IT is true that life is no night fair, as a character in one of Pramoedyas stories says, but maybe life is like a train. So today I want to write about trains and peopletrains not merely as a means of transport, but also as a space for encounters between people on the move to and from different places, a kind of transitory interaction and isolation.

Maybe this is why scenes in trains so often appear in various kinds of expression, suggesting a ma