For a time, I was an American child living in India. My family rode the trains to the beach, and I was intimidated by the clamor and chaos of the Indian railways, but the landscape from the train was something that kept me at the window.

My British friends were sent home to boarding school as they approached twelve, and I made the mistake of telling my father I also wanted to go. Too soon, my brother and I were parked at an American missionary boarding school in the south of India. Little about the experience was good, worse for my fourth-grade brother, but we got to ride the Indian trains long distance.

A train car then was its own private world, as you couldn’t walk from car to car the length of the train. We had two large rooms—empty except for bare bunkbeds—for those of us schoolmates traveling in the same direction. We were an unchaperoned, danger-prone crowd, elementary to high school age. The windows had no glass, only bars. Rain drove through the windows and sloshed across the floor.

At sunrise the landscape opened up—a luminous pink and green early morning like I never saw at home in Calcutta. Palm and banana trees and swimming rice fields raced by, there were signs I couldn’t read, people doing what I couldn’t interpret, abundant dogs and goats, kindly people sharing the idli rice cakes they made while we squatted together on the platform. I had no camera to record it all, alas, alas. The next year a schoolmate died climbing the outside of the train.

That was what I knew of trains then. I have a camera now, and I’m on the subway in New York City.

There is the same press of people and commotion, and I hear taped admonishments not to ride outside the train. Emerging into the light above ground is like an Indian sunrise after the dark below. There are riders sharing concern for me, not unlike the way Indian passengers had fed us—saying get off here to take a picture, but don’t get off there, and cleaning my filthy window from the platform when they see me shooting through it.

The landscape is just as compelling, just as surprising. Why why why a window filled with tennis balls? Is the naked mannikin positioned just so especially for those of us riding the train? So astonishing are the rooftop landscapes of air handlers, pizza signs, antennas. And the graffiti—oy vey. Riders are doing what, my goodness, on the platform in head-scratching ways that again I can’t understand. Some of these high platforms feel like I’m at the top of the city.

Glorious riveted steel and riveting bridges rush by. The tracks cross and uncross, curve and straighten, and trains dive to levels below.

Here in New York the rain doesn’t come through the window, it settles on the glass and confuses the lens—where to focus? Finally it finds the dance of the pigeon and owl, the rusting patina of graffitied superstructures (so painterly), the enigmatic backsides of signs I can’t read, rooftop bee-hives, waters-edge cormorants, the all-American heaps of old tires. The winter slush finally fools the lens utterly.

Some of what there is to see is the underbelly, the back yard, the closet, the secret soul of the city. To see it is to understand the city better. We see the baring of painful thoughts—homesick, love me, distrust. There must be, have to be, riders looking on who sympathize.

And on to our destination, silvery rails converging ahead. We are glimpsing fans wearing their devotion to the stadium, the serene smiles of workers leaving for home, a rider’s jacket closed with a door key, track workers at unknowable tasks. The train we’re riding reflects its beauty in one after another glass building, and will eventually reach the rail yard that trains call home.

Some of us got off earlier, and it was a trip, but for the trains it is journey’s end. Until tomorrow when they begin again.

Suzanne McIntire