It starts with “Outside another yellow moon, has punched a hole in the night-time mist…” and goes on to talk about Brooklyn girls, and heart attacks, and thorns and roses, and of course, about downtown trains. I heard this song for the first time about 15 years ago, thanks to my sister who was into picking up the latest grammy nominations cassettes (and who is, as I might have mentioned in passing, responsible for my love of the English language), and perhaps thanks also to the fact that I hadn’t been introduced to rock (as I know it), and would therefore not look with disdain upon anything that was “pop”ular in nature.
I don’t know under which strict genre this song falls, but it has somehow stuck in what appears to be more than a corner of my brain; and every so often, as things move within my head, this song perhaps gets dislodged around, making me listen to it again. And as I write this (while admiring the extremely picturesque late monsoon view from the Pune-Mumbai expressway), what comes flashing by are not the exact years that have gone by, but the phases of life that touched and went.
The time when I was the age of those Brooklyn girls, till the time I moved out of my home to stay away, and have been shifting houses (not homes, thankfully) since then. Then the phase when I started earning (for myself, and for those “carnivals”). Then back to school (“I know your window, and I know it’s too late…”), and then now, dropped into a city where the trains (downtown or otherwise) are literally “full” in much more than the actual feel of the word.
And thus here we are, subjecting ourselves to the vagaries of these journeys, almost half expecting to hear an answer to “Will I see you tonight, on the downtown train…?”
P.S.: "Downtown Train" is a song by Rod Stewart
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