Pehchaan kaun…
Every time I visit Mumbai/Navi Mumbai, I am filled with a strange heaviness. An outcome of a relationship where you want to say “it’s not you, it’s us” because you’ve arrived at a conclusion that you’re better off away. This despite the fact that some of my dearest folks hail from the region; my family and friends and strangers reside there. When I meet and hug them, everything seems fine. All of a sudden, the distance and the time spent apart don’t matter. Maybe that’s the reason I’ve continued to reside in the north. A childhood friend of mine moved base to Delhi NCR last month and is already planning to undo his decision. This city isn’t for him, apparently.
Now constitutes my fourth year in Gurgaon and I’ve been visiting home on a not-so-regular basis. Whenever I am in that city, the desire to reach is as strong as the need to leave. Reaching. Leaving. Two key words to understand my prevalent mindset while packing for Bombay before re-packing back for Gurgaon a few days later. It very well could be the humidity’s fault. But then, there ain’t no snowfall in Haryana anyway. You sweat near the coast. You roast in the Loo.
There are many things a city does but it doesn’t speak to you. People do. And when you end up with a good story, you begin to like the place more. It’s a selfish exercise, nonetheless, but who cares? As long as there is something to talk about, everything seems fine. If a city can’t give you anything else, it should give you memories — nice, rotten, sour. When you look at the mirror, the mirror looks back at you. It’s a different story why you were looking at it in the first place. Chances are you wanted to check how good you’re looking. Chances are you wanted to check whether you were looking bad. That’s the chance you take with life and, more importantly, with a city.
To give you a recent example, I was home over the past weekend and was traveling in the local train… as you do. You can imagine how it must have been like at 9.30 in the morning. Packed compartments, if you can’t. I was standing quietly minding my neighbour’s business as he was playing an interesting game on his phone. Suddenly, “Shakti” says a guy who just got in to the train. I look at his bespectacled face and my mind starts rummaging through all the school day albums. He looks like somebody I once knew but I don’t know who. That’s the downside of making it to your 30s; everybody somehow reminds you of everybody else. Within the next 4 seconds, I tell him that I can’t recognize him. With a mysterious smile perched under his nose, he concedes he doesn’t know me either. I wonder how my expression must have been like when he told me this.
Turns out he read a tattoo on the side of my neck. It has my name in Nastaliq script (the one used to write in Arabic and Urdu) and it took me a while to figure out this whydunnit case. By the end of it, I am left with an amusing memory simply because Mumbai is known for people crashing into people with no agenda whatsoever. A phenomenon quite unique to it whether you choose to reach or leave.
