The air around a wedding hall is always pregnant with hopes of the marriage working out in the years to come. But, the wedding itself is an unabashed celebration. Of the wedding, institution of marriage itself, procreation, the catering community, the contractors, the band (bros.), etc. The good-natured citizens of this city were joining the congenial concrete-producing community in matrimony known to all as the Namma Metro. The grey Goliath donning a dirt-kissed red and silver shirt welcomed curious onlookers from the end of the Mahatma Gandhi Road. An hour after the first Namma Metro train had done the deed of cradling the ‘commoners’ to the wasteland of Byappanahalli, people along the metro tracks on the road below absently looked up every time it blew its horn. It truly was a royal wedding. The subjects were faithfully lining up to bless this auspicious occasion. Tightly-knotted barricades brought out the best of the subjects’ capabilities of walking in a straight line patiently. It also helped that none in the crowd were particularly of healthier disposition.

The ceremony had been officiated. Opulence dwarfed the otherwise-adorned sunset against clear skies. They, too, seemed to have come together to bless the union. The incessant booming of instructions by the police almost imitated the chants of priests. As we inched closer to the entrance of the doorway, the ornate floral mantapa stood on a rich red carpet. It looked unoccupied but appropriately out of place. A clump of bright yellow hands played various drums to welcome the eager well-wishers. There were no protests or naysayers in sight. The paupers of the transportation world, pedestrians, were treated with almost suspicious primacy as people tottered towards the staggering serpentine queue. Everybody was there to bless the royal union.

As with any wedding, almost nobody attended it singly. It was a great opportunity to revel in the riches of the powerful in the city and return home confident and content that the wealth they witnessed will never be theirs to be experienced or suffered. People travelled from far and wide to witness the wonderment and show. The sea of faces trickled to a rivulet at the security line, only to converge later at the only functional platform for upstream flows. In truest traditions of the city, there was a general appreciation for lack of options in movement, be it up the stairs, around the eerily spacious mid-level concourse, the escalators or the platform itself. Despite the uniform lack of imagination that the stations seemed to offer, they seemed disproportionately large where people seemed to linger the least.

Marigold petals and green fabric ran the heights of the highly-vulnerable dirty beige walls. People took great delight in plucking metro-coloured balloon-bouquets off the railings. The stations were bright and roomy, but conspicuously lacking in air. This changed, though, once the platforms were approached. The city twinkled with misty eyes back at us as the platform waited for the train to roll down the waving tracks. The train rolled its doors open and with an alarming thud, the seats filled up. As our train departed, another screeched to a halt on the adjoining platform and the deafening cheers propelled us into the ‘historic’ journey. The prospect of looking around at fellow travellers was marred by a unanimous wall of raised cellphones across the train. The prospect of peering through the glass doors was marred by the reflection of the eerily-glowing whiteness of the train’s insides. Three celestial voices announced the arrival of imminent destinations that people showed almost no regard for. The route probably has been etched into people’s mind with the ink newspapers have been devoting to the matter. The bits of the journey with straight alignments of the tracks offered the least pleasure for every turn provided for humoured displacement of the passengers, much alike those found in comedies from the 70’s. It seemed at its noisiest best in Indiranagar and as it slithered onto the Old Madras road. The spectral premises of the Byappanahalli terminal are a breathtaking sight on either ends for the views it affords people so easily comes ironically at a small cost today. It was a little disheartening to see the stations go ignored by the exiting eyes, albeit photographing friends diligently against every piece of printed material with a metro logo on it. This frenzied activity was equally vigorously interlaced with shrill disciplinary warnings from an army of uniformed and plain-clothes employees. These curious specimens were everywhere. They frisked you, guided you to the ticketing counter 30 meters away from the security point, helped you turn around and look towards the stairs/escalators, helped you scale them, move towards the next level where the platforms were, guide you towards them and help you figure the position of the opening train doors. And then, there were those whose sole job was to ensure people stood behind the yellow line so as to not tumble onto the tracks carrying the electricity to make the metro trains run. They had booming voices, whistles, lack of inhibition towards pushing, hitting, shoving, nudging and slipping in ‘much-needed’ profanity. People were fewer in number, but with the zeal of an army of shrieking gleeful children. Entering the platform seemed far easier than exiting it as it seemed to have blessed with an alarmingly single set of stairs-escalators-elevators.

The metro operating family seemed much alike a host wedding family that often oscillated between hospitality and indignation over the stupor of their guests. Customer care booths flanked the concourse that greeted one upon entering the station with practically no capacity with which to function except gesture towards the ticket counter for every conceivable problem one encountered. The entry/exit gates posed their peculiar problems, but perhaps not at the scale of those encountered on the Delhi metro even today. Far more people seemed aware of the systems involved in making a metro journey happen. Conversations about the Delhi metro were also quite commonly heard amongst the riders. A large number of people travelled the metro line but their motivations were a little less obviously discernable, as the incidence of lingering, peering and questioning was less than impressive.

The metro feeder service was very visible in the line’s vicinity, although the dreams of zipping out into the lacklustre fabric of the city remained elusive. Metro stations were operating like gated townships, where the mess of the city (read traffic) was slapping acutely against its gleaming walls. The currents of people spilling onto the roads regardless of the station needed to shrink dramatically to walk along the mountainous footpaths. Elephantine beads of light rolled jagged on the freshly-tarred roads. After a flight of fancy, it seemed I was back in Bangalore again. Coming back home from a wedding is always discomforting, for the joy and radiance is stripped bare of what really comes to be the life one leads. And the life that the metro will lead seems far from approaching the city as it apathetically waits. Of course, until the next wedding comes along.