Delhiwale: Clean, bright, sanitised... and eerily silent metro amid Covid-19

Delhi’s public transit service opened after five months this week, so we decided to sample the Yellow Line to get a feel of the new etiquette.

New Delhi: As the Delhi Metro reopened, more than five months after the coronavirus changed the world, its scenery is weirdly reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the classic Stanley Kubrick sci-fi film. Only a few people are milling about, in masks. Since this is Yellow Line’s Chawri Bazar underground Metro station, one of the deepest in the city, it has two sets of escalators burrowing down to the basement tracks.

Metro train running near Lotus Temple in New Delhi. (Amal KS/HT PHOTO)

This is the third day of the limited reopening of the Metro services. A small queue has formed outside the station’s entrance, moments before it opens for its day’s second shift — at 4pm this Wednesday, five hours after its midday break. Those familiar memories of spitting, sneezing, coughing crowds swarming into the station seem as unreal as New Amar, the single-screen cinema that originally stood on the station’s site. The commuters are entering as reverently as one might enter an international airport — at one’s best behaviour, eager not to needle the security staff.

A hushed atmosphere reigns inside. Around the security personnel, all sheathed in masks and face shields, the commuters are to follow a precise choreography. First, approach the sanitiser stand in the corner, and rub your hands under a sanitiser spray. Next, walk to the man checking the body temperature, before approaching the security gate, while keeping a safe distance from fellow humans.

As soon as they cross to the other side of the security, the commuters disappear straight into the station’s vacant hugeness. Nobody is to be seen inside except for sudden glimpses of Metro staff or a security guard popping up in some far corner.

Finally, a masked commuter is fleetingly spotted, quietly going down the escalators.

It’s a strange and unreal silence.

The platform has perhaps less than a dozen people — though 27,000 people will be travelling on this line today. The train from Samaypur Badli to Huda City Center in Gurugram arrives. The announcer’s casual voice appears to be the only discernible leftover of the old normal.

Each alternate seat inside the train is plastered with a physical distancing yellow poster warning “Do not sit here.” The ladies coach has only two women. The one next to it has six people, one of whom is clicking a selfie. Among them, plumber Babu Ram is going to Gurugram to collect payment from a building contractor. “Itna sannata hai (so hauntingly quiet here),” he remarks, before putting his finger on his mask, in the hush sign. Indeed, the new etiquette in the Metro doesn’t want you to talk, and risk spreading aerosol particles in the train. For that matter, every surface that can be touched — the handrail, the glass pane on the door — might seem, to an anxious eye, swarming with you-know-what. Though one does feel, at least if one has boarded the train at Chawri Bazar, that it is probably far safer inside the train than in the super-crowded market outside.

The train arrives at New Delhi Railway Station. A man steps into the coach. A few minutes pass and the train halts at Rajiv Chowk Metro station. In the pre-corona era, the sprawling terminus would be pulsating with humanity, its air saturated with various harmless viruses. The staircase, which would be flooded by new waves of commuters with every fresh arrival of Metro trains from other connecting lines, is empty. Further ahead, a masked housekeeper mopping the vast walkway is looking like a tiny cog in the giant wheel.

Now, a walk through a long empty passage, up the escalators, and outside into Connaught Place, and daylight. Palika Bazar is a few steps away. A poster on the glass doors to the market says: “Body temperature check is required.”