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COMMENT

Massive, ruthlessly-straight and hard-edged concrete pillars tower greyly upwards, to support even more towering clerestory roofs, which soar some 30 metres above the platforms.

Photo: S.S. Kumar

Intimidating architecture: An MRTS station.

The sheer size of the stations leads one to expect something like the great express trains of Europe, which pull into and out of, say, Berlin’s five-deck central station, or Moscow’s Yaroslavski station, whence the Rossiya starts its 5,000-mile trans-Siberian journey to Vladivostok. But when the MRTS trains appear, they turn out to be tiny little commuter trains, which edge almost diffidently into these gigantic edifices, these concrete cathedrals.

The stations are silent on the fate of humanity. At one station there was absolutely nothing to say where the ticket office might be found. I walked the entire length of the ground floor, a distance of a hundred metres or more, through puddles of rainwater where the structure had leaked heavily in the overnight showers, and if I had not by chance looked left would have missed the tiny ticket-window altogether. There was nobody there (this was at nine in the morning, peak commuter time). A man lounging against one of the huge pillars (which glowered at his offensively insolent familiarity) detached himself and disappeared, reappearing in the window to sell me a ticket. I then made the mistake of asking him which side my train was due to depart from; he gave me a general sort of wave, with the added bonus of a grunt. So I took a chance and went up the nearest flight of stairs.

There were 63 steps, and they took me up two floors. I dared not try the lift, lest there be a power-cut while I was inside it. The escalator was — of course — not working, and in any case it was only available from the first floor to the second. They do call it the Mass Rapid Transportation System, don’t they? Well the masses would have to be very fit even to get to the platform, or they’d certainly get fit doing so. In a wheelchair or any difficulty with mobility? Just forget about the MRTS. You’re not the kind of Mass the railways had in mind. The new stations are, predictably, unregenerate replicas of the old, and in industrial countries all of them would violate almost every imaginable law on access for the disabled. Even the platforms have been built thirty or so centimetres below the train floors, so you have to haul yourself up into the train.

There are indeed two floors to negotiate before you reach the platform. The mezzanines or ‘tween-decks are best hurried past. They are totally unlit, almost totally unlabelled, and appear to serve no purpose whatsoever. They can also be menacing. Late one Saturday afternoon, as the light faded, I found myself decanted from a train that had decided it would proceed no further; I walked down to the mezzanine, took the only turning available — the other routes were all barred by locked steel gates — and found myself walking, in deepening darkness, along a narrow walkway. I then had to walk through another steel gate, and at that point I grew seriously worried, despite the fact that at 1.70m and 75 kilos I would at least have put up a struggle if somebody had jumped me. Eventually I saw something resembling light, and it led to an outside staircase, down which I gratefully descended. I had had visions of the discovery — a very long time later — of my skeletal remains in that mezzanine. Alas, poor professor. We knew him well. But he took a wrong turning in an MRTS station...Must be 300 years since, and they’ve only just found him.

At least on that occasion, I escaped.

The next test of the passenger’s resolve is the wait. If it rains, the entire structure leaks, and there are puddles of rainwater lying around for hours, until they are replenished by the next shower. The passenger has the satisfaction of knowing that they might possibly be a human subject in an MRTS inter-station competition to see which station can breed the most mosquitoes and thereby infect most passengers with dengue fever, or even malaria. The records for this tournament are, I understand, exempt from the Right to Information Act.

You will certainly have to wait long enough to be a target for the local insect life. In six years or so of using the train, I have only ever heard one announcement, and that was unintelligible in the crackle of the hopelessly inadequate loudspeaker system. So the only thing is to look at the timetable.

If you can find it. Some of the stations have one such, on a notice board about a metre by a metre and a half. It is easy enough to read, especially in the daytime, though it is very coy about which southward trains stop at Thirumailai and which go further. But its crowning achievement would leave Jacques Derrida tearing his hair in frustration and defeat. Monsieur le Professeur derived considerable academic mileage, if not notoriety, from his argument that texts are necessarily indeterminate in their range of meanings; but the MRTS timetable has wiped the floor with that argument, because its text means nothing at all. The times indicated bear no relation whatever to when a train will arrive, or even if any train will arrive. Put that in your pipe Jacques, and smoke it.

Well the train — a train, possibly the delayed 8.28, or the delayed 8.47, or the delayed 9.10 (you’ve probably been there long enough for it to be any one of them) — finally appears; and — surprise surprise — it trundles you several kilometres to your destination, in a tiny fraction of the time other forms of transport would have taken you, and certainly at a tiny fraction of the cost one or two other forms of transport would have levied upon you.

Now, like a good modern commuter in a rising economic superpower, you get off, and — as the train runs only along the jewel of Chennai, the Buckingham Canal — you switch to the bus, relieved that it’s only a shortish bus ride home or to work. No, you can’t use a combined ticket, which you can do on all forms of public transport in most large cities in the industrial world. A senior railway officer told me not long ago that the railways’ own accountants had killed off that idea, though I have an impression that it might be revived for the imminent (in a loose sense) Metro.

Switching to the bus, in any case, can mean a walk of over a kilometre to the nearest bus stop (I mean that — I’ve done it). One station has the laughable sign “Bus Terminus” by one of its exits. Nobody has told the buses yet.

Well you do get there, either home or to work, wondering — you’re not the only one, and this is hardly the first time — about the persistent sullen distrust, ignorance, and contempt in which the Republic of India and its citizens hold one another. If the MRTS of Chennai is a work of genius, it can be so for only one reason.

It’s a sight better than commuting by bus.

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