from home. Only I can understand that I am not looking for a relief.
There are other excursions, too, other train rides, some planned and some not. I stop for my Kathak dance lessons at the Geary Street studio in San Francisco on a Wednesday evening and on a random Thursday, I decide to take the Muni connection, N Judah to Irving Street, to attend Jenny Offill’s book reading at the Green Apple bookstore. One week, on a Tuesday, I attend the transit advocates’ assembly in downtown Oakland, my bag on wheels behind me. “Are you going out of town?” another advocate asks. “When a woman travels the whole Bay in one day, there’s a lot she needs to lug around,” I say.
Train time is never a lost time for me, and as such rises against the notions in which everyday capitalism operates. Listening to music for five hours would never be ok. But in being shuttled to work and then back home while doing that, I do not once cease being productive. I can give myself this gift of wallowing in leisure, which I would not have otherwise. Commuting is also not a drag then but opens for me a new world of possibilities, which I make the most I can of. In fact, my new relationship with time keeps adding new meanings for me at a subconscious level even when I am not on the train. Listening to music increases significantly during other parts of the day. Day-dreaming and losing myself in thoughts occupy me on Saturday mornings till this day with perhaps only some guilt, ever so more imaginative than real.
All of this ruptures when the pandemic first hits. Suddenly there is no compression or expansion of time and space anymore. Day after day, the only movement happens between the work desk and the home couch. I pine for the loss of my public transit symphonies, my gentle transitions from home to work and then to home again.
“You must be pleased to not have to do the commute to Silicon Valley anymore,” my new department head quips during small talk over Zoom. “Not really, no!” I answer quickly.
She and I have had our differences during my two years at the organization. She believes inherently in the economics of housing, that we ought to build more until there is no more need, any disruption along the way a necessary evil. I believe in the stories of the people impacted by the disruptions; my indefatigable desire is to build, yes, but to protect first. I have inched my way into the organization with a few wins, but also ruffled a few feathers, hers included. So, naturally, when she’s promoted, it worries me.
I stay on course, working hard and staying true to my principles.
Then, exactly three months later, I lose my job.
*****
In the days and months that follow, as I grieve that job, I think often about the commute. About how my passion fueled my perseverance until all that time on the train became almost second nature for me. About how the train rides and the work flowed together seamlessly that I would happily have kept dancing to. Being shunted over sinuous rail tracks four times a week back and forth across flatlands, hills, water, subterranean earth, how I was being carried forward with gentle sweetness and utmost ease to my next destination, time for all the sumptuous lounging I could ever need between home and vocation. It was my third space for five hours where at the end of each busy day palpitations came to a rest, anxiety morphed into solemness, the swaying trains like a lullaby washed the mind off all its frenzies. At the break of every dawn, I was ready to begin the long journey all over again. It had become for me a second religion. When I lost the job, that was robbed from me as well. I became in some parts an atheist, ever more ungrounded and unmoored.
Exactly one year later, I accept a position to lead a transit advocacy nonprofit in San Francisco. We work remotely on most days and on Wednesdays I take the BART train to the city. Some days I feel the irony to be connected to transit in yet new ways, some days I interiorize the abruptness of Wednesday trips into the city. 30-minute train rides are over in no time and the mind never comes to a still. I carry work skirmishes home even on commute days.
My new colleagues take pride in calling themselves “transit nerds,” share a passion for trains, and buy stickers for their transit clipper cards. On weekends, they visit a local museum with a collection of retro buses decked out in pastels and Art Deco calligraphy. For an event hosted by our organization that lasts the full month of September, they log their transit rides and win transit-themed prizes, ride with their district supervisor, celebrate their favourite rail and bus operators. On other days, they talk about reconnecting the J line to the tunnel or march for the creation of protected lanes for buses on Geary Boulevard.
