A Sunny Side-Street in Dadar

Returning to the city, standing in the midst of one of its many bustling hearts, smiling to myself and falling in love all over again :)

I hop off the bus, shouldering my only-slightly-heavy bag, my headphones hanging around my neck, my light yellow cotton shirt loose and comfortable, and my favourite pair of blue jeans.

From the minute I step down, I am enveloped in noise. It begins with the taxi drivers, to whom I shake my head in reply. I ask one of them which direction Dadar station is in, and he points straight.

As I stand beneath the bridge, waiting for just the right time to cross, I watch the cars, the taxis, the buses and trucks and bikes with all their ridiculously loud horns, their ever-turning wheels, their rude, incessant urge to overtake and their places to be. I smile to myself and feel like an idiot. Because, as plainly as I can put it, there is so much sound, and so much movement. Simple things, perhaps the simplest a city could offer, and I am in awe.

So I stand waiting beneath the bridge, clutching my bag close, my yellow shirt yellower in the sun, eyes transfixed as the traffic rolls on. I let the city wash its ceaseless tide of things and people and voices and wastes and wheels over me. Gladly.

And then, just as I have crossed to the other side and begun to squeeze my way between two still taxis, a cycle pops up out of nowhere. I step aside in time, still a little off-guard. And again, like an idiot, I smile.

I missed this. Not the almost-being-run-over, but the trampling and elbowing and fighting for space in a city which, even with its many many roads and highways and railway tracks, seems to have none. Sometimes, of course, you manage to find some, or stubbornly make some for yourself if you can't. Although most times, you fail.

But what I love is how the fighting for space goes on. This city makes a tough man of the meek, and a tougher one still of those already acquainted with its tiresome, endearing ways.

I walk towards the station, old Mumbai rising above me, chest-wide with its old, decrepit buildings with grey, chipped-paint walls and little open windows. The cement aglow in the heat, the afternoon impossibly bright, the world too loud. The hawkers with their paraphernalia, the crowd with their footsteps.

And I lose myself in this sound, all this sound, all this unending, ruthless, brutal running-over-of-all-other-sounds sound; all this kind, non-judgmental, almost gratifyingly apathetic sound.

By which I mean that I become, at once, everybody and nobody. And that is what I love most about this city. You match your footsteps with that of the crowd, everywhere - up the station steps, alighting the train, beating the traffic, down the sunny alleyway. You are one with the crowd, and in that precise moment, nothing special, either. No one glances at you, not really. So you smile to yourself like an idiot, and that's okay, because no one is looking. You are free, impossibly free. You can be anything you want and do anything you want, because you are simply too small before this big, big city, to make any difference at all. It's oddly comforting.

The roads are always too narrow, the trains always too full, every turn of every street too crowded. And so it happens that the same thing that often exhausts you about the city makes you love it deeply, and irrevocably, too. So much sound, and so much movement.

* * *

And then, just when you couldn't possibly love it any more, you get a window seat on the local train. A 2000's Bollywood song playing in your headphones, you stare out the window, smiling like an idiot again. The wind blows, and this long route you know like the back of your hand flashes past like a familiar, welcome dream. Watching through the train's crisscrossed window bars, you fall in love with this tiresome but never tired, beautifully unstoppable mess of a city.