Getting to know the city
I start with nowhere to go. I watch the city, but I don’t let it see me.
I find a city beneath my feet one day.
A city that inhales and exhales rats, wet trash, slick mud, fresh blood, horrors and dreams scrunched up into old newspapers, flowers pushing through cement, glowing-dying cigarette butts, slippers that lost their feet, rolled-up drunks, chopped liver, holes of some significance, cats that glower and slink, a lady who has to sit down as her brain swims, a hand that offers her water, a manhole cover from 1884, a carpet of yellow amaltas, someone’s plastic baby Jesus, road kill and ice cream– – all these breaths crammed into a single street to step on or tiptoe past.
I find the city with my nose.
An island city that you can plot in dried fish, Worli sea breeze, Dadar’s flower heaps of rose essence and oily exhaust, chai tapris and cinnamon-flavoured cigarettes underlining the hope of Lokhandwala’s auditions, the metal-sweat of railway stations, hot garbage and thick perfume, long lines of new-new laundry, the cold reek of Mahim creek, firni, kebab, fresh bus ticket, art-gallery airconditioning that smells like you’re invited but not welcome, hot sanitised hospital tears, sweet butcher meat, onion-peanut Chowpatty, room fresheners masking hurried sex and old sheets, strings of warm-piss-sulabhs, the stink of suppressed dreams clogging your nostrils every five seconds – the essence of Bombay – I think, anger and construction dust (Saki Naka), hope hanging over a national park, coconutoiled heads of Sneha-Mahim, congealed VT ambition, agarbatti and sweat taxis weaving through Prabhadevi at 7 am, stale goodwill of the morning walkers of Dadar East, 1,23,678 specific but unnameable something-somethings of Dharavi, sour hope of “aaj mera Tuesday hai” Virar local, stagnant ATM AC, crisp unhappiness of the Colaba rich…
Some walks I dedicate to the city’s trees.
And witness the old greats carrying the weight of their wires, locksmith numbers, old-new gods, squirrels, lovers’ inscriptions and flocks of parakeets. I watch these trees eat the city, bore through its walls, swallow its forgotten buildings and creep past its boundaries. I watch them engulf the city and caress it in shade, in flower and leaf and fallen fruit, in backrests and meeting places, in landmarks and signposts, in the forgiveness that only trees can show for those who drill, chop, slice, yank, trim, pluck, pick, snip and push them out every day.
With each walk, the city
acknowledges me in nods, smiles, side-please, shrugs, one cup of tea, looking away quickly, whistles, cat calls, hooded stares, asked directions, offered directions … and I begin to answer to the city, I belong to the city now.
I leave myself all over the city.
In steps, in leaps, my feet in wet mud, my shadow on old walls, my dropped napkin, my body’s warmth on a bus seat, my weight against a pillar on platform 6, my breath mingling with the October air, my old skin becoming new dust … I leave myself all over the city. The city belongs to me.
A collection of pleasures
Every spring, yellow flowers blanket the hood of a forgotten Fiat Padmini. There are five flowers at times, and as many as fifteen at other times. And whenever I see them scattered across the car’s grey, rusting roof, sometimes spilling onto its windshield, leaving yellow dust on its frozen wipers – I feel the car is cared for.
To watch the wind carry water in symmetrical ripples like water is being coaxed to dance – uncertain but still graceful – makes me think of gooseflesh, and the ambivalent affection of cats, and of pleasures so tiny they fade as quickly as they come.
Today, I plucked hairy mulberries from a bush and painted my lips with their juice, while eating them in a mad rush. Soon my tongue turned blue and I turned six, again.
You know, that dull ache in your calves after a few hours of exertion? My friend likes to call it “sweet muscle pain”. To knead the length of your calves along that pinched pain around your bones and feel a muted kind of comfort … is the oldest pleasurable pain.
Finding a long-dead frog pressed to the ground like old grey paper, the heart of a tree split open by lightning, the sweet smelling rot of things, even a burr wedged into the edge of my sock pressing into my skin – not unpleasantly; maybe I’m strange but there is pleasure in this too.
I watch curtains billow in open windows and breeze fill the contours of laundry hung to dry and trees bend gracefully in the wind and skirts cling to hidden legs in a gust and the green construction covers of sky scrapers flap like tendrils on the fourteenth floor in the monsoon and I like it so much I want to pull it all apart.
Excerpted with permission from How to Forget, Meera Ganapathi, HarperCollins India.
