World | India
Same time, same train friendships shattered
Every weekday, heading into work and then coming back home, Ashok Shah met up with his diamond-merchant friends: same train stations, same cars, same times. They talked business - prices and shipments, carats and quality - and chatted about family as they rode the city's clattering rail network.
- AP
- Published: 00:00 July 14, 2006
Mumbai: Every weekday, heading into work and then coming back home, Ashok Shah met up with his diamond-merchant friends: same train stations, same cars, same times. They talked business - prices and shipments, carats and quality - and chatted about family as they rode the city's clattering rail network.
This week's train bombings ended that tradition for some - sending Shah to a hospital, killing two of his friends, and ripping apart dozens of groups of train friendships.
"It's one big train family," said Mayur Shah, Ashok's brother-in-law, waiting for him to regain consciousness after surgery on both his arms in a downtown Mumbai hospital. "We travel at a fixed time on a fixed train so we keep friendships for years."
Train friends, as people call them here, are a Mumbai tradition and a part of workday life for thousands of men and women. Some groups play cards, some sing songs. Others, like Shah and his diamond-trader friends, mainly talk shop.
Each morning, they jump onto their trains at various suburban stations, flinging bags, lunch boxes, or even legs over the benches to save space for friends in the packed train cars, before spilling out in downtown Mumbai. Each evening, the trip is reversed.
"Business is their bond. They talked work. But these men also shared their happiness and sorrow," and often met outside of the trains as well, said former deputy mayor Dilip Patel, who has spent much of his time since the blasts attending the cremations of victims.
A couple of professional communities appear to have suffered badly. At least two dozen of the dead are believed to be upper-middle-class diamond traders and stockbrokers, mostly men from India's western state of Gujarat who live in the city's northern suburbs. Both Shah and his brother-in-law are Gujaratis from those areas.
But Patel, the deputy mayor, said many groups of travelling friends had already begun commuting together again. "Nothing will stop these men from meeting," he said. "It will always be a fixed train, a fixed time."
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