Always wonder about the strangers, those people you register only through the corner of your eyes, over the edge of your reading materials on the train. Rivals clambering for seats, negotiating for standing space, a bit of air on rush hour trains. People you sometimes hate for small reasons like smelling like overdue sweet powder that will choke all life out of you. Like men sitting with legs too wide open so it cuts into your own space. For screaming loudly on the phone, or falling asleep with their heads like a pendulum swaying with the movement of the train, half defying gravity, half threatening to go crashing down on you in any unsuspecting moment- like a cannon ball on a leash made of spring. So you feel tempted to push it all the way to the other side and watch it rebound. Or girls with ponytails ticking your nostril driving you half insane with the desire to whip out a pair of scissors and snip the darn thing right off and watch them flutter to the floor like raining seaweeds. These curious specimen called strangers on public transport. All carrying with them their own history, bad mood for the day, weird odours of lunch, places they have been and the kind of soap, perfume, shampoo they use, their own memories, stories, worries, private jokes wrapped up inside. Strangers you sometimes only ever meet once in life and quite quickly forget. How you see your own stupidity, absurdity reflected in some one else and you despise them for it.

That rare glimpse, or chance encounter with strangers you will never know, never understand their history, learn of their worries or share their private jokes. And how you swear under your breath about that "stupid man who wouldn't budge even though you had already said 'excuse me'." or that "crazy bitch who kept pushing and poking her finger at everyone around her to clear some space." it is a down right madhouse, a freaking zoo of the insane, quirkly, exhibition of the strangeness of being a commuter, a stranger. How you hate, despise, pity, admire, envy, secretly laugh at these 'other' strangers, like watching simpsons live in action. And you feel like you would eventually go mad and start screaming at them for all these reasons and for no reason at all.

Like that slightly overweight man I once saw, waddling out of the train at Kembagan. I pitied his backview, and wondered if he had a bad childhood, if he had always looked so sad, yet so ridiculous from the back. How he carried a plastic bag in each hand, looking as if he was doing a funny juggling act of balancing with that comic quality of extremely lonely clowns. I wished he had someone he would return home to and tell him he was the best father or husband etc, and not like an amusing but pitiable sight from the back in the eyes of a stranger. Maybe he had friends waiting at home who knew that he was so much more than what looking at him from the back on a certain afternoon at kembagan station will ever unfold. How my sadness was facile, a superficial thing, that only strangers will ever feel toward each other. That kind of unforgiving harshness, or unconditional forgiveness strangers sometimes give in their ignorance, in their shallowness. how they hate you and then forgive you because you are just a short disruption, a interruption, a tiny kink in their life. How sometimes for no apparent reason at all, you have a desperate wish that a certain stranger would be blessed, uttering a prayer on their behalf that things would turn out well for them. Because sometimes you see sadness in them, the kind you don't ever feel from movies, or people you know, but because they are strangers. And because you know that perhaps you are just like him, wondering if someone else might perhaps have whispered a prayer in your name- from a stranger.