Bombay hangs over me like a dust cloud left behind after the Loo in the Gangetic plains. It is more than a memory, more than a feeling; it is an alter ego of my identity (or shall I say, identities, forged as it is of multitudinous pasts and parts); I recognize in it a faint shadow of self that I left behind so long ago in its alleyways and open spaces. Every trip to India then takes the form of reinvention, or rediscovery, of accents, and verbal truancy, an alien tongue forged in my own incantations, then re-forged in an alien world. I don’t know why I try to discover myself through words and smells and feelings (and sights and sounds, even the most disagreeable ones, viewed from a self-sanitizing lens of the west) of a land now alien, yet holding secrets to my boyhood, so confusing. In the end I discover nothing more than the truth about my own alienation from past and from memories. Khali-pili phokkad! Such trite waste-of-time, such nonsensical time-pass that benefits no one, not Bombay definitely as she smiles at this with a half smile of indulgence, how many of us does she have to suffer. And definitely not me, given that I don't discover much outside JW Mariott and Taj Land's End. I made these elaborate plans to visit my past(s) and end up hiding out in hotel rooms and lobbies.
You know there is an apartment, in one of those old buildings where the paint is chipping and the balconies are devoid of fashionable chairs where the smell of ocean and taste of salty breezes hang in the air, that is waiting for me to claim it as my own. Even as I live suspended in this reality (and I write this on an airplane going from Baltimore to Los Angeles) and dreaming of the New Year’s eve party in some farmhouse in Pune, I think that I shall have to claim it to complete my story, to make sure that I become the person I set out to be. There are lies and deceptions, untold cruelties and wanton acts of kindness that propel my everyday life. But to know and feel that I belong would require that I embrace the possibility, the future that may substitute a past, and not be consumed of worry about healthcare and insurance and running hot water.
You may think that I am now a such a firang, a quasi-American, an angrez-ka-aulad christened in a new form of the brown sahib returning home with a peculiar language and an attitude to match..but inside this incendiary beast that strays, there is a soul longing to be lost in the chaotic overbridge in Andheri in the evenings wading through the multitudes selling thisthatandtheother, choodiyan, scarfs, imitation watches, cheap toys, metallic whatnots… I feel that my mind is often like that too, a cornucopia of fears, aspirations, dreams, interrupted sequences, and desire to be complete. To run from it all is so futile.
My parents lived in Bombay for so long. They aged, and like the city, their proverbial paint chipped and finally my father’s lungs gave way. The pollution of the city choked them. But in the end, the city outlives us all.
I left, became what I have become, lost so much, gained some, and in the process lost count.
I am tired. Of fumes in Chembur, defecating crowds in Bhandup, distance to Thane, the lost causes, and the benediction from the unknown.
I am tired.
