Goodnight Mumbai, My City Self
I love this city in a way that I have never been able to love a human being. Even to call it love feels facetious because it feels silly to say I love myself in a way I’ve never loved another.
I live inside a body and a name and a lifestyle that people identify as me. But these are mere identifiers, a hat & spectacles placed over an invisible being as a visibility courtesy to other people. These are not me, they merely symbolise me. Ostensibly, they protect me from the universe running over me by mistake but really, they protect other people by alerting them to the scary presence of another.
ME – this is what I know in an innate sense that defies words and expression. The closest I can come to it is this geopolitically defined, this culturally denoted, this statistically demarcated, this verbally described experience called Mumbai.
In 24 hours, this city (and I) go to vote for one of the most shouted about elections in recent times. Relationships have ended, allegiances wrought & broken and people have even died for this. And after that, true to our name, we’ll go to work, to school and to places we must be so the system runs. So we run.
What is a city, after all? It’s more than its people and its buildings and its location and its numbers. It transcends what is written and spoken about it. And if it is a city that you have lived in your whole life, it defines you and you in loving harmony, define it back. Just like every drop defines the ocean and the ocean is every single drop. I feel the way Mumbai feels, every second.
I feel most at peace in the nights here. One of the labels hung on my city is after all, the city which never sleeps. I am awake and watching the city’s nights as its noise transitions from tinny, metallic horns and the tang of concrete to deep bass breathing and the rumble of machines coming to a stop. The night is defined by my wakefulness and by the sleep of every one of the others who are it.
Sleep, my place-self. Sleep the sleep of island magic and moonlit sonatas. Mumbai sleeps.
(@ideasmithy)==============================================================
I’m Ramya Pandyan (a.k.a. Ideasmith) and I’m on Twitter and Instagram.
This Mumbai post and the vivid description just send it into a momentary emotional moment. You have described the moments I lived, hate and love, finding love and break up, walking solo at Marine Drive and embraced in its beauty. I so miss the city and yet so many labels, city that never sleep, Maximum City and what’s not!
We really love this city, don’t we?
We do and it grows on us like anything!