Elphinstone
Beneath the rubble of the three oldest of my West stairs there lies a large rhombus-shaped royal blue plaque, badly dented and pocked with rust, that used to nestle against my body partially obscured by the rubbish dump. I do not believe they will let me have it back. Lacking arms as I do, although I am possessed of a good number of legs and a slender yet strong body with which I have for four decades borne the strides, saunters, and drunken swaggers of the locals – their morning pell-mell, their night hush – I will not be able to reclaim the plaque for myself.
The plaque says, in bold white letters, in both English and the script of the local language which is as tortured in appearance as their fortunes have been: “Elphinstone Road Station.” It is the name of the station on the Western Railway, the platform of which my East stairway joins hands with.
The plaque was kicked away by a gentlewoman, a regular on the 9:58 that arrives anywhere between 10:00 AM and 10:20 AM and sometimes not at all, whose belly swelled with young and who has appeared at the far end of the Alley of Flowers that runs alongside me and picked her way past the flower stalls and vendors of utensils and slippers and other sundries for near on twenty years, half of my own life. A woman with steps so light – featherlike – that I would not feel them even when she ran up my stairs and pounded down my shoulders in a rush for her train, except for the massive final kick she delivered that toppled my plaque. A kick accompanied by a wild scream that rent my soul. Dare I assert that the quietest of us become the loudest when our ends are near? When they come to tear me down, as I am sure they will, I will thunder with grief not least because I do not deserve it.
It would be pointless of me to hold the loss of my plaque against the good woman because she is dead.
It would be pointless also because it was inadvertent. She was pushed. I felt it happen.
The day was unusual from the start. While the sun rose in the east as usual and the residents of the ramshackle dwellings beyond the Alley squatted by the tracks for their sacred daily eliminations as usual, at about 9:00 AM the skies opened all of a sudden and the Southwest Monsoon let loose on us with unwelcome vigor after two weeks of glowering and scheming inside her grey clouds. People had packed up their umbrellas and taken out their good footwear. They had resumed work on housing projects. She pelted down, not pausing to gloat. Briefly I enjoyed the cool she brought. My beams contracted, the stress and the dirt washed out of me. My gutters overflowed with water and I watched indulgently as milk cartons, wafer bags, and cigarette butts sailed headlong and freefell off my far end.
But the bad news soon began. Slowly I became aware of the increasing commotion atop me. Caught unawares by the rain, hundreds of umbrella-less travelers jostled for shelter under my roof instead of moving on quickly. As well it was the Season of Worship, though you might well ask: when is it not the Season of Worship for these longsuffering folks? This time it was the turn of the goddess with ten arms and pretty curly lips who sits astride a tigress and has a voracious appetite for marigolds, and so an unusual number of flower sellers, baskets on hips, seeking to protect the source of their livelihood from bedragglement on their way to and from the Alley of Flowers, joined the other travelers and clogged me. Further, thoroughly discombobulated by the rain, several trains arrived at the same time and stood blinking on the tracks while others did not show up at all.
By my estimate, at the peak there were at least two thousand people on my shoulders and hundreds more on each of my stairways, joined body to body, heaving and settling as one. The rain hammered down and made a din on my roof of such dimensions that it was impossible to think. But I flexed my shoulders and braced myself for the coming and going, the waiting, the pushing, the fidgeting. I did not worry.
Soon my 9:58 regular, looking a little flustered but neat as a pin in her green sari and little white cap, her carry case of brooms and mops slung on a shoulder with as much pride as an artist would his brushes, her umbrella aloft – she was one of the prudent ones – hurried up the Alley. She folded her umbrella and looked up at me. There was not a wrinkle in sight except on her face. She held an arm protectively about her swollen belly and placed a hand on my railing. I felt the pebble-sized calluses on her palms and heard the unsaid question that trembled forever on her lips: how much longer? I ached for her. I, too, am trodden upon.
She paused on my second stair to plan her fight up.
By then the rout had begun.
I do not know exactly what happened.
You may think me blockheaded, but if there is one thing I know it is that one must do what one is meant to do. If one has been cobbled together of soft tissue and brittle bones and is meant to give way, one must give way. If one is meant to stand rigid one must stand rigid.
But that morning the rain, the discombobulating rain, threw this universal mandate off-kilter. Loath to step into the pelt, people stood fast and did not budge even as others barreled through uncaring as to what or who was underfoot. Youths shinned up my sides and climbed my roof and jumped off me with an abandon that I would have mistaken for joy if I did not know otherwise.
There was another crucial reason for the stampede to which only I am privy, which I will reserve for later discussion.
The next I knew my 9:58 regular was on my sixth stair. She clung desperately to my railing, her toes scrabbling for hold in the slick plastic rain sandals she still wore. But the sheer tonnage behind her forced her through my railing, one leg on either side of a bar, which made thudding contact with the tenderest, most private part of her and provoked her bloodcurdling scream, the last sound she made. Then her left leg slipped all the way through and hit my plaque with a force against which it did not stand a chance.
