When Mumbai Awakens Again
I’ve been tentatively getting out. December was for cautious celebrations of a dinner here, a lunch there, a bookshop browsing. It has felt scary to hope, guilty to celebrate after the pain of the last two years. Mumbai feels new.
January’s third wave was yet another cautionary tale. But also a lesson that we have to re-negotiate our way into the new normal, that things will never reset to the way they used to be, least of all overnight.
I’ve always loved my city but now feels like a new lease on life, a second chance to truly experience every breath, every sight, every ray of sunlight, even every whiff of smoke, every cross word by a harried fellow commuter. I love it all.
It feels like a rediscovery of my own love, how memory is tucked into corners of my own body, of little packets of love unfurling in nostalgia as the sea breeze ruffles my hair. The sounds, sights & yes, even smells of my unique island city are a rediscovery of what it means to be me. Under the pain, the worry, the fear there is also cheer & sunlight & hope & inspiration & resilience.
There are gadgets to be repaired, buckets & mugs to be replaced, friends to be met & all the affection squeezed into a look over masked faces within an hour. Newspapers to be picked up again, milk packets to be cut open & boiled, istri to be given & taken back. Plays to be watched, tea to be drunk. There are strands of our frayed lives to be scavenged & picked up again. There are memories of bomb blasts, communal riots, gang shootouts, floods & rains, terror attacks and now a pandemic.
We fall, we get up, we hold each other up. Sometimes we snarl at each other but we keep moving as long as there’s another breath in us too. Sometimes we even smile at a fellow Mumbaiker, canine, human, building or sea. That is what it is to be a Mumbaiker. This is what it is to be me.
