I’ve always felt uncomfortable in a new city. Not only do I not recognize the buildings, the buildings do not recognize me as well. This is not helped by the fact that I’ve never lived in any city for more than 5 years, which was only once. But Mumbai is a city that does tend to hold you. Men had to resort to eating bats for Mumbai to be able to send me away.
And that brought me to Kolkata. A city I grew up in, I am
told. But Kolkata smells like a city I knew only in the distant past and never
in the present. I suspect even the residents feel the same way about the city. But
I know that it takes a few years to feel the city as your own. I never
understood why. I just thought that it was an inexplicable process that you had
to go through. And so I endured the vagaries of ‘the city of joy’ and the ‘art
capital’ of the country while it offered me neither joy nor art.
That changed recently, when I finally found a friend in the
city. A lunch over drinks turned into a sunset and a sunset turned into a walk
admiring the city lights as street vendors created their own carnival on dirty
footpaths. A tall abominable tower stared at us from a distance like a phallus
of a sick beast. Parks spread out for acres without end in the dark provided
lovers required respite. And my own inability to find a place without loud
thumping music blaring into my ears told me what this city lacked in terms of
natural needs of a human being. I did not recognize it then, but the city was
finally revealing itself to me.
As I drove down the same streets the next day, the views
were no longer alien to me. I recognized the phallus in the daytime, marking
its presence across the skyline giving the city recognition. The dome standing
on lush green parks laid out was no longer a stranger, but a monument to be
proud of. And every cultural disparity the city failed me in was another
opportunity to explore and look for what must be possible in this museum of
civilization. Layer by layer, the city bared its secrets slowly embracing me
into itself.
I realized it’s never the buildings, the roads, or the
architecture we identify ourselves with, no matter how extraordinary they might
be. It’s the stories we associate with them. It’s the friendship that they have
enabled us to share. Those shared stories are the fuel of memory. And any city
is merely bricks and mortar lest they be robbed of the stories we share with
them. We never return to the buildings. We return to the people we shared them
with. The rooftops, the lights, the waves, and the wind. Are nothing but
memories we have shared. That’s what makes the skyline of incomplete buildings
of Mumbai more close to my heart than the towering heights of New York. And
that’s what makes a dead city with no hope of redemption beautiful to the
people who happen to walk across it on a moonless night with a newfound friend.
