Settling in…Setting out…

A dread had taken refuge in my heart the moment I had heard that I have to spend the next 3 months in the city of Mumbai…now I do not know what or why that was… though some reasons were starkly clear – I didn’t want to run into the people of my distasteful past, I am also known to be the sort who hates changes, I thought it would be too crowded, too humid or maybe I just wanted to plop myself in the comfortable cushion of Delhi where I didn’t want to make new friends but be with my beautiful bracket and relive the old me… whatever the reasons may have been, the moment I set out to Mumbai, I felt a displacement…like that house cat that has been thrown out of her familiar home and then turns wild and hostile… I turned wild and hostile – but only mentally… many things were jumbled up in my head, many memories knotted, many issues hanging mid air waiting for me to hold them and sort them out – so as a person who used to have a terribly simple life, suddenly these new cropped bugs got into my system and my defense mechanism revolted and in effect I shut the most important door of my heart, the sensitive one.

And then I had an encounter with the city that never sleeps – or rather the city that hardly even let me sleep… the initial days were utter confusion – grappling to get into the groove of my internship, getting used to living in a pg with a nutty landlady, handling dead lines, making some new acquaintances as well as digging out some old ones – until one day I realized that time was zooming past me and I wasn’t even cribbing as much anymore…
Then came a short patch of ill fate again when my path crossed with my ill past again… it was inevitable – I say that now – for everything happens for a reason and that was the final kick in my head and a jolt into the reality of the world of selfishness… another important lesson learnt…and another speedbreaker old me, picked her broken pieces and resumed her journey…

One major reason why I didn’t want to come to Mumbai was also the fact that had I ever got into trouble, I wouldn’t have a friend in the middle of the night, to fall back on… my best friends were in another city and the best friend I had here was nobody to me now… life has its strangest ways of testing your strengths and weaknesses…
At a time I was alone, I faced many obstructions…. Pressure of an unwanted marriage, paralysis of my grandfather, being mugged in the streets of Mumbai, falling sick…while that ignorant past of mine who thought that all my problems of life still revolve around him – for a moment I wanted to laugh – in anger or in amusement, I didn’t know… running into him at the streets of a market, on the day I needed a friend the most, reiterated his conceitedness and my final judgment of him in my mind. After that day, bit by bit, the messed up, knotted strands began to unravel and started combing itself out… in life sometimes, you need just one moment, to redo your priorities and to salvage your pride and joy back… the hurt was there, and I admit it without any shame…lots of hurt and lots pf pain… for why wouldn’t it hurt to have seen one lose a friend that was so close to the heart, to another. Yet, nothing was worth more hurting… ‘enough’ is the word that I finally knew the meaning of…

So in my trips to the hospital, while going to work, having sleepless nights, yet finding reasons to laugh and make people around me smile, I began to get a little bit of myself again… not all there yet not all here… I wasn’t unpleasantly closed, yet not cent per cent open…a comfortable balance I had learnt to strike in my daily life. Another huge advantage that staying in Mumbai gave me was it returned to me my sense of independence… I could go alone for movies again, and having coffee alone at Barista wasn’t weird anymore… loneliness is a beautiful thing – it is such a retrospective reflective phase… when you start question your existence and your reason for existence… the necessity for joy and the dispensability of misery start to make sense…

Like for example, on of these days, I got a ride from a colleague to this place that’s one far end of Mumbai but where my precious friend plus mother figure plus counselor plus sister, Adi lives… and as the bike zipped by the highway, I saw the cars just zoom by, sometimes we overtook them, sometimes they left us lagging behind…and then at one point, we were at high speed, the entire scene seemed to slip by me in full speed and I saw a plane take off and swim across the sky at some unimaginable speed to some far off destination – and it made me think…this is life, this is what every day is like… time is passing us by…and there is no way we can turn back and grab back even a second of it…the time I am on the bike is unique, it will never return…even now as I sit here writing this piece wont come back to me, every breath we take is transient, every word we say is like time – once gone, never to come back… so even when the laziest of days loom over us and life seems to just sit still in one immovable position… think…we are still unknowingly rushing through life… we are ageing, youth is cheating on us… so instead of sitting and lamenting over the sorrows that life brings us, we should learn to live a moment – carpe diem – grab the moment… live…celebrate… some of the most profound philosophies of life come through such simple words… and we, silly human beings who take too much self importance in wallowing in our rights and wrongs, fail to acknowledge and follow that simplest of paths….

Three months, many tears, some smiles, a thousand realizations, one cathartic confession and innumerable retrospective hours later, my priorities are in order, some issues are sorted – I finally know what I want to do , where I want to be, with whom I want to be and with whom I don’t need to be… I feel more complete and largely at peace with myself… I want to live my moments but also in the process, make sure I don’t end up covering anyone else’s moments in muck. Life is indeed short… and we are all on our own bikes, how we choose to maneouver it is entirely upto us… we will never stop and the road will never be empty… and it took me some time to learn that no one is indispensable to me but myself.

Mumbai made me see closely the beauty of life... that during the rains and the floods, a stranger doesn’t hesitate to stretch his hands and help you through the current, that the guards take it as their personal duty to prevent you from venturing out during the riots, that out of the many auto wallahs who have steered my safely home at 3 at night, only one was a mugger, that even when by mistake I have jumped into the men’s compartment in the train, I haven’t felt threatened or unsafe, that on a Sunday, however dirty or crowded the beaches are, the families still have unadulterated fun as if it were Switzerland itself, and that there is a certain warmth to this city that has finally seeped into me and replaced all the prejudices I started out with... and I used to wonder before, how come, inspite of all the traffic, the water logging, the rush, the crowd, people still don’t want to leave this place... now after 3 months here, it has begun to make a little sense... and though Delhi is still closer to home, and closer to my heart... the dread that had taken refuge has found an exit at last…Mumbai beckons me back...and I will return... as for now, I feel a strange twinge of sadness... for I had hardly begun to settle in and its time to set out again... !