Two people fell off our local trains last week. There may have been more, because those tracks claim lives regularly, so it may be more accurate for me to point out that reports about those two people were all I noticed. Reading about them reminded me almost instantly of one morning a couple of decades ago, while I was on my way to college, when two people happened to fall off the train I was on. They fell within minutes of each other, between Goregaon and Jogeshwari, one on either side of my compartment.

The exists were, then as now, overcrowded to a point where stepping into the train was no longer an option. They must have hung on nonetheless, scrabbling for a few centimetres on which to rest a foot, before slipping. According to the people watching them, while hanging on themselves, both survived, which is why I haven't forgotten that little miracle.