They spend a lot of time being publicly excited about public transit, in other words. I don’t join them at the museum. I have never been a transit nerd, though I understand the appeal of diving so deep into a subject and passion. I think instead about who gets to access office spaces, the grocery store, the school, the park. I came to this job to fight for the rights of those cut off from society or from making meaningful contributions to it, because of transit cuts or inadequate connections. As the scholar Kafui Attoh writes, beyond the environment there is the issue of “who is part of the public, and who by dint of poor transit is alienated from it.” What is there to celebrate, for those would-be riders?
Community is my true vocation. Transit without the added consideration of a community’s needs is to me a hollow monument, without purpose. Card stickers, ridealongs, bus museums—all are meaningless when communities continue to be underserved on the frontlines. For these communities, transit is a lifeline, not an amusement park ride.
But there is another reason that my colleagues’ public displays feel foreign to me. I have come to cherish my commutes in a very private way, their intimacy and meditative quality, putting me into a different relationship with time altogether and thus with myself. Solo commutes have served to slow me down considerably and in the absence of active commuting now, I am always eager to inch my way to other time spans in my days when I could simply indulge in my inner thoughts. Overall, transit feels personal to me, not grandiose, not something to marvel at or celebrate with others.
When I finally share my discomfort around the celebrations that take place in our organization during transit month with a close board member over rounds of appetizers, I sense a strong disapproval. It lingers over the entire meal. Twelve weeks later, I take a short sabbatical. I have made some strikes in venturing a path where I feel I do not belong, not without the heart burn my choices have obviously led to. In the sabbatical, I seek that expansive third space again, three and half years after where it first stopped, to just dwell, bask and reconnect with myself in myriad ways.
*****
One day over my sabbatical, I can no longer resist the pulsing of my old commute. So, I pulsate. I take the two trains to the San Antonio station one Wednesday morning.
The mood in the 7:40am BART train is very solitary and unlike the previous 400 or so times, I am keenly observing all that I was probably missing when I would laser focus on work projects. No one is talking to each other. People come, people leave—Caucasians, Asians, African Americans, Latinx, glued to their phones, their coffees, or staring into space. I can faintly hear my fellow passenger’s music. The train sways from side to side but doesn’t shake the Indian guy who stands firm with a backpack, a side bag, his two hands clasped to his newspaper. Time moves whenever the lady driver makes announcements in her low voice. Place moves constantly, the eastern sun washing the port of Oakland, the highway mega overpass near the San Francisco International Airport. The trains cut swiftly through iconic landscapes we humans have fashioned and refashioned around the Bay over the last two centuries. When underground, the trains softly whisper the built fabrications rolling by above us. First time suspends itself; then, as usual, it expands. The Caltrain delays and the minutes inflate like balloons. Slowly the familiarity resurfaces again.
The Caltrain from Millbrae gradually makes it way to the uneven geography of the Silicon Valley peninsula, where poverty meets steel and glass. But this train, planned as café seating, is for a certain kind of commuter; I once belonged here. This is my community. I revel in the newfound awareness.
My nostalgia as well as my anxiety peak as San Antonio arrives. When the train stops briefly for some mechanical issue, I wonder if any of my former colleagues are at work right then. This would be when I would start my day with them previously, when action and excitement would keep me on my toes right till the very end. My surroundings on Shoreline Street are deeply familiar, the sweeping curve, the street slopes, and then the distant view of the office building.
I mimic my old workday at a nearby WeWork space, even though I feel uncomfortable and a sense of obsessive longing for the past.
On the return trip at 5:26 pm, the loudness of the second BART train from Millbrae is a reflection of the racket in my mind. Maybe I did what I could with the Silicon Valley job. At the stop at Colma, police activity ahead of the train delays the train some. Across from me, one woman leans on another until the train finally starts. Maybe there was nothing different I could have done.
One job lost, one going awry, one million other pursuits currently in a state of stasis. When the train leaves the Daly City station, it is darkness everywhere except for the isolated lights on cars, buses, houses, streets. I yearn for some clues by the time I reach home. My fidgeting is noticeable. The long train trip coming after some time, I am reliving the nostalgia alas without the ease and tranquillity I often experienced previously.
The train becomes very slow.
The wheels whistle as it enters a tunnel.
I close my eyes.