I spared many thoughts for the good woman. Within seconds she was inert and, I suppose, the young one inside her. Within two hours someone had covered her bruised, sliced body with a white cloth and placed it alongside the other bodies on the steaming platform where the heat and the rain ensured that their decay would commence without delay. It is in the way they depart, soft with rot and showy with odor, that their kind most distinguishes itself.
Next to the bodies lay a forlorn collection of their accoutrements: mismatched slippers, bags and purses and briefcases, headgear and eyewear. The air was still, the rain fell but mildly as if the monsoon had been temporarily appeased. By and by a large white vehicle arrived and took away the bodies. Other vehicles brought officials with somber faces who traversed my length, tapped at me with sticks, and muttered about a new bridge. They have said this before. I am but their stepchild.
Months before the stampede, the same crew that came around muttering about a new bridge came around to propose that the name of the station I serve, Elphinstone Road Station, be changed to Prabhadevi, which is the name of one of their goddesses, a temple to whom is visible from my shoulders. Following the proposal someone fervidly tore off the plaque bearing the station’s name and dropped it against my side, where it gave me cool comfort while I nursed my grousing, nostalgic thoughts.
The plaque is significant as it is the only written record of my name, which I borrow from the station. They call me Elphinstone Footbridge.
May I be forgiven for thinking Elphinstone far more elegant – fairly resounding with substance – than the new name they proposed? I have nothing against their religion but, shabby thing that I am, I derive status from my name, one that was shared by a once-governor of this city of Mumbai.
I have heard that he was descended from thirteen generations of Lords spanning more than five hundred years.
I have heard that he was made a Baron.
I have heard that he was so dashing that a young Queen Victoria fell in love with him, because of which they made him leave his country. If this is a rumor, it is the kind that only enhances.
I have heard that he never married.
Elphinstone. Say el-fin-stuhn. A name that might well belong to a domed, steepled structure nestled in an unending moor, its hallowed interior all stained glass and marble. Brick and stone that people revere as they would a wise ancestor, that breathes and weeps and lives a more purposeful life than most. A name that conjures top-hatted lords and corseted ladies, crowns and powdered wigs, rolling green hills studded with moats and impeccably engineered fledgling railroads, and rain that is not a shrewish scold but a caress.
Does it not so conjure for you?
My own beginnings were gritty. Never christened, I was born of need and haste in this, my foster land, put together by an inexperienced crew from leftover concrete and bits of spare roofing. I am not pretty. With a towering disdain for all things aesthetic, the crew omitted to paint me and thus committed me to a lifelong battle with rust. My stairs slope, my shoulders dip and rise. In that I value precision and beauty, I lean towards the countrymen of my namesake: it is no small burden, then, to know that the sight of me sparks neither pleasure nor confidence.
Yet they came in droves. For twenty hours a day they hurried up my stairs and over my shoulders, slapping in slippers and clacking in heels to their days at desks or in the trenches, a storm of locusts that blew and blew and when it cleared away only I remained to tell of it. They did not mind what I looked like as long as I held them aloft. For forty years we were partners in their push for growth, their blazing desire to catch up with the world. And so they said “To Elphinstone Footbridge!” Elphinstone. Elfin Stone. Delicate stone. Strong stone.
And just like that, Elphinstone no more?
These were my grousing, nostalgic thoughts back before the stampede when I thought a change of name was the worst that could happen.
And now neither Elphinstone Station nor Elphinstone Footbridge, but Elphinstone Stampede?
They blame me for it.
They’ve jeered at me before. It was perhaps six years ago that I first heard them say I was too narrow. A small procession came by to say it, its members carrying placards and little black boxes with which they snapped away at me. They stuck posters all over me requesting I be replaced. Then, in their usual slapdash way, they forgot all about it.
They blame me for being slim but they do not blame that crone of a monsoon, of whom I have said enough.
And if I am slim, aren’t my flaws the flaws of those who made me? Their smallness of vision made me small. They did not see the coming of the steel and glass towers, the many places to work in. They did not see the coming of the Alley of Flowers and the flower-sellers with hips upon which to balance impossibly large baskets.
They foresaw neither hips nor baskets, nor the fallen basket that caused a flower-seller to shout “Phool gir gaya!” – the flowers have fallen – which the crowd mistook for the slanderous “Pul gir gaya!” – the bridge has fallen – which is the real reason for the stampede. “Phool” for “pul,” flower for bridge, their language and their ears fallible too.
Trucks belonging to the Army have arrived. Army men have alighted and are surveying the area for the new bridge. Soon a wrecking ball will swing and I will go down.
The bodies are gone as is the forlorn collection of accoutrements. The air no longer bends with screams. But I remain as do my crumbling stairs and my bent railing at which a gentlewoman and her unborn young met their unlikely ends and made me catch my breath.
They want to erase the fact of what happened just as they wanted to change my name to erase the fact of four hundred years.
The new bridge will gleam with glass and steel and be of larger proportions. But its name will not be Elphinstone.
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Inspired by true events
Photograph modified from the source and licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
