you’ll come back when it’s over, no need to say goodbye

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.

there and back again – a shopper’s tale.

At 4.30 am, the Chennai Mail pulled into Chennai Central Station. It carried, among other things and people, two very determined shoppers whose 4 day sojourn in Bombay was solely focused on one thing and one thing only – the purchase of temporarily gratifying goods and services. Now that I’m back and the spoils are laid out on my bed, I’m vaguely embarrassed at the scale of the retail therapy I indulged in.

Bombay is still my favourite city in the world. I’ve seen Chennai, Singapore, London, Paris and Dubai and none of them has had the ability to make me as inexplicably happy as merely the air of Bombay does.

It is a dirty, overcrowded, disturbing, scurrying city, no doubt. But it’s also vibrant, alive and reinvents itself every time you visit.

Where else would you find auto and cab-drivers willing, with a smile, to take you over short distances for ten rupees?

Where else would you be able to bargain with ingenious bead-bangle-bag vendors who try to charm you into spending your money on their ultimately worthless merchandise?

Where else would you be able to see the sea, no matter how far from the shore you are, at all times, just when you really want to see it?

You can lose yourself in the maze of people and streets, walk paths that are centuries old, be struck by the incongruity of Gothic architecture in the middle of a dirty side-street, haggle over old books of poetry on the street, feel the wind and the rain whirl around you even as life continues to go on, undaunted. Bombay is a perfect melange of old and new; wherever you think history has been wiped out by glass and steel, you’ll see it peeping around a corner, reminding you that the city has stood and will stand long after you are gone.

Just as it should.

exorcizing ghosts.

I’ve almost exorcized your ghost from my memory. You do not exist, I do not exist as I did then.

But just now, just tonight when a suspicion of the emotion that I felt for you might have been felt for someone else crept into my mind, all I could do was recoil.

Memories of the flesh are harder to erase than those of the heart. I still sleep in the same bed.

…and I want to die.

Of shame. For having let you come so close to me.

Of desire. I want that feeling back.

Of emptiness. I’ve felt hollow for months now.

It’s easy enough to train your mind to forget. But what about the rest of you?

i tried alone to mend this broken heart; i need you, that thing you do

Sunday afternoons were always my alone-time. I used to go up to the office, turn on the ACs and spend hours trawling the internet, reading fanfiction, articles, writing my own stories and waiting until the afternoon turned into late evening before I headed back into the civilized world. Though I don’t do that anymore, because I have a computer in my room now, I still miss the sequestered solitude of those afternoons, their somnolent silence (except for the clacking of the keyboard) being one of those sounds that I will always associate with contentment. The smell of the office, with its blinds, its plasticnylonnewness and the feel of newly washed hair on my back; in moment, I can almost capture the essence of that time in the present.

Now, I’m sitting in my brother’s room, using his newly-installed computer and listening to music because my speakers aren’t working. I’m lazy, I’m troubled, I’m changed I’m no longer that girl whose life was so thoroughly influenced by unreal events and far away people that reality has never seemed to bother me, now or then. I swim on a tide of promises and chances that I cross my fingers and hope for; I don’t think I even notice when they don’t. It’s always the good, always for the best, always the glories of the unlived life that I have pursued.

And in this view, I’ve forgotten or mislaid people. People who, at the time, seemed to shape my very existence but to whom, today, I cannot say anything but the most insignificant inanities. Oh well, life moves on.

so what?

Election fever! I spent all day watching the news channels and rejoicing. Not that I’m particularly pro-Congress, but I’d rather not have the BJP in power. And watching the more articulate, youthful and intelligent politicians made me think that maybe, just maybe, we have hope. 

Otherwise, not much. I’m in the middle of a book on Scotland’s “hidden history”, and soon after I think I will have to give up resisting temptation and finally open “The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay”. I’ve been waiting to read that book for so long that I’m almost certain it will disappoint me! 

Forms, forms and more forms are filling up my days. 

Bitter snatches, boredom dawning, earnest and fearful expectation, jaded, nostalgia, excitement and a general lethargy have all descended upon me.