It was Todd who said it, flailing about like an eager pre-schooler anxious to answer his teacher’s question. “Me, me; pick me,” his flung-up finger eagerly solicited, as the heads of everyone whirred in his direction, multiple sets of eyes dilating on his ruddy expression. “Statistics show,” he said academically, “that when emergencies occur amid a group of people, response to the ailing is always delayed.” “Everyone,” he continued, “expects that someone else will rush to give relief, so no one reacts right away.” I swallowed hard to soothe the drought in my throat on hearing his remark. It was prompted by my report of the woman on the train.
Rush hour. The subway car was filled to capacity, teeming with commuters hurriedly making their way. In the head-spinning cosmopolitan commotion, I tucked myself into the last available seat beside the entrance near the unoccupied operator’s cabin. Bodies big and small, tall, short, amnd average gathered about me, carried by semi-alert proprietors of all hues and shapes. Not a few were frazzled by the din of another morning on a crowded subway. At that unrighteous hour, many would have preferred to have still been sleeping. The ones who were standing squeezed into every inch of space. They formed a human screen, obscuring my view. Crouched as I was against the glass pane thrown up at the entrance, I could no longer see people’s faces, only silhouettes from their abdomen to pelvic. So when the train stopped to permit another exchange of commuters, I saw her right away.
I saw, her belly. She entered, wearing a tracksuit: grey trousers and matching hoodie which hugged her taut middle-section. The belly protruded slightly from her tiny, delicate frame, not yet like a fully inflated balloon. “Ah.” I mentally registered, “She’s pregnant.” The curiosity of the thought sent my eyes trailing behind her, as she meandered past the human screen and found herself a spot over by the operator’s cabin. My eyes ascended the belly in search of her face, as she stood there. But the hoodie was pulled over her head and hay coloured tresses dangling from its peripheries, completely shrouded her traits. The only other data I registered was that she was young…and black. My distracted thoughts wistfully echoed, “Hmm: young, and black, and pregnant.” Somewhere in the fathoms of my semi-conscious, I rued the fate of my own little sister. Still, distracted and semi-alert like the sorority of commuters stretching their inadequately rested bodies above me, I reburied my head in the pages of the book that I had previously been reading.
I read on, as the pollyannaish voice of the announcer proclaimed in a sing-song fashion over the PA system, “Pleeeassse stand cleeeear of the clooosing doors.” The locomotive jerked forward, exuding a sigh of complaint, as the operator released the brakes. It bucked under the strain of carrying so many hundreds of lumpen people. Then, it heaved forward, confidently steadying itself, picked up speed, and swiftly chugged on, on its way. Fifteen minutes flew by with the wind rushing beneath the engines. I was reading something about power and by now had become quasi-entranced, lulled by the mechanical rhythm of the side to side tilting car I was in. Then there was a shuffle. And a panicked female voice exclaimed, “My God!” I glanced across to the operator’s cabin from whence the cry came. Time … stood still.
I must have lost myself in that moment. For everything else receded. Except, across from where I sat, a pair of eyelids languidly parted, revealing hazy, dilated pupils. They stared forlornly at me, as if in accusation. I stared back, enthralled, trying to make sense of what I had seen. A woman had collapsed and was keeled over on her side, not completely on the floor, but felled all the same at an awkward, preposterous, diagonal angle. Her head had smacked against a wheeled trolley bag as she fell. I lost my bearings: there in that interminable moment, trying to figure her out. No one moved; no one did a thing. People were standing and people were sitting. Everyone stared. And the keeled over woman remained on the ground beneath us, propped up in that suffocating corner. The fashionable young Somali who sat beside me and immediately near the collapsed woman, did not scamper up to assist her. And I continued to sit and she continued to sit. And those standing around and those seated remained as rigid as mannequins.
In the seconds that followed, my semi-tranquilized mind slowly recovering itself, a feeble “Are you okay?” escaped from my lips. But even then, I was still sitting, snuggled up against the glass pane by the subway doors. The woman on the floor was the fragile expectant mother.
