It's been a few days of constant brooding. Four different tragedies have each imprinted themselves on me. I can't stop turning them over and over in my mind, they leave me with questions I can't answer, emotions I struggle with.

So I turn to you, my readers. Here they are, in no particular order.

First: a fire breaks out near the top of a 7-storey building in the Delhi suburb of Dwarka. The video clips - these days, there are invariably video clips - are terrifying, with flames and a huge cloud of billowing smoke.

I first heard of this fire from a friend (reading this) who lives nearby: "Hideous fire in the flats opposite. A man and his 2 kids jumped to their death. So heartbreaking." Indeed. He was 35 years old, and the children each about 10. "Couldn't sleep all night," wrote the friend, and she could have been speaking for me.

Because think of it: What was the conflagration like that this man thought leaping from the seventh floor, with the kids, was even an option?

Second: Visiting the famous double-decker living root bridge in Meghalaya - where the family and I visited, in 2009 - in May, a honeymooning couple from Indore vanishes. After several days of searching, his body is found in a gorge, apparently murdered and thrown there. She is still missing.

After several more days, she turns up in a roadside dhaba (small restaurant) in Uttar Pradesh. She turns up, it seems, only because her conspirators have been found and arrested.

Yes, conspirators. The story that police investigations have brought to light goes something like this: she was involved with another man. Her parents arranged a marriage she did not want. She and her lover put together a plan in which three men he hired followed the couple on their honeymoon and murdered the husband. Evidently she thought she could live as a widow for a while and then persuade her parents to let her marry her lover.

She thought wrong.

Evidently too, she did not have the fibre to tell her parents she did not want to marry this man. That itself is a story familiar like the back of my hand. I know - we all know! - of such parents, such lack of fibre, such marriages.

Yet the way out of this is to murder the husband?

If she couldn't stand up to her parents, was it not possible to tell him the situation quietly, and ask him to say no to the marriage? Surely he would have agreed, surely he would not have wanted to marry a woman who loved someone else? Failing that, could she and the lover not have run away together?

But murder?

And there's more: What does this say about the parents? About plenty of parents who are similarly deaf to, or uncaring of, their childrens' state of mind as they reach adulthood?

Third: A typically overcrowded Bombay commuter train ("local") rounds a curve approaching a station in a northeastern suburb. Some reports say there was another typically overcrowded train on the adjacent track, going in the opposite direction.

There may have been a sudden jerk. That, and/or the curve somehow caused the two trains to lean towards each other so that the commuters hanging on precariously - I did say "typically overcrowded" - on one train brushed the commuters hanging on precariously on the other train. Result: several commuters fell off the trains, onto the tracks, to their deaths.

I have travelled plenty in Bombay commuter trains crowded like those must have been. I did so daily for 15 years, and less regularly for about 20 more. But no, I've never hung off them precariously. My self-preservative rule was to let trains that were that crowded go, and wait for one where I could at least get all the way inside the coach. There were other possible dangers in the crush inside - pickpockets, possible asphyxiation, possible fire - but at least I would not fall off. Some consolation there, some safety. I think.

Still, the point is that such conditions are a daily reality for millions of Bombay commuters. Why should that be? After all, we are proud of our "progress", of "improvements" in our "infrastructure" - a coastal road, airports, Vande Bharat trains, road bridges across spans of sea, you name it we have it and some of them are undeniably boons to car drivers like me. Yet the great majority of this country doesn't drive cars. They are still forced into overcrowded buses and trains, often risking their lives.

When will we measure progress and improvement by what this majority endures every day?

Fourth: an Air India flight, visibly unable to gain height after take-off from Ahmedabad, crashes. Some 240 on board and several more on the ground die instantly.

It is a shocking, ghastly tragedy. Many competent investigators will eventually produce explanations and raise questions that I hope will be answered.

But for now, I can't escape a comparison of sorts. After the deaths on the suburban trains, we heard this startling factoid: in the last 20 years, there have been over 50,000 deaths on Bombay's train network.

That's seven every day.

That is, about as many people die on the city's trains in a month-and-a-half as in the Ahmedabad Air India crash. Or put it like this: Bombay's ongoing train tragedy is as if every three months, there are two plane crashes like the one in Ahmedabad.

Would we tolerate planes crashing that frequently? Why do we tolerate our trains killing that steadily?

Questions, questions. I brood over them. Thank you for reading.