by Muhammad Nurman

Created on: September 19, 2010

By Muhammad Nurman

Dear honey, once we used to be excited jolted by the train. Crazily, I never hesitated to keep accompanying you dancing our on way through this Greater Jakarta commuter train. No matter how packed it was, we kept boogie-woogie along the way, and that's good! And no matter how serious trouble it made on the way, including the frequent delays and people kept waiting in stations, we were always eager to jostle and dance our melody away aboard.

We were used to this party, regardless of what comfort people really wanted in a lowest-class train. It lacked seat, even when it departed from its base station, and we never cared.

 I'd really like to jump on the train from the other side of the platform together with some other stand-by guys who preferred “to sneak in” even before the train stopped in order to have a seat—yet this is not guarantee you can automatically get a seat—you know that. Much to your disappointment, honey, when I did for you once, it had already been “reserved” by the other eager commuters from the nearest previous train station.

No problem, no big deal failing jostling for a seat; you almost certainly won’t be there for long, will you? Your comfortable doze will probably be interrupted by a sudden appearance of either the elderly woman, the pregnant woman and very rare—the disabled—subject to priority. I know, sweetheart we never pretended to sleep. We never wanted to get irritated by the upcoming unceasingly cynical comments coming from a group of people, the ones belonging to this particular community, which forced anybody sitting to give in.

We were very accustomed to the situation, so we never thought they were the troublemakers—they could be either irritably idiosyncratic or goofy. One thing for sure, they had long been getting together here. Once a joke goes: they age on the train!

The reason why the train, no matter how packed it was, kept being thronged by passengers didn’t take our concern. This community “owned” the train. And there were still some others, almost on every car of the train who “were in possession of” it too, “reserving” special spaces for their own members

And as their stories and pleasantries were spun out along with the jolts, and corners had already become their favorite places, we had our own too. Starting from the corner, those sitting along the aisle got more and more and they didn’t

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