Viscosity

SM Edwards, writes in 1909, in the Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island of the need to join Bombay and Salsette by train. The Sion Causeway, that connected Sion, in Bombay to Kurla, in Salsette over the Mahim Creek was finished in 1803. In 1826, the width was doubled and the tracks of the Great Indian Peninsular Railroad were added to it. Laying the tracks proved to be a tough task, quite like the story of Chat Moss in England, tonnes of soil and rocks were thrown into the creek, but they seemed to disappear into the water’s infinite capacity for viscosity. CT Clark, writing to the secretary to the Military Board, Bombay in October 1845, described the ‘soft and yielding’ character of the mud at the creek, ‘in which even the light natives sunk to mid-thigh’. The solution lay in floating the railway across the Mahim creek, ‘upon large hurdles formed of mangrove bushes lain over of cotton bales’.

A section through the train today bears remnants of the yielding soil filled with cotton bales. The imagination of infrastructure as hard lines stretched starkly across the landscape wear away slowly but surely at the train. The tracks themselves can float, carrying a mass of bodies. In the local trains of Mumbai, a density of bodies fills the volume, exploding out, latched on to every crevice in the chassis. Through the journey, the bodies act as one, moving synchronously with every jolt and pause. The train is drawn as the negative of the bodies that it holds. Carrying sweat, dirt, rain, mud, paint, pan juices, amongst other secretions, the train’s surface starts to bubble up, peel away, rust and deteriorate, splattered with layers of the soft bodies it passes through. Wetness pervades even the most permanent seeming of materials and forms.