Schrödinger’s Strangers - Part 6

Hello everyone, finally back with my raw unfiltered thoughts on random strangers to keep myself sane and survive with social anxiety.

I like to observe people and make notes of their interesting characteristics, things that make them uniquely them.

I call this series Schrödinger’s Strangers - people are both known and unknown until truly observed.

Today’s subject is a guy I saw on the Hyderabad metro. It was a usual daily return after work for most commuters, a busy 6:00pm journey. I don’t remember which stop but this guy walks in with a pair of headphones hanging loosely off his head. His hands were full of pen ink, a fountain pen accident gone wrong perhaps?

He was decked with tattoos on his right upper arm. On first glance they appeared random, but then I realised it was a loosely drawn abstract family portrait.

Now most people on the metro take out their phones at least once, not this guy. I never saw his reach for his phone even once throughout the journey. He did take out an old Tinkle magazine and started reading Suppandi. Nostalgia hit me like a truck, and I regretted throwing away the few books we collected as kids.

He was multilingual, easily slipping in and out of conversations with people in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi and Marathi.

He ended his conversations and took out a yellow highlighter to mark something in the comic, a funny joke he liked? Something he wanted to remember, or was he just testing the highlighter out?

He left calmly, almost as if he was invisible.

Until next time.