Today was my first time riding in the general car of the KRL during evening rush hour. I had warned G, a male friend, that if the train was too full, we might have to separate. But as the train pulled up, we noticed there was ample space by the door, even though we boarded at the last moment before the train took off and left Palmerah.
Me being my smug self, I said to G, “Bro, this is much better than the female car.” He nodded quietly, and the words he refrained from saying spelled themselves out to me when the train stopped at the next station, Kebayoran, and a cluster of new passengers came onboard.
The Kebayoran-Pondok Ranji leg of the journey has always been most interesting to me. When the train isn't too crowded, you can look out the door and observe the undulating terrain (both physical and metaphorical) as Jakarta Selatan unfolds unto Tangerang Selatan. My favorite stretch in particular is the long, quiet patch of land that, about four years into my nearly daily commute, I discovered was the Tanah Kusir cemetery. The boundaries aren’t as obvious as you’d think—it usually takes a moment for the fact that the train is choo-choo-ing along the land of the dead to register in the passengers’ countenance.
I’ve catalogued the range of reactions people have to this revelation. Broadly, they either: 1) quickly look away, almost flinching; 2) continue to gaze blankly at the gravestones; or 3) never notice at all because they’re too busy fiddling with their phones (I suppose this could serve as a Profound Analogy for how people react to death—whether their own or others’).
But on evenings like this, when my view of the outside world is blocked by the figures of other passengers, I have no choice but to set my usual agenda aside and cast my gaze inward. As the train rolled past the cemetery (or so I estimated, since I couldn’t see outside), I realized I was going through a completely new experience: being in a packed mixed-gender general car.
It wasn’t that I was the only woman in the car or that the entire idea of a woman was absent from the space—there was another woman standing right in front of me (although she was openly watching soccer clips from the night before, so does that still count?). Beside her stood a man wearing overhead headphones, holding his phone. I noticed how the wallpaper was a photo of a woman in a hijab right before her face got partially obscured by a YouTube notification in kanji and hiragana. Later, when my gaze had made its round and fell back to this particular man, he was typing a reminder: N1 JLPT N1 25 Agustus 2025.
Once I reoriented to this familiar yet unfamiliar setting, I began taking stock of the features that stood out to me—the details that, maybe, had subconsciously crept in and signaled that I was not where I was 'supposed' to be. A packed mixed-gender train car, instead of one of the female cars at either end of the train.
The height difference was immediately noticeable. I went from being easily P97 height among female KRL commuters to practically average. My eyes could see it. My brain could rationalize it. But when I stepped back into my body from the all encompassing surveying eye floating above the heads like a CCTV cam, it felt strange to be looking at the nape of someone’s neck instead of the crown of their head. Counting grey locks sprawled across a man’s full head of hair instead of estimating the thread count of a beige hijab paris. Remarking how many of the men had ingrown hairs below the short crop of their hair; some were still inflamed, while others had turned black, as if the hair inside had coiled in and would remain there for the rest of their host’s lives, unseen and untouched—except for a forced medical extraction.
The next thing that hit me was the smell. It was neither a familiar waft oscillating back and forth towards a comfortable mean, nor was it a foul offensive attack. It seemed to have developed under my radar until a certain threshold where it then engulfed me and remained there, coiled in my olfactory senses, for the rest of the ride. A mix of tobacco and cologne, mostly tobacco though. I wondered whether the smell wouldn’t fade into the background because the locus of the body that naturally transmitted these scents—where the neck meets the shoulder—was generally geographically closer to my nose. Or perhaps it was the sight of the people and my consciously attending to their presence that intermingled with the scent, amplifying these sensory inputs’ salience in my attention field.
The final bout of tangible unfamiliarity hit me as the train continued along the Jakarta Selatan-Tangerang Selatan border, swaying here and there and inevitably transferring some of that momentum to the passengers. This was what I dreaded most and had been the reason I kept avoiding these general cars years into my commuting journey: being reminded of my female body by how its curves might press against my fellow passengers. The reminder of my otherness did come, but not in the way I expected. When the train moved left, I stepped my right foot back. When it moved right, I stepped my right foot forward, shifting some weight from my lower body to my core. Same dance as always, rinse and repeat, doing my petty calculations just to keep my balance. Everyone around me didn’t seem to be subject to the same choreography I was well rehearsed for—perhaps they didn’t need to because their solid mass was nailed to the earth in a way my female body naturally was not.
‘The train has arrived at Pondok Ranji’, the first indication that we had crossed into Tangerang Selatan. A considerable number of passengers disembarked, leaving enough space for me to finally breathe and compute the raw observations I’d made over the past ten minutes. Strange sights, strange smells, strange movements. Noticing how different everything was, was easy; accepting that these differences existed despite how close I was, was not. Me, in my loose baseball jersey, my P50 male height, my short hair, my unadorned and unperfumed skin, heaving, pressing into the voids left by male forms, naturally adjusting and pivoting to the turns of the track and hum of the engine.
Earlier in the GoCar, I said something that piqued G’s interest. “Is it really that brutal? The female car,” he asked. “Uh, well. I guess? It’s super packed, and the women aren’t afraid to yell if you’re not paying attention to your surroundings,” I rambled on, realizing that I was describing things that might broadly apply to the general KRL experience—or rather that I had no grounds to claim those descriptions uniquely qualified the female car, as I had no basis for comparison.
A strange thought occurred to me. Despite how I had simultaneously experienced the male car deeply yet felt removed from it, I was nevertheless, for even the briefest moment, there. Not as a woman, not as a mere spectator, not as a distinct passenger, but as a body melding into the mass fluidly occupying the space that is the gerbong laki-laki. I realized G would never have the converse experience. The gerbong wanita would forever remain a mystery to him—a concept coiled inside his female friends' heads, something he could see but never extract, let alone embed into his awareness.
‘The train has arrived at Jurangmangu’, we got off and took our time walking along the platform. “Say,” G paused. “If we do return to the office full-time next year, I don’t think I’ll stay at my current place.” He was referring to the Sektor 7 apartment he was heading back to and our potential workplace changes in 2025—a complete shift from full work-from-home to a 40-hour in-office schedule in Jakarta Selatan.
“Oh ya, completely agree,” I replied. “The commute is just not worth it.”