Funnily enough, I spent roughly three months crying over my imminent departure from Chennai when I was 15, about to relocate to Bombay. The change seemed so overwhelming and immense, despite the fact that I’d already come to regard the city as my second home and I was only going to live with family, that crying seemed to be the only way to express all the tumult going on in my head.
Over two years, Bombay seeped into me – a beautiful, intoxicating mixture that, try as I might, I cannot describe. Like I said to a friend when we made a trip there recently, something about the air of the city just makes me happy, the minute I land there. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Bombay really was my Kirrin Island, my holiday home from the age of 4 to 13/14. I saw the same things each time I went there – the museum, the Gateway, the aquarium, the bookstores, the art gallery and the sea – and though moving there did change a lot of things for me, Bombay has become my favourite city in the world.
If you’d asked me, at 15, whether I wanted to come back to Chennai after my 2 years in Bombay, I’d probably have said no. Chennai was never on the cards for me. I assumed I’d be just like my batchmates – applying to far-off, intimidating sounding universities and discussing the respective merits of airline carriers and UK unis vs US unis. Evidently, something up there had other plans, and I very reluctantly packed my bags and wept copiously over having to leave Bombay only to go back to insipid, somnolent Chennai.
Three years changed everything, though. I don’t think I would be the person I am today if I hadn’t come back – and I realize now that I might have ended up very differently if I’d rushed off to the UK immediately after Bombay. Oddly enough, the one place I always thought I would be a child in became the place that threw unanswerable questions at me, the one place that pushed and shoved me onwards, on the road to ‘growing up’.
I’ve found my best friends in Chennai. People without whose opinions I couldn’t live; people who’ve seen me at my worst and my dubious best; people with whom I share a strange, struggling bond. I’d never had a “gang” before I came to Chennai. I’ve always been a nomad, and I suppose I’ll always be one, but something kept us together and I’m infinitely thankful for my people.
I’ve made heinous mistakes here. I’ve fallen in and out of love like a Jack-in-the-box on a sugar high. Up and down, the rollercoaster ride never seemed to stop. Hollywood romance and Victorian wishfulness were my only ideas of love before; I know now, after multiple crashings and burnings perhaps, that love is awkward, funny, unexpected, capricious, and terribly, terribly difficult to feel or express.
Drama. Three years, of never-ending drama; each time, just when I thought things were settling down into a comfortable, cozy sort of routine, somnolent Chennai threw a new, harrowing, confusing, multiple-phone-call inducing nightmare at me. I’ve been ecstatic, confused, disgusted, hollow, sick, cynical, idealistic, deluded and thoroughly astonished. But, of course, I enjoyed every minute of it all, good and bad. Drama is necessary, drama keeps things real, people!
So that’s it then.
The bags are lying on my bed, clothes and shoes, bags and scarves, books, books, books on the floor, on the bed, on the shelves. I feel oddly unreal, putting things into these giant strolleys. I’m going. I’m going!
I’m going to miss home. Bombay may be my city of dreams, but Chennai’s always been just that – Home.
