Forget-Me-Lots!

Pause For Thought from the author Shelina Janmohamed

I used to be a regular commuter on the trains and underground when I first started work.

Finding it hard to shake the irregular daytime hours of my heady student days, I would find myself forever late for my train, forever rushing to the office. The regulars were more timely, neatly dressed, waiting in advance on the platform.

As the train moved in from the suburbs where I lived to the centre of London, tube trains would whoosh past, stuffed with business folk, their eyes glazed over. They weren’t really present at all. They were tinned together, and at speed they became blurred into clouds of identikit blackness.

And now I’m one of them, a small be-suited worker bee, stuffed into the armpit of a taller man in a stripey suit. Wishing we were anywhere but here, all we share is enough time and space for me to identify his deodorant. It’s a form of existence, but only just.

The newspaper I read along with my fellow commuters is filled with news about massacres around the world. In those places mere co-existence sounds like utopia.

But in countries like Britain, where the immediate threat of massacre, war and fatal persecution are not on the horizon, I ask myself if our idea of co-existing, of just ‘existing’ - is perhaps setting our aspirations too low.

Whilst we rightly work towards the kind of society that embraces people of all races, creeds and backgrounds without discrimination, our aim seems to be subsistence of the most basic kind.