Bombay, My Love — NaPoWriMo Day 19

Do you know what real joy feels like?

It feels like the smell of the salt and the sea and that noxious something I don’t quite want to know as I take a deep breath and wait to cross the street and fail, yet again foiled by the cars and the bikes overflowing from the road like an endless sea of ants hoping to make it.

Just like the constant stream of wannabe actors hoping to make it in the city of dreams, where dreams are crushed every second and two born out of those like a phoenix rising from the ashes to claim everything else and conquer all fears of the inevitable.

The inimitable spirit of millions of souls, a collective living and breathing and choking and crying and laughing and wasting away yet renewing and struggling and succeeding against all odds just like you have, my love, and never, never, falling asleep.

I’m sorry I didn’t have more time with you.

I wish I would have cared a little more as I passed by your crooked lanes and the houses and the trains and the streets full of people.

I wish I had seeked the truth and the stories

tethered and untethered to you just like the waves that hit Juhu beach all night and all day

waiting to be dipped or flung headfirst into.

I crave the nights spent with friends laughing about nothing and everything as we sip chai at Prithvi or hot chocolate in Kala Ghoda or Bournvita at Marine Drive and wait for the sun to rise so we can get back to our books.

Those lovely evenings spent traipsing through markets for the perfect bargain or that perfect gift or that perfect luxury or that perfect delicacy in this town full of imperfect fools and imperfect intentions and imperfect decisions.

City lights glimmer and dance over the water and the sand and the dirt as we breeze past riding atop a high of adrenaline past the sea link to our destination of nowhere and everywhere and up, up, and up.

We build our palaces and our mansions our pools and our buildings and our houses and our huts and our slums upon the same seven islands and hope we can finally breathe a sigh of relief at the roof or the tarp over our heads.

We toil and we rage and we leave and get lost and find our way back into the maze of desire and pain and pleasure and love and hate and think that it’s just us in this whole wide world yet are surrounded by dozens of others going through the exact, same damn thing.

You know what makes Bombay special?

There is, of course, no place like home, but when the same place is home for more people and dogs and cows and birds and bugs than you can count, you know there’s magic in the water and the air and the land there.

Bombay, my love, Mumbai, meri jaan,

I cannot wait for one more night with you.

Poet’s note: NaPoWriMo Day 19! The prompt was to write a poem based on a “walking archive.” A walking archive is when you go on a walk and gather up interesting things — a flower, a strange piece of bark, a rock. This then becomes the “walking archive” — the physical instantiation of the walk. Since the only way for me to do that right now was to flip through my phone, my thoughts automatically went to home!