I have once before witnessed a miscarriage. The woman whose birth canal had prematurely expelled the semi-developed foetus was the wife of my mother’s brother. She must have been two hundred pounds at the time. Yet she was as melancholy and pitiable in her demise as the delicate expectant mother who now laid before me. People who faint lose all awareness of the event. They may look out from glossy eyes, but they are incapable of seeing. I don’t recall whether my mother and I had helped my aunt to the bathroom on that occasion. But I remember the blood-clotted placenta that had slipped spontaneously from beneath the folds of my aunt’s ample nightgown. None of us expected it. My aunt had lost consciousness, and along with my mum, I had to struggle to keep her from collapsing. That was a decade ago.
Much earlier, I had seen a baby violently ruptured from the safety of its mother incubator. That mother too was young and delicate, barely finishing her teens. For some reason, and I don’t know why, she was being carried by a male hospital worker. Where was the gurney? The man carrying her had no right to hold her that way: he had had her strewn across his chest, as flaccid legs dangled over one of his arms and her moribund head hung over the other. Her abdomen was squashed against her torso. She was not lifeless, but she had evidently been unconscious. The hospital staff sauntered by with her and made to carry her up some stairs. It was at that moment that the baby gushed out from her pelvis. It was ghastly, as it was sad and unpleasant. The orderly shrugged, struggling up the stairs with his cargo while the woman’s little stranger, that was not to be, laid abandoned on the cold hard floor, its life ebbing away with the seconds. Women do not easily recover from the premature loss of their infants.
Why did such thoughts not rouse me as I sat in stupor watching this woman on the subway floor? And why did no one else dash to her rescue? This author I recently read wrote in resignation that “we too often stand paralyzed in the face of urgent collective challenges.” I think it was David Held that said that. What’s missing, he suggested, is solidarity: “By solidarity I mean not just emphatic recognition of another’s plight, but the willingness to stand side by side with others.” Natalia Ginzburg penned an essay, Le piccole virtù, where, exploring this same interpersonal disconnect, she contended that the required ingredient is education not in the small virtues of human interaction. Rather, we need socialization in the larger constituents of human generosity: in courage, charity, regard for others, l’abnegazione, in defiance of danger, “e il desiderio di essere e di sapere.”
Fortunately for the woman on the subway floor, someone did have their wits about them. “Help her up,” instructed a sober stranger looking across to the persons standing by. The dazed pregnant woman was foisted to her feet while the Somali beside me echoed my question, “Are you okay?” But she was still sitting, so the woman who issued the instruction spoke again, “Let her sit,” she said. The Somali stood up and the mother-to-be hunkered down beside me. By now, people had begun to mill around, their interest in the woman actively awakening. “Wait. Are you pregnant?” intoned a stick-like woman with flat-ironed hair. She had come over and was quizzically eyeing her subject who now slouched beside me. “Is she okay?” an Asian-accented female voice chimed in.
I leaned forward and peered beneath the hoodie that was still drawn over her face. Beads of perspiration, like raindrops on roses, settled on her adobe-tinged nose and forehead. Her cheeks were moist; her eyes unopened. Blond locks cascaded in curls around her face; she glowed in the aura of a cherub. “Are you going to be okay?” I discretely inquired. “Should we call for a doctor?” The imperative of another person on the train rang out above my head, “Get her some water,” it said. Within seconds, a hand stuck out from amid the abdomen of the group that had gathered before us. A can of Ginger Ale was proffered by a young metrosexual male. It had made its way from someone standing in the middle of the train. I collected it and handed it to the visibly exhausted woman. She was just then opening her drowsy eyelids to answer, “Yes,” to my first interrogative, and “No,” to the second. It was a noble display of courage. “Perhaps,” I said to her playfully, “it was just your little stranger – your baby – that gave you a kick.” She smiled timidly at this while I wondered who in their right mind would let a pregnant young mother travel alone on a rush hour train.
The sense of outrage I experienced over my moral abnegation during this episode has remained with me since. It has served the useful function of making me alive to the people around me. Not long after this incident, I boarded the Rocket to York University. It was about 10am that day and, as usual, scores of commuters crowded on with me. Among the last few passengers, a pregnant woman got on. She climbed up the platform to the back of the shuttle and ended up standing beside me. I was sitting. I made to get up, so as to offer her my seat. But she intercepted me, “Oh, no. It’s okay. I’m alright,” she said. I shifted to reposition myself in the seat, but judging better I swirled around and exited from my place. “I prefer, that you sit.” I told her. Perhaps it was my tone of resolution: she took my place with nary a sound of protest. I was glad for that and glad too that, for once, my faculties were working.