As I sit bored and idle in this room of a hotel in Muscat, my mind keeps going back to the recent times and I start to put words to thoughts for this long impending post.
I had always planned this, a string of abuses and curses for Bombay – The melting pot. I had to get it out of my system, for I thought that was one city which had wronged me, made me suffer and responsible for all the fuck ups.
One bus ride and I realised how wrong I was.
‘Ek 4 Bungla’, I asked the bus conductor and took a window seat, very happy that I was leaving the ‘God damn city’ within the next 24 hours. So happy, that I started looking at everyone with contempt. It was almost like ‘Hey! You lesser mortal, just a few hours and I won’t even look at you’. And with this contempt my eyes wandered outside to the bustling traffic and then to the ‘famous’ larger than life billboard of ‘The Hot’ female clad in a saree (this lady had been a topic in many ‘professional’ and ‘non – professional’ discussions).
‘So, is this the only thing that I will miss about this city?’ I asked myself. ‘A girl with green eyes, half draped in a pink saree looking at me, suggestively suggesting a few things’, I introspected.
My phone rang and my reverie was broken. ‘Where the fuck are you, I have been waiting here for the past half an hour’, barked a friend who had been waiting for me at ‘my’ chai tapri. Definitely another thing that I would miss about the city, I thought. The girl on the billboard took a backseat and I wondered where else will I be roaming around the city at two in the morning, looking for sotta and chai with no worries of not finding an auto or being stopped by the cops / goons.
No place else.
Where would I be getting my work done with a smile, make the best of friends with a handshake. Forget the stress of the day’s work and have fun in the night like there is no tomorrow.
No place else.
‘Hmm….I just may miss this city a little bit’, I contemplated.
These may come across as shallow and flimsy, but often these shallow little things remind leave you with a deep and lasting impression which can never be expressed in words (or maybe I am lost for words).
My bus stop came and I got down, bidding adieu to the ‘BEST’ services.
(And then the time came)
I took my boarding pass from the check in counter, a coffee and a muffin from the coffee shop next to the counter, found myself a corner to sit and wait.
This is where it struck me, now that I was leaving Bombay for good, I suddenly felt a part of me will be gone…lost forever. This is where I realised how much the city meant to me, how much I had fallen in love with it without intending to, how much I owed to this city, how much did it help me grow – both as a person and as a professional.
It is not every city where you lose a job and find another one in the next nine days. It is not every city that makes you sleep on a cold and dirty floor with your bag under your head and then gets you a house in the best of the localities.
When you find your bearings lost and gone, you were down and out it was only this city that called you to live it up, once more and to forget everything.
It was here, in the final moments of my stay that I fell in love with this city, the city which I so loved to hate. But maybe I had fallen in love with it long time back, but never saw it (like it happens with a camera when the subject crosses the focal distance it gets out of focus, this is one example I love to give to my friends whenever I mention about my love for the city).
Now, when I sit back and go back in time and remember the times (good and bad), it dawns on me that this city taught me how to live, how to work against all odds and work some more, against some more odds.
Bombay – the good, the bad, the ugly, or whatever you are, it was you who made me love YOU.
It was you who taught me that it was an honour, being part of ‘The Melting Pot’; it was only you who could make me say this.
