Letters to the Cities I love| Benaras.
You were an escape. A phantom.
Love at first sight.
A story that I had crafted in a corner of my heart on the first time that I had seen a watercolor of you in my college library. A random book, I hadn’t even gone there to look for something specific. Just a random flicking of pages of a book that was already on the table while I was taking to a friend. It was then I saw you. A warm hued watercolor of the ghats. A cliché scene now that I think of it, that’s what everybody has limited you to. A picture of the burning ghats. Or the glorious image of those grand lamps of the evening aarti.
But this one was different. The haziness and uncertainties of the watercolor held back your secrets, allowed me to form stories of my own; what you have done for thousands of years and millions of people. What you continue to do for another million people. So many stories people have crafted with you, so many so that I wonder if you are made of people, of the tiny tiny stories that each of us come and write with you or the narrow streets, streets so narrow that I just have to outstretch my hands to touch the walls, the volume compensated by the depth of the stories. The limitless, kaleidoscope that each particle of yours is. The limitless kaleidoscope that each particle of yours tells me I am.
Maybe that’s why I didn't mind waiting for you to happen. I knew the certainty of you happening like tomorrow’s sunrise. Of course there is a chance I can get hit by a car tonight, but there is a conviction to tomorrow that we believe in, a sort of sentiment that people call faith. And there was the same blind faith in the certainty of you happening.
So I made a promise and stored it in a corner of my heart. You know the corner that still believes in all the dreams I have. That still has enough heart to hope. The kind of faith I manage to have in cities, the belief and hope in their spirit is something that astounds even me.
It’s what you give us. Madness, magic, drama and silences; and wrapped up in them somewhere is what we call peace.
So when I needed the escape, you happened.
I don’t know what those 5 days were. I really cannot mark where one day ended and the other started. I promised to take pictures like I would if I had a film. I wouldn't search for my phone at each second. I would pause.
It’s difficult to explain how you communicate. It’s like arguing with a person for ages and then when your throat is all parched and you sit down to take a breath and suddenly notice that all that’s around you is just you and all the you have been shouting at is yourself. It’s like a huge conundrum that you have been struggling to find a solution to, blown away in a second, as simply as a soap bubble.
Maybe it wasn’t you that I was waiting for. Maybe it was what I knew I would be when I would come to visit you.
I think this why all of us are here.
To understand the enigma that you are. But there are you are, holding yourself open like the palm of my hand, to tell us all the secret.
There isn’t one.
That if we would just let go, of all the uncertainties, all the questions, all the complicated labyrinths we have constructed for ourselves like your narrow streets, the answer is as simple as the Ganges. The answer as simple as the flow. The answer is you.
Thanks for reading!
What I feel for cities often leaves me dumbfounded. There are cities that have floored me, taken my heart and continue to have a piece of it much more strongly than I could have ever imagined. This is a series of letters to my loves, to all the cities that have touched me, cities that I love with as much heart as I can muster.
If you like this, please check the other!
Good vibes. :)
