M-U-M-B-A-I

 The rush in your heart, the way it races, that moment, that time, those only few mins of landing... When you hear the announcement, you'll be shortly landing on the

“Chatrapati Shivaji international airport, Mumbai.” 

It’s like some big deal, some big thing was accomplished and you've finally reached home, home to the queen's necklace, the buzzing traffic and the horns of auto rickshaws and BEST buses and the rush hour of local trains. Everything at once comes for real. Then you get out and feel the warmth, the heat, and at once you start sweating, the sweet sweat on your body is a constant reminder of the Mumbai city :) the lovely, vibrant and colourful Mumbai...... <3

Sometimes maybe I guess it’s not the place I miss but I miss the familiarity of the surroundings, and sometimes it’s the people and maybe just maybe my solitary travel time. When in college I used to travel alone in bus, and used to think about my life, the songs I used to listen to, the friends I used to meet on my way to college or back home, the plans of spending a holiday together, getting together for school’s reunion (Which I have till date never attended) and about breakups, and love lost and couples still going strong, it was a way of life for me. However petty and jobless you and your friends might be, it’s just about a way of living, like every age has a different story, different angle to life.

 
When I see girls here in Russia small, beauties in buds I adore their freedom and I find them very fortunate to have born in this place, because they feel safe in their country and on the other hand we feel unsafe in our own country. The reason being our law system so stale. But let’s not get into that.

The city I was born in and I want to continue living in has offered me many different things but most importantly great friends. 

Whenever I am away I wonder about how I have changed, now when I come back after almost a year in a foreign country, I see the rain water puddles, the garbage scattered, the untidy eateries around and I find the city growing more and more unhygienic.  I get irritated walking on the streets, then one such time when I was walking in Dadar khabootar khana area which is the most unclean place I consider so far, I slipped on a peel of banana, then pigeon shit had fallen on my friend and later in the evening I found a caterpillar in my hair haha :D
I think I somehow enjoy this too.


Now when I travel with my friends, AC buses has formed the main element even then it was but now I seldom travel by other buses. We still discuss the same stupid things, and I am still poles apart from the “love” thing...and my friends know about it, but I still advise them and just sometimes I realise no matter what friends remain. The discussions and problems are still the same, but what different is that we have grown up, soon we’ll embark on a journey far different from the current one, many will shift to different cities, in my case its always different countries. And then bit by bit the scenes of meeting, enjoying, sharing and teasing will fade away. People slip through hands like good old sand, songs are forgotten about, time ceases to exist, the soul continues to die, but there’s still no time to stop and stare. Nobody knows what conspires in a mind of a 20 year old away from home and country, the loneliness many times you feel brings tears, but I have learnt that life is going to be that. There is no one to help, and will never be. Talking to mum eases the tension, but it doesn’t help the idiosyncratic mind free from its idle games.



So when I come back to this city, sometimes I feel not at all to board the flight, there’s a fear in me, after so much time how much must have had changed and what what must have had happened, and plus facing the same people, but then I am caught by the excitement to meet my friends, my family it’s a different zeal altogether.


Once here I am met by the same problems, the same difficulties there were a year back and the year before and so on, I’ve realised that in 10 year our country, city, sector/colony, home moves only a lil ahead. Because everything else seems the same. People are the ones who change. We are the constantly moving species, our world is in constant motion, and so are our thoughts.Even today you can get caught in pathetic traffic which can cost you your flight, even today in the rush hour of suburban Mumbai stations you can slip from the train entrance, even today you find children begging, cleaning and selling flowers on traffic signals. 

Even today you’ll find Dadar station in a pool of dirty rainwater where the vegetable waale sell veggies and fruits. Nothing seems to have changed, I see the same faces, the people my mum buys veggies from, people are fine doing what they are already doing. Nobody wants to move even a single bit further. Now it brings smile to my face, but on a deeper level I see the graveness of this stagnation.