Mad in Mumbai- Memoir ’

I remember the early morning bus to Mumbai. Landing up in mist and seeing the sea for the first time. It was such a shame to finally arrive in Mumbai at 25years of age. But it was magic too. I didn’t know what awaited me, but I was in love and felt quite blind. So I parked myself in a city where nothing blew off in alarm when I looked at it absentmindedly. They didn’t know what the alert and same me was. So they wouldnt question me during that zonked period .I would stay here till this sudden blind spot that filled me with wooziness lasted. Till the static of 5000 gongs buzzing in my head died down. Or at least settled itself!

I imagined that’s how elephants fell in love. Madly. Truly. Deeply. There were other ways of falling in love too. Slightly, romantically, flirtatiously, moderately, sexually but none of those options were available to me. I dived into it straight like an elephant would jump into swimming pool. Clumsily. The whole of me at one go, without keeping any other eggs in any other basket. In retrospect it looks like a suicide mission for whatever could go wrong did go wrong. But at that time the earnestness kept me afloat. It was the first time my mind had been pulverised by anything other than mathematics. And it felt GOOD and made me feel blind. As blind as driving a car with front mirror covered in mixed fruit jam would make you feel.

The big authoritative voices that kept shouting at me all my life suddenly became well wishing whispers that would just creep out of mouse holes and whisper and disappear. Career Careeer Career? Where is it going where is it going? Money Money Money. This money will run out run out run out. As soon as I turned to look at them they would freeze like they were hollow echoes’ and had nothing important to say. Anyways listening to them all my life hadn’t made me any smarter or richer. So now I could tell them ‘Fuck you’ at least let me try for happiness.

Suddenly I felt like pretty girl who walked like a drunken elephant on the streets of Mumbai with friends who only thought she was lost because she had no job!I had proposed a man finally after all these years and he had agreed to ‘give it a shot’. I had for the first time in my life walked across a city wearing a blood red skirt with a sleeveless blouse and not felt conscious about it. I had for the first time smelled the vast sea at Versova and breathed the creamy texture of the freedom sitting around the little barista at seaside.


It was another world into which I had unknowingly arrived. What freedom it was from the days of reporting everyday to my mom on the phone truthfully. Every little detail of what was happening. Who I went out with and why I got late and how I got safely dropped back home.Why for the first time in my life I could walk out on the road at 1pm to look for chai and sit beside the sea and then come back home without having to look at any disapproving faces! I could even not come back home for the whole night and next day find that approval from friends who were growing impatient with my oh so platonic notions of freedom! It was the first time I encountered pregnancy kits in the bathroom and it gave me a strange wicked pleasure. Someday I would use these too. I thought boldly.


Then one morning I felt all washed up and cleaned and rebirthed on the 16th floor of a building. I was wearing my electric blue lycra jeans which had a skull on its butt pocket and my Faiz Ahmed Faiz people’s tree Tshirt. It read my favourite poem ‘ aur bhi hain gum zamane main mohabbat ke siva’ But I wasn’t thinking of escaping sorrow! I lay there wanting to just be able to see clearly what was I doing with my life really? I knew it wasnt anything bad, evil or immoral or anything. Just that this wasnt the pace at which I had lived and I had to go back to the old mirror to see the new face.


Too much had happened in a month’s time. I had run away from home. My uncle had died of paralysis. I had hopped on a train reached Belgaun to visit an aunt I hadn’t seen in eight years.

There were pigeons outside and the January morning reminded me of playing with shadows in my childhood home veranda. This wasn’t the city of verandas and I had to rush to office but just getting up that morning it looked like I had gathered all the small playful shards of sunlight to last me entire life to play with. That morning that clarity hasn’t come to me again. But every time I open the little purse in my heart all the little shards start dancing again. I wonder if the will last me till I am old and ugly.
Who knows they just might.