A journey through dust, steel, and laughter, carrying the unspoken promise of belonging.Where fleeting rides become reflections on equality, democracy, and shared existence...
Men weathered and tanned by sun and survival. Their shirts tattered, almost decently and bleached by years of labour and hardwork, their wrinkled palms lined like cracked earth. They stand by the roadside, their feet still soaked and covered in the day’s dust, sharing among them the only perfectly folded betel leaf they had. The red glint catches the fading light as they laugh, their tobacco teeth showing with ease, their soft exhausted voices, resonating in the street with what only honesty can hold.
As I look at them from a safe distance, enough for them to be oblivious that they were seen and for me to listen to their conversation as I was taking my everyday evening walk. Just as I pass them, one of them asks, almost hesitantly, “Metro chadhle?”( “Did you ride the metro?”). Something about that question stilled the air and stirred the heart simultaneously.
It was not asked in envy, pride, jealousy, or superiority but with a childlike curiosity. The kind reserved for miracles that one sees only from afar. They fill up the void between their feet as they lean closer to one another. They speak of the new metro recently built and made functional in Patna. They talk about its shine, its hum, the air conditioning, its gentle cooling air that to them might feel like a breeze from another world. They talk of its lightening speed, its smooth glide as it passes through the steel track, of how it lights up at night looking like warm and soft patches moving as fast as it could. But most importantly they talk of how they got to experience this at just rupees fifteen.
While they talk I realise something commonly rare. They were not divided by what generally divides. I could not recognise anything among them, but just a curious glimmer in their eyes, and a crumpled smile on their faces as they talked. They were not divided, by religion, by caste, by class, by appearances, or even their uneven fortunes. The metro, in its quiet oblivion and mechanical grace bound them together as equals in wonder, excitement and experience.
They were just four men, from different worlds, different lives, different thoughts and beliefs, joined in a simple single conversation about movement, about an extremely heavy stretch of metal, about wind swishing through as the metal raced. About a possibility larger than all differences. It seemed as if it was the first time they did not talk of survival, of betrayed fate. Rather, together, although in a fleeting moment they spoke a language of shared awe, of shared hope.
And that very fleeting moment, standing by the dust of the road, I realised something simple yet profound. Sometimes equality does not march, scream or demand, it hums softly on these steel rails, glistening like hope, swallowing the emptiness that division creates. That maybe, equality writes its stories everyday in such compartments, where the doors automatically work for all, similarly. Where, to maintain a safe distance is advised to all, where seats are not ‘reserved’, where everyone buys the same ticket.
The exciting exchange of words among these four men, reminded me of my usual metro rides in Delhi. A short journey, from GTB Nagar to Civil Lines, barely enough time to settle before the doors opened again. Yet, each day brought with it a thousand different stories, woven together equally despite differences, in the same compartment with cold symmetrically angled seats. The metal lid scent of newness, the yellow blinking lights, the rhythmic beeps, the constant announcements, the whoosh of the sliding doors, the thrill of standing among strangers solely on faith and belief without the weight of difference.
A man in formals with his ‘corporate bag’ diagonally hanging across his chest, standing beside a student in worn out jeans constantly trying to check the college schedule, a woman in a crisp saree trying to make the most of her journey, examining some test papers, while a labourer held a paint splattered bag in one hand, holding tight to the rod from another, against which he stood still. No one looked out of the place. No one looked away. All of us shared the same air, the same hum of motion, the same inertia jolt as the train paced, the same transitory quiet between two stations.
For those few moments underground, the world above, of horns and hierarchies, of status symbols, of differences, socially, economically, of caste creed or religion, of highs and lows, of everything and not everything, seemed to dissolve. The metro became a small republic of motion and movement, where the ticket of a bare minimum price was the only eligibility, and the destination the sole identity. Inside, it did not matter who I was, where I came from, what were my dreams and aspirations, or how much was I in control of my life or mind. There, I was simply just another person in transit, equal, unseen, and completely at home in that soft anonymity.
Perhaps this is what public places are meant to be, not just an infrastructure but a constant reminder that democracy is not built only in parliaments, but in small compartments, that lights up the same for everyone, that waits and leaves the same for all, that warns of a danger or a precaution to be taken equally for all. Democracy, secularism, or equality can never be written down in manifestos but in these gentle moments when people breathe the same air without judgement.
For a country where lines have always been drawn to divide, through caste, religion, privilege, language, power or money, it seems strangely poetic that metros too run on lines of colours that differentiate the directions but connect the destinations, people from one corner to another. They don’t divide. They bring people together and not keep them apart. Those separate lines slowly dissolve the oldest lines of separation.
Inside those speeding compartments, nobody knows who belongs to an upper caste who doesn’t, who is rich or poor, or who is a skeptic or a believer. We are all just travellers, a part of the system that runs the same for all.
Maybe that’s what equality truly feels like, a short ride between two stations where the city outside blurs into motion, and all that remains is the quiet reality of shared existence. Inside the metro, no one is ahead or behind, all move together, carried by the same rhythm, breathing the same air. I often wonder, if our country could move like that, at the same pace for all its people, how beautiful might it be? If the nation itself were a vast compartment, cared for, cleaned, and cherished equally by everyone within it, perhaps peace would not be a dream but a habit.
The metro, in its tireless and unassuming way, teaches us that progress means little if it leaves someone waiting on the platform or gives different seats to different people. It leaves us as a reminder that the only lines worth drawing are the ones that lead us closer to harmony, to understanding, to the belief that beneath every difference, we are built of the same warm blood, bound by the same fragile hope.
And as the metro glides forward, cutting through dust, history, and difference, it carries not just passengers, but a quiet promise: that someday, this country too might learn to move like that, separate in design, but united in direction. And that sometimes equality arrives not just through reforms and revolutions but quietly, on steel tracks, in shared air, and in the unspoken understanding that in the end we are all just travellers, sometimes in the journey of life and sometimes at the platform of a speeding metro.
Those men in Patna may never meet the ones who commute daily in Delhi, yet their wonder is the same. The metro becomes a shared dream of belonging, a quiet thread running beneath the noise of inequality. I think of them often, four men standing by the roadside, their laughter laced with betel, their talk full of motion and possibility, of hope and curiosity. They might not have ridden the metro yet, or they might already have, but in their eyes, it already sped as a symbol of something greater than transport, something closer to faith, as a reminder that even in the thickest dust, hope can still travel sleek, humming, and shared.
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Mythri Tewary is a Philosophy postgraduate from Ramjas College, University of Delhi who writes about the quiet intersections of ethics, everyday life, and shared human experience. Equality, to her, is not an idea to be declared but a feeling that awes her, in the fleeting, unnoticed moments where people simply move together
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