- Prema Jayakumar
When people are forced to spend time in a small space for some time, there is an ephemeral kind of intimacy that develops among them. You find it among strangers who go on a sight-seeing trip together, among people who travel in a small train compartment over a long period, among people who attend a short-term class on any subject. You find people confiding in each other, talking about their lives, sharing problems. You find people who have been on a pleasure trip together arranging to meet each other and spend time with each other.
If you have read the Patricia Highsmith book ‘Strangers on a Train’ or seen the 1951 Hitchcock movie of the same name, you will remember how a chance encounter of strangers on a train leads to murder. The theme in such an interesting one, I believe there has been another movie and a stage production of the book in English.
What is fascinating about the theme is not just the thriller part of it where that particular crime is motiveless, it is the fact that people put into an enclosed space for a longish while feel forced to communicate with each other. And very often this communication ends up being intimate. Problems in life which have not ever been shared with people close to you are aired in that unfamiliar atmosphere. Of course, in the rarefied atmosphere of Business Class air travel and so on these exchanges may not occur. But put a group of ordinary people in the forced intimacy of a closed space they will communicate with each other even now, even with the intrusion of electronic devices, and share confidences. These spaces may be trains, waiting rooms, airports or any place where a lot of time has to be spent and yet you cannot get to do anything specific.
When people are forced to spend time in a small space for some time, there is an ephemeral kind of intimacy that develops among them. You find it among strangers who go on a sight-seeing trip together, among people who travel in a small train compartment over a long period, among people who attend a short-term class on any subject. You find people confiding in each other, talking about their lives, sharing problems. You find people who have been on a pleasure trip together arranging to meet each other and spend time with each other.
People tell absolute strangers about their medical problems, long stories of diagnoses that went right and wrong, treatments in the various branches of medicine – allopathy, ayurveda, homeopathy, and even the miracle cures effected by people not qualified in medicine but have so-called special powers. They also confide their worries about children, or boast of the accomplishments of their children and even of the problems they are having with their spouses. All these confidences are made in the certainty that one will not see that person ever again and what has been said will be forgotten at the end of one person’s journey or with the arrival of the train or flight for one of them. These are matters that are not safe to discuss with one’s family or friends since they too might have opinions and might express them. What one wants is only the relief of sharing some worry or grief that weighs on one and feeling the load lighten. And who better to listen than a stranger whom you will never again meet (or so you hope).
I have wondered why just why people want to meet others with whom they have spent a short time. After all a sightseeing trip or an excursion is just that. You come out of your normal life and you spend an intense time with your companions, sharing food and sharing experiences, sometimes adventures, with these strangers. There might have been crises, there might have been danger. And then, after the time allocated to the trip, each one returns to their life. It is only a slightly lengthened form of the old train journey.
What is it we seek from these strangers? Is it something that is not available in our own lives, some sort of companionship that we lack in our everyday lives? You see, community was an organic structure in earlier days. In a small place, everyone knew everyone else, they knew each other’s lives, problems, achievements, whatever. There was the extended family and then there was the larger community. Now that kind of life has vanished with its positives and negatives. And there were plenty of negatives that nostalgia veils from this distance. I think these temporary communities were the forerunners of the artificial communities that we set up in our gated colonies and apartment buildings. You do see each other, but you don’t have to see much of each other.
But I do wonder if the kind of confidences that shared between strangers exist there too?
