#Scurf167: U-bahn paraphernalia & ors., circa Oct 23
I think I should put this out there
Wrote this dispatch in Frankfurt in early October 2023.
While there are a million things unfolding around me each second, they also present before me a chance to write about each one of them. That I choose to treat them as mundane nothings, the grub of everyday, even little burdens floating around, and ignore the temptation to dwell on each of them as literary muses, is a conscious choice the laidback being inside me makes.
This week, rather this month, has started here (as in India) with a long weekend. On Friday afternoon as the city emptied itself around me, I buzzed through it’s deserted lanes dervish-like. In this time of my life, the only constant (non-human) company and cacophony in these deadly silent days has been the whooshing, gurgling, whistling of u-bahns.
Their frottage mosaic presents itself like a wrapped gift on the platform of life. The trains keep you on your toes. You check timings before making a plan, then you check them once before leaving from home. On your way to the station if you’re distracted by the prosaic beauty of an old tram on the street of Frankfurt, you check the coming and going of these u-bahns again on your phone. Little tinker-y updates making you hurry up or slow down and very rarely continue walking in the same cadence.
All too everyday, all too human.
Over this weekend, as I buzzed from U6 to U5 to U11, ideas occluded me when I moved past pigeon-infested corners that thrum with a rhythm I am all too well-acquainted with. Delhi’s metro stations too buzz with the manic infestations of pigeons. But that’s all where the similarities between these two systems begin and end.
Burrowing through the weekend, I keep finding myself awakened (even aroused) by the innards of the otherwise bustling u-bahn stations of this city. I gaze at the pillars with a child-like wonder, jaws dropped, eyes agape — at the font styles, the myriad colours of tiles, the mosaic like namescapes in each of the stations.
An empty u-bahn carriage is as mysterious and beautiful as a brimming one. Even its most prosaic elements give me a measure of joy. These journeys are short owning to good connections and short distances, making me mull over the missed opportunity of reading, people-watching or snoozing when aboard. Even the stations I’ve most accessed seem, in one way, completely inaccessible to me. I think I know this one station inside out, having taken the train from or to there 3-4 days a week, and then a secret route emerges.
Over this longish weekend, rummaging through thin piles of fallen leaves gathered around escalators, station entrances, staircases, lifts, I discovered that one of the stations I’d assumed as having known fully, had not one but two floors running underneath the top one. Of course, shallow skimming dullards like me have a tendency to get ahead of themselves.
I gaze, wallop and jump into all things new and shiny that I come across. The result of this is evident in my phone’s gallery which has turned into a cache of u-bahn paraphernalia images